Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health and Healing (2006)

The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UN 1948) came into being when the European empire was being dismantled and a new post-colonial era was heralded. The Declaration stated that everyone has the right to life and liberty, meaningful education and work, freedom of cultural expression, and a standard of living that promotes health. Social justice advocates go beyond a human rights discourse. The social justice principles of equity, access, participation and rights focus on politically marginalised groups within liberal democracies. Mick Dodson (HREOC 1993:10) writes that social justice: is what faces you when you get up in the morning. It is awakening in a house with an adequate water supply, cooking facilities and sanitation. It is the ability to nourish your children and send them to a school where their education not only equips them for employment, but reinforces their knowledge and understanding of their cultural inheritance. It is the prospect of genuine employment and good health: a life of choices and opportunity, free from discrimination. While it is important to articulate Aboriginal and Tortes Strait Islander health within a human rights discourse (HREOC 2005), social justice advocates need to engage with Indigenous intellectual traditions. Human rights and social justice concepts need to be translated into Indigenous concepts in order to have practical value. Aboriginal societies in the past and present are kin-based societies in which the majority of social, economic and political practice is organised around kin-relatedness. Kin-relatedness is experienced as nurturance, as an authority structure, and as an economic practice. Kin-based economies are systems of rights, responsibilities and obligations (Austin-Broos 2003; Macdonald 2001). Kin-based societies contrast with civil societies. Rose (2003:55) has described how, in civil societies: the dominant view of the person is that each person is autonomous ... the person is disembedded (from context) ... moral impartiality depends on recognising others as autonomous; that fairness belongs to public justice; and that the public system of rights and duties is the best context for managing moral equity and accountability ... In contrast, in kin-based societies the person is defined first and foremost in relationship. There is no such thing as an autonomous (disembedded) person. To be disconnected, or expelled from context, is to experience social death. The authors in this issue of Australian Aboriginal Studies have found Western models of health to be deficient in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' health and healing. Biomedical ideology is based on a Western concept of the self--on the self-contained individual defined independently of family or community. Treatment regimes are designed for patients who prioritise individualised bodily health over social health (Heil 2003). The biomedical model strips away social contexts of meaning, and diminishes awareness of sociopolitical causes of disease. Complex social and moral processes are reduced to narrow cause-and-effect relationships (Riessman 1989). Health professionals who work within a biomedical framework tend to ignore global relational-moral causality, for example, the effects of economic globalism, world trade agreements, and neoliberal politics on Indigenous peoples' health (McDonald, this issue). This health theme issue contains eight papers originally presented during a seminar series held at AIATSIS in 2003, entitled 'Health and Society: An Australian Indigenous Context', and three other papers by AIATSIS staff--two of which were presented at other AIATSIS meetings in 2004. Each paper has been peer reviewed by two academic referees, and of the 15 authors, nine are Australian Indigenous scholars. The papers cover a wide spectrum of approaches, from the historical to the contemporary and futuristic. …