Content area
Full Text
Abstract
As an Aboriginal person, I see firsthand how the dominant culture influences relations of power and privilege through systems, institutions and dominant ideas about best practice. My work involves exploring ways narrative practice aligns with Aboriginal worldviews and how this can support respectful and decolonising practice with Aboriginal people who consult us. In this paper I describe practices that challenge damage-centred accounts that locate problems within individuals and communities. Guided by our Aboriginal worldviews, I work alongside the people with whom I meet in my work to find ways to decolonise our minds and explore multi-storied accounts of people's lives by starting with and building upon stories of strength using narrative maps of practice.
Key words: narrative practice, decolonisation, mapping, Aboriginal worldviews, re-membering
Throughout my life, I have heard single, damage-centred stories about my people, Aboriginal people. These are stories of addiction, poverty, despair and helplessness; of reliance, demotivation and discouragement. They never fit with me. In my Aboriginal family counter-stories were invited to flourish. I attribute this to the many conversations I had with my nana, Mary. Aboriginal affairs were always discussed with young people and adults. From a young age, I understood that the personal was political. This is not to say that damage-centred stories have not affected me. These stories are prevalent in others' descriptions of my people's identity and lifestyle. Together, my family explored the damage-centred stories, but these accounts were placed within their broader social, historical and political context. Power, as described by Adichie (2009), is the ability to tell the story of a person and make it their definitive story. Dominant discourses, mainstream media accounts and popular opinion combine with elements of power and white privilege to render invisible the broader social contexts that produce damage-centred accounts of Aboriginal people's identity. The single story becomes the definitive story. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti (2000) wrote that dispossession can be enacted by commencing a person's story with 'secondly' and neglecting what happened first: 'start the story with the failure of the African states and not with the colonial creation of the African states and you have an entirely different story' (Adichie, 2009). The stories told about Aboriginal people by media, popular opinion and political leaders are 'secondly' stories....