INDIGENOUS HEALING PRACTICES: WHAT IS BLOCKING THE WAY?
Traditional healing practices are a vital aspect of health and wellbeing in Indigenous people globally. Have a look around this site and learn why we need your help to improve access to healing right here in Australia, as well as around the world.
Aboriginal Health Contexts
Before presenting the key determinants of reduced Aboriginal health outcomes, it is important to understand the context within which these indicators are positioned. Present within every human society is a unique cultural perspective and knowledge system for dealing with and responding to health related conditions (Archibald 2006). Across the Australian continent, the Aboriginal people possessed their own explanatory models of health and illness, which coalesced with their timeworn existential ideals, ceremonies and the natural environment (Panzironi 2013). From the Central Desert Region of Australia, the traditional healers, called Ngangkari, refer to their health belief system as Ngangkari Tjukurpa and consider it as the theory from which their traditional healing process are grounded (Panzironi 2013). Inherent components of this knowledge system are an illness causation process, the conceptualisation of mental, physical and spiritual manifestations of disease and restorative responses
to traditional mental health concerns (Panzironi 2013).
While the literature suggests that prior to colonisation,
Aboriginal people enjoyed amuch healthier lifestyle than the
18th Century European’s (Carson et al. 2007), Aboriginal
people did suffer from Hepatitis B, bacterial infections and
some intestinal parasites (Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara
Yankunytjatjara Woman’s Council Aboriginal Corporation
[NPY] 2013). Furthermore, trauma was the major cause of
death for Aboriginal people, along with arthritis, anaemia,]
tooth attrition and periodontal disease (Carson et al. 2007).
Prior to colonisation traditional Aboriginal healing methods
were adequate in their response to the illnesses experienced
by the community (Panzironi 2013), however all of this
changed with the arrival of western diseases in 1788
(Carson et al. 2007), to which the Aboriginal people had no
resistance.
Of noteworthy detriment to Aboriginal people and their Aboriginal Language Groups
communities was the contagion of smallpox and sexually
transmissible infections, which led to the acquiring of diseases associated with poverty, such as tuberculosis, influenza, measles, scarlet fever and whooping cough (Carson et al. 2007). Here, the introduction of these diseases, chiefly smallpox, caused a substantial loss of life among Aboriginal people, which also had an effect on the health of their communities via mass depopulation and associated social disruption (Carson et al. 2007). It is also an interesting footnote that mental illness, substance addiction and negative health expressivity associated with western diets, such as heart and kidney disease, were an unheard of occurrence within traditional communities and as such, there was no transmitted knowledge via the Tjukurpa, in order for Ngangkari to effectively treat these rapidly emerging illnesses (NPY 2013).
“…people who expose their bodies to petrol fumes or alcohol, or any other
dangerous and poisonous substances, are particularly at risk. We Ngangkari
cannot help them when their bodies start breaking down and they cannot
control their motor functions. We Ngangkari have never been very successful
at treating substance misuse…”
(Curtis, cited in Panzironi 2013, p. 170).
Given that Aboriginal people consider wellbeing as being inextricably woven around culture and community, it is these more contemporary and more individualised health expressions, which pose as the most debilitating toward Aboriginal health today (Goodall 2008). Resultantly, colonialism had a devastating impact on Aboriginal people and the inequalities which came with it, continue to be embodied as disproportionate burdens of disease (Goodall 2008).
“We never used to have cancer. We used to drink water, only water no soft
drinks but when they introduced drinks, sugar coming in the sickness coming.
Sugar big trouble, too much sugar. All white man sicknesses, diabetes, we didn’t
have it before…”
(Traditional Healer, cited in Panzironi 2013, p. 171).
Furthermore, a clear relationship does exist between the poverty and powerlessness caused by colonisation and the contemporary health challenges of Aboriginal people (Goodall 2008). Here it is commonplace within the literature, that the historical experience of intergenerational trauma and violence underlying these social disadvantages, have been embodied as reduced educative, employment and health consequences (Carson et al. 2007; Goodall 2008; Panzironi 2013).
