Traditional medicine plays a role alongside Western medicine
Indigenous cultures have successfully used traditional healers and bush medicine for thousands of years. Many of these practices continue to be used today. When dealing with Indigenous patients, it will help you to be aware of these practices and to understand why they are important to Indigenous Australians. You’ll also have the opportunity to learn […]
Ngangkari healers: 60,000 years of traditional Aboriginal methods make headway in medical clinics
Community Healing
For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, healing is a holistic process, which addresses mental, physical, emotional and spiritual needs and involves connections to culture, family and land. Healing works best when solutions are culturally strong, developed and driven at the local level, and led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Ngangkari – Traditional Healers
Ngangkari are the traditional healers of the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (NPY) lands in the remote western desert of Central Australia. Ngangkari have looked after people’s physical and emotional health for thousands of years. The NPY Women’s Council Ngangkari Program supports ngangkari to continue their work in communities, clinics and hospitals.
Healing through voice, culture and Country: Short films
This resource will benefit practitioners in mainstream health, education and social and community services who work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families experiencing FDV.
“Every client has a trauma history”: Teaching respectful relationships to marginalised youth. An evaluation of NAPCAN’s Respectful Relationships Program Northern Territory 2017-2018.
This report presents findings from a research evaluation of a one-year program run by NAPCAN in the Northern Territory which sought to develop a trauma-informed approach to Respectful Relationships Education (RRE). The program was undertaken under contract with Territory Families, and focused on providing training in traumainformed RRE to staff in the youth services sector […]
Healing for Our Stolen Generations: sharing our stories
This report is a review of the first two years of projects funded under the Healing Foundation’s Stolen Generations Initiative 2013-2015.
Our Healing: Indigenous men break the cycle of violence
On White Ribbon Day a few weeks ago the Healing Foundation celebrated the success of Our Men, Our Healing, a groundbreaking capacity-building pilot for Indigenous men in Darwin and three remote NT communities – Ngukurr, Wurrumiyanga and Maningrida. The program aims to strengthen, support and empower Aboriginal men through cultural, educational and therapeutic healing activities. […]
9 Ways Native Men Can Heal From Historical Trauma
Historical trauma has taken its toll on Native people, and Clayton Small, Northern Cheyenne, founder of Native Prevention, Research, Intervention, Development, and Education, or Native P.R.I.D.E., spent years developing ways to help Native men overcome the effects.
The Marumali Program: healing for Stolen Generations
There are an estimated 10,625 people who directly experienced the trauma generated by forcible removal, an estimated 25,844 children (second generation) who have been living with parents affected by forcible removal, and an estimated 40,612 grandchildren who continue to experience the effects of their grandparents’ removal.1 Two models developed by Aboriginal people have been evaluated […]
Community life and development programs: pathways to healing
This chapter provides an overarching framework for understanding the components of healthy communities through a healing and community life development approach. The chapter explores three major themes covering the nature of the trauma that has occurred over many generations and continues to be experienced in the present. These are: – the extreme sense of powerlessness […]
Addressing individual and community transgenerational trauma
This chapter provides a focus on trauma as cause and effect which, when untreated, can compound within and across generations. The result is physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social distress for individuals and broader social groups. While the experiences and transfer of trauma are not limited to members of specific racial or cultural groups, religions, […]
Making Tracks: A Trauma-Informed Framework for Supporting Aboriginal Young People Leaving Care
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people leaving out-of-home care are even more likely to experience poor outcomes and with more serious consequences This framework is a trauma and attachment-informed approach embedded in a cultural, ecological and developmental perspective. It aims to help workers recognise and make sense of many of the young people’s behaviours, […]
Key Messages – Making Tracks: Trauma-Informed Practice Guide for Aboriginal Young People Leaving Care
This practice guide highlights key messages arising from the development of a trauma and attachment-informed framework for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people leaving care. The more detailed framework is described in the Making Tracks: A trauma-informed framework for supporting Aboriginal young people leaving care (Jackson, Waters, Meehan, Hunter & Corlett, 2013). This practice […]
Trauma-informed services and trauma-specific care for Indigenous Australian children
This report provides comprehensive information on trauma in Indigenous Australian children. It examines the effects of trauma while also providing an overview of recent government initiatives implemented to address the negative consequences of trauma exposure in childhood and adulthood. The report also describes the delivery of trauma-informed services and trauma-specific care. Complementing the information in […]
Our healing, our solutions: Volume 3
In May 2010, the Healing Foundation announced its first funding initiative aimed at acknowledging and addressing the pain and hurt caused by colonisation, forced removals and other past government policies. The primary purpose of the healing initiatives was to improve the social and emotional wellbeing of Indigenous people and communities, focusing on the wellbeing of […]
Australian Child & Adolescent Trauma, Loss & Grief Network – Indigenous children and families
When an Indigenous child or adolescent experiences trauma, loss or grief, there can be extra complexities that need to be taken into account. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians’ experiences of loss are multifaceted and complex, and involve the ‘normal’ losses that people experience as well as the other losses that are specific to Indigenous […]
Trauma and Recovery
We Al-li community and workplace workshops are an Indigenous therapeutic response to individual, family and community pain that many people carry as part of their life experience. For Aboriginal peoples this pain is more specifically defined as the traumatic impacts of the multiple intergenerational experiences of colonisation resulting in ill-health, individual, family and community dysfunction […]
Children at risk: Developmental trauma within a complex trauma environment
Patron of We Al-li, Judy Atkinson’s presentation on the multiple and complex experiences of trauma and loss that impact on Indigenous children and families and how to start healing.
