DP9-Aboriginal-Spirituality

It is reasonable to accept that the issues of concern to Indigenous peoples are those that have the capacity
to impact negatively on their wellbeing. In 1993, the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People, the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees sourced the following issues:
• land and resources;
• human rights;
• internal colonization;
• self-government;
• self-development;
• environment;
• discrimination;
• health;
• education;
• language;
• cultural survival;
• intellectual property rights; and
• social and economic conditions (YWIP 1992).
Although wellbeing and Spirituality are not expressly mentioned, they are embedded in many of the items listed
above, including cultural survival, which is inherent in all the other factors listed. Cultural survival has at its core
the continuation of cultural practices that spring from the philosophical basis of the culture, that is Spirituality;
without the opportunity for this to occur, the wellbeing of Indigenous peoples suffers.
One of the factors mentioned of concern to Indigenous people is internal colonisation, and an understanding
of the history of ongoing colonial practice in this country is crucial to understanding Aboriginal health and
wellbeing. As Warwick Anderson (2007) has observed:
The contemporary health care of Aboriginal peoples is already thoroughly historicised. ‘History’ figures in most
arguments about Indigenous health policy. Indeed, discussion of Indigenous health is now one of the few ways
for historical narrative ever to gain entry to medical journals (Anderson 2007:151).
This is reflected in the concerns of the social and emotional wellbeing practitioners who invariably state that
in order to heal it is crucial to understand the colonial history and its legacies (Atkinson & Ober 1995; Atkinson
2002; Dudgeon & Williams 2000; Locke 1995; Phillips 2001, 2003; Wanganeen 1994, 2001). However, it is important
to unpack this history in family, local and regional contexts to increase our understanding of the continuing
specific impacts of the ongoing process of colonisation on Aboriginal wellbeing.
In Australia, internal colonisation has been characterised by the widespread disregard and denigration of
Aboriginal philosophy, ways of being and doing, and, concomitantly, of the people themselves. This means that
Aboriginal people have to carry and work through on a daily basis the Indigenous knowledges that the scholar
Sheehan has labelled ‘the burden of disregard’ (Sheehan 2001). The historian Thom Blake (2001) has observed
that this disregard has always been expressed in violence, not only the violence of the frontier but the ongoing
violence of incarceration, slavery and the breaking up of families in the reserve systems set up under Protection
Acts that endured for up to seven decades of the twentieth century. Violence and nihilism is also evident in the
current disregard of Aboriginal culture and lifeways in contemporary Australian society, and has a profound
impact on wellbeing. Blake finds an explanation in settler colonial psychology that has application in the present.
In the following quote, the tense has been bracketed to highlight the fact that this analysis could apply to the
contemporary situation for Aboriginal people in Australia and the bracketed past tense needs to be reviewed.
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