Tuesday Oct 25, 2022

The Importance of Cultural Safety with Janine Mohamed (Inspiring Stories)

 

 

The Importance of Cultural Safety
with Janine Mohamed

The Ampliseed Podcast: Inspiring Stories, Episode 2

 

 

 

This is the second episode in Ampliseed’s Inspiring Stories series— interviews with leaders who inspire us on our pathway to an equitable and nature positive future, who share with us what brought them to this space, which opportunities inspired them, and what challenges they had to overcome.

Jump to: On this episode | About the guests | Show notes | Transcript

ON THIS EPISODE OF INSPIRING STORIES

"We can only ever travel at the speed of trust, and trust takes time". This second episode of our Inspiring Stories podcast brings you a powerful story of lived experience from Dr Janine Mohamed. Janine is a Narrunga Kaurna woman and the Chief Executive of the Lowitja Institute. In this podcast she takes listeners on a journey of Australian history through the very personal, moving lens of her own family’s history.

 

ABOUT TODAY'S GUESTS

Janine Mohamed

Janine Mohamed (Invited Guest)

Dr Janine Mohamed is the CEO of The Lowitja Institute – Australia’s National Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Research. She was recently awarded an Atlantic Fellows for Social Equity Fellowship in 2019, a Doctorate of Nursing honoris causa by Edith Cowan University in January 2020, and a Distinguished Fellowship by The George Institute for Global Health Australia in 2021. Janine is based on Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne.
Ariadne Gorring

Ariadne Gorring (co-Host)

Ariadne is the co-CEO of Pollination Foundation. Ariadne is passionate about Indigenous-led cultural conservation, working with the Kimberley Land Council (KLC) for over 20 years on native title and cultural and natural resource management. She is a former Atlantic Fellow for Social Equity at Melbourne University, and recipient of the Barbara Thomas Fellowship in Conservation Financing via The Nature Conservancy Australia. Ariadne is based on Bunurong Country in Melbourne.
Kirsty Galloway-McLean

Kirsty Galloway McLean (co-Host)

Kirsty leads Ampliseed, a global network connecting practitioners with a rights-based, human-centered approach to building environmental resilience. Her background includes over a decade with the United Nations working in Canada and Japan, and 15 years as CEO of a management and communications consulting firm in Australia. As Executive Director at Pollination Foundation, she works to connect and support international organisations, philanthropists, business, Indigenous and community leaders, and other corporate foundations to drive progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. Kirsty is based on Bunurong Country in Melbourne.

 

SHOW NOTES

  • This interview was originally recorded in 2020. 
  • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that the following program contains a reference to an Elder who is sadly no longer with us. 
Additional resources

 

TRANSCRIPT

Janine: We can only ever travel at the speed of trust, and trust takes time. Being strong in my culture and my cultural identity really helped protect me from the slings and arrows of racism that I experienced when I ventured out into dominant culture spaces, like mainstream schools or health services, because when you come up against those slings, those things that people tell you about yourself, you'll know they're not true.

Ariadne: From Ampliseed and the Pollination Foundation, welcome to Inspiring Stories. This series makes space for conversations with leaders who inspire us on our pathway to an equitable and nature positive future. I'm Ariadne Gorring co-CEO of Pollination Foundation. And we focus on bringing community to the heart of climate solutions.

Kirsty: And I'm your co-host Kirsty Galloway McLean. I lead Ampliseed, a peer-to-peer learning network of landscape scale conservation projects around the world.

Ariadne: Today's episode comes from a Zoom recorded in October, 2020 with a dear friend, Dr. Janine Mohamed. As a Narrunga Kaurna woman from Point Pierce in South Australia, Janine's career in indigenous health has grounded her as a passionate advocate for cultural safety, women's empowerment and systems change. In her role as the CEO of the Lowitja Institute, the peak body for indigenous health research in Australia, Janine inspires indigenous women to be cultural advocates and leaders in their workplace.

Kirsty: Before we start, just a quick housekeeping note - because this recording was originally a Zoom presentation with slides, for podcast purposes we've edited this inspiring story to make it standalone for you to listen to wherever and whenever suits you best. Links to videos and photographs that Janine refers to can be found in the episode notes.

Welcome Janine.

Janine: So good afternoon or good morning or good evening to all my international and Australian colleagues. I would like to begin by acknowledging the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, I'm on the Bunurong area of Naam. Naam is also known as Melbourne. So I live and work on these traditional lands, so I acknowledge elders past, present, and of course our future emerging generations for whom this work that you are all doing through Pollination's network is so important.

This will be an Australian-centric presentation. So I encourage you to think about it in terms of indigenous peoples of your region, through the lens of historical truth-telling, the cultural determinants of health and the application of cultural safety in all of the environments that you get to live, work and operate in.

My most recent role is the CEO of the Lowitja Institute here on Naam. We are Australia's national community controlled Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander health research organization. We're a community controlled organization working for the health and wellbeing of Australia's first people through high impact quality research. So we commission research.

