Perceptions and Experiences of Traditional Indigenous Healing in two North Queensland Aboriginal communities

Abstract

My research examines the perceptions and experiences of traditional healing among Aboriginal Australians in Far North Queensland within community settings. This question was informed by the following: firstly, the World Health Organisation has acknowledged the value and contribution of traditional healing to health, wellness, and people-centred care. Secondly, Australia's Productivity Commission found, in an Inquiry into mental health, that traditional healers have the potential to help improve the social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The Inquiry recommended that the Australian Government should evaluate best practices for partnerships between traditional healers and mainstream mental health services to improve health outcomes. Most scholarly research in Australia on this topic has tended to address questions of cultural appropriateness of mainstream healthcare for Aboriginal people, rather than look to Indigenous viewpoints to inform potential integration between traditional and mainstream healthcare. This is in contrast to the literature from Asia and Africa where traditional healing is frequently considered the most immediate treatment option particularly where distance or resource limitations limit the delivery of mainstream healthcare.. In North Queensland, there is no structured or systematic recognition of healers by mainstream health services and little substantial published research on either the role of traditional healing, or the experiences of community members as to its practice. Significant interest was shown in this subject by the Apunipima Cape York Health Council with the Chairman acting as cultural broker to ensure the cultural safety of the research. An ethnographic study was conducted in two phases in two distinct North Queensland Indigenous communities, Aurukun and Yarrabah. Data collection involved observation, in depth interviewing, and participant observation, with thematic analysis used to critically examine field notes. Members of the two study communities offered contrasting insights into constructs of healing and the role traditional healing played and continues to play in their communities. Aurukun residents who participated in the study sustain Wik customary lore and belief and utilise totemic symbolism in everyday life. The relocation of Stolen Generation children to the Yarrabah mission, and the consequential family disruption, created competing interests between language groups, and resulted in cultural fragmentation. The health services in both these communities do not acknowledge traditional healing at a systems level, although individual practitioners recognised that their patients made medically pluralistic choices. International research regarding medically pluralistic behaviour shows that initial choice of a therapeutic mode is driven by how the patient believes the illness has been caused. For example, symptoms attributed to disturbance of spirits are believed incurable by biomedicine, with such beliefs common in Aurukun. While the traditional ancestral context of Yarrabah had known therapeutic healing places within the last one hundred years, there are currently no publicly acknowledged traditional healers with health services in Yarrabah. Indigenous leaders and healers use a cultural lens to view an intercultural domain of social recovery and health practice. The intercultural domain is an "in-between" space, characterised by hybridity where identity can be expressed, and innovative sites of collaboration created. Conclusions drawn from analysis of the data suggest that such an intercultural domain of health practice could respond to personal and family-based expectations of healing and community cohesion. This could occur through integration of Indigenous expectations of biomedicine, social recovery, cultural belief, and traditional healing practices within unique social ecologies of healing.

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