We certainly are leaders in knowledge translation, and supporting the next generation of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander health researchers through activities such as scholarships and commissioning of research. And we do lots of things with the Australian government in terms of our emerging indigenous research workforce.

But before we go any further. I just want to reflect upon the importance of what Ari and I have both done, the acknowledgement of country that we all shared. This is an important Aboriginal protocol that enables us to acknowledge some very fundamental truths about this place we now call Australia. So acknowledgement of country reminds us first and foremost of the long standing and enduring connection that we as First Nations people have to our country.

We've never ceeded that connection or our sovereignty, and another Australian context, we have no treaty here. So knowing that through colonization we've had cultural destruction, acknowledgement of country is an enacting of our cultural revitalization of our cultural determinants, which I'm gonna talk deeply about today. And of course our cultural continuity, our first nations peoples are a living, breathing, reality and a remarkable, extraordinary achievement of cultural continuity.

So to exemplify that cultural continuity, imagine that I'm showing you a six meter tape. And this is representing our connection to this country of more than 60,000 years. So one meter equals 10,000 years. Now this is the important bit, the period since colonization would actually amount to only a tiny fraction of that tape and probably the space occupied by two fingers. And I'm gonna go into a little bit of a discussion about the destruction that happened within that space of those two fingers.

So when I see signage or monuments, I'm often looking about who's being represented in our environment. And I encourage you to do that to actually walk around and see whose story's being told. When I see monuments and other acknowledgements of our achievement as the oldest living, continuing culture on earth, it's a personal reminder that historical truth telling can be a very powerful intervention.

More often than not, what I see is monuments to the explorers or the people that discovered Australia and not monuments to my peoples and, because this truth for my people is really brutal and very untold. And if it's told in the Australian narrative, it's often through a non-indigenous lens and hopefully that's changing.

So in Australia, our indigenous peoples make up 3% of the population, and we come from more than 250 language groups. So we make up 27% of Australia's incarceration rates. We're 3%, but we make up 27% of the incarceration rates. Our children make up 60% of the youth detention population nationally, but in the Northern Territory, we make up 100% of kids in juvenile justice and our life expectancy is 11 years shorter than that of non-indigenous Australians. I'm a proud Narrunga Kaurna woman from Point Pierce Aboriginal mission in South Australia and missions in Australia are really not dissimilar to reserves in Canada just to make that comparison.

These missions were a part of Australia's past punitive policies, really to control the 'native pest'. And I saw firsthand from an early age, so much of the inequity in our health services. I was raised by my Nana, who had schizophrenia. So we had a lot of contact with the health system, and even though I couldn't name it, I could see from a young age that Nana was treated differently.

And a lot of indigenous people online will probably agree with me that often, the first time that you feel racism or inequity, you feel it in your stomach, you can't verbalize what it is, but you can feel it. And she was treated differently. And when I say that, not in a good way.

So, my Nana, who I called Mum, her name's Clarice Milera and she was born in 1934. Mum grew up in a fundamentalist Anglican mission, firstly, during the protection era and then the segregation era, which was marked by the white Australia policy. So the white Australia policy not only had a lot of impact on indigenous Australians, but it actually had a lot of impact on Australia not allowing people from overseas to settle here. So protectors, protection boards, and native affairs departments segregated and controlled a large part of the Aboriginal populations. Aboriginal people who survived the frontier conflicts, the massacres, the poisonings, the rapes, and the murders were moved on to reserves or missions.

And just to go a bit deeper on that and to elaborate often who was moved onto these missions, were peoples of different language groups that wouldn't necessarily have traded together or even spoke the same language. So there was now a melting pot of indigenous peoples coming together on land that was often the most infertile land to be able to grow and harvest food.

Mum also experienced the assimilationist era where children were forcibly taken from their families if they were light skin because they could be integrated into society. She was not allowed to speak her language or practice her culture or receive Aboriginal medicine. And if she got caught doing any of these things she was dealt with severe punishment. In short, she grew up experiencing and witnessing trauma from a very young age. And just on this slide here it's an advertisement, it's a real advertisement that happened in Australia. And tells you a story that's untold, which is the woman's written back and said "I like the little girl in the center of the group" and she's marked her with an X, "but if taken by anyone else, any of the others will do as long as they are strong."

So there's often a notion that indigenous children were taken in and became a part of families. But in actual fact, they were often used as labor or as a friend for someone else's child. Yeah, so they weren't necessarily integrated into a family. She grew up being told by the dominant society that her identity as an Aboriginal girl, and then as an Aboriginal woman had no value.

And my Mum loved her father very dearly. She grew up watching him under this oppressive system on the mission where wages and rations were controlled. So if the superintendent deemed that her father had done something wrong, as a possible punishment he would be denied rations. He would have to go and ask other family members to feed his family. And of course, as you can imagine, this was extremely demoralizing for our men. In Australia, we talk in the national narrative about the stolen wages, but in my experience, it was actually modern day slavery.

So Mum was only allowed to go to school until Year Five. And so you can just imagine the intergenerational impact that's had on our family in terms of being able to access housing, employment, education. As a young woman, if my Mum wanted to go and get a job as a domestic help, which was all she was told she could aim for, or if she wanted to leave the mission for any reason, to even get married, she had to apply for permission from the mission superintendent.

And I'm sure everyone today knows the importance of a safe and nurturing environment during those formative years. And being thought about in a strengths-based way. And we all know about the impact of the 'social soup' or the messaging we hear, both as the people who are indigenous and the people who are non-indigenous. A safe environment means feeling secure and strong in your Aboriginal identity, it means a sense of belonging, it means that you see yourself in a strengths-based way, and others do too.

Mum had all of that ripped away from her; the determinants of her cultural, social and emotional wellbeing and mental health were shaped very early in her life. It meant that as her kids, including me, were growing up later, Mum lived with the ever present fear that we would be taken away from her. In fact, I'd describe my Mum as a helicopter mum.

It meant that when she was given the label schizophrenia, she was even more terrified that we'd be taken away. It meant that she did everything she possibly could to hide her symptoms and her authentic self and within our communities here in Australia, there are many Aboriginal family stories where people didn't know that they were Aboriginal because of the treatment of Aboriginal people, they hid their identity and found out later on in life.

So Mum was really terrified to go to the doctor or the hospital. Not only because there was no respect for her cultural and spiritual beliefs, but because of her fear that either she would be taken away and put in a mental health institution, or that we would be taken away. The racism she grew up with, that violence that we all grew up with, be it conscious or unconscious, was internalized and expressed through her illness.

The fear that was intergenerationally indoctrinated in Mum from her earliest years meant when her kids were in trouble at school, or even if we did well, like we had a play on or a presentation, she stayed away. And it wasn't because she didn't love us, because she didn't want to help us or the school, it was because she feared that she would be seen as an unfit mum. And I just want to remind everyone that this story is not exceptional in Australia. In fact, it's very common. The stolen generations policies ripped many families apart over decades. And this film, I encourage you to look at it if you can download it, it's called The Rabbit-Proof Fence.

So unfortunately, many health professionals, researchers and services were very complicit. Some communities still have collective memories of the involvement of maternity hospitals in the forceful removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids. Aboriginal men were hunted for their heads. And when their heads were returned, the person who had murdered them and brought the heads in was actually given money. And that was in the name of Darwin's theory and research.

So my mom had a real living memory of medical experimentation that was carried out on indigenous peoples in the name of research. She had many stories. One of the stories she did tell me was that kids were automatically wards of the state. So soon as you were born, you didn't belong to your mum and dad, you belonged to the state and the superintendent on her mission, really got fed up with too many kids having toothaches. So he lined up all the children that had their adult teeth and had them pulled out. And so Mum had false teeth from the age of 13. So what parent in their right mind would take their sick child to a hospital, or tell a well meaning person anything, if it meant they'd be taken away or have their teeth pulled out.

So you may not be surprised to learn that my mum's worst fear did come true. When I was 10 years old, I was removed from her. I spent a year away. And sometimes I think really how lucky I was that this experience didn't happen to me a decade earlier because I probably would've been permanently removed from my family. So you can imagine how this history has had an intergenerational impact. I am a self-confessed helicopter mum.

So what were my family's experiences of the systems and services that were meant to nurture children and young people? It was an intergenerational experience. There were those who labeled my mum as an angry black woman before they recognized her as someone with a trauma related mental health issue. Rather than being places of healing and safety, my experience generally is that they were not safe or welcoming. However, despite having, the complicity of the health services of Australia's assimilationist project, there were some really beautiful people who understood and who helped us navigate those systems. And some of those people are the very reason I became a nurse.

So during my primary school years, I spent some time growing up in a town called Maitland in South Australia, where we lived next door to the director of nursing from our local hospital. In our home, we had more than our fair share of sick people. My uncle, my mum's older son also developed schizophrenia.

So there were lots of sick people in our house and our neighbor, Mr. Walker, would often come over and help us. He would build the health literacy in our home and he wasn't an Aboriginal man. He saw color, which was so important, and he respected our difference and he didn't judge us. And our family often enjoyed a laugh with him and we built a relationship founded on mutual respect and trust.

So when I look back, I really recognize that Mr. Walker embodied allyship, cultural safety and respectful practice long before the term cultural safety had even been invented. When I was around seven years old, he told me I'd make a good nurse, because I was smart and kind. He didn't underestimate me and I can honestly say to you, he was the first non-indigenous person that actually said something that built into my life that was strengths-based. And he encouraged me to see beyond the mountain to see what I could be. He gave me a lifelong respect of, and I've coined this presentation on it, a saying that says, "we can only ever travel at the speed of trust, and trust takes time". That's true whether we are thinking about our relationships, as individuals, as neighbors, as colleagues or as nation states or globally.

So as a young nurse, I learnt two very powerful concepts that have become my lifelong passion and continue to drive my work. One of these concepts is cultural safety, which I'm gonna come back to later. And the other is the cultural determinants of health. Let me briefly unpack this concept and make the point to you right now that the cultural determinants of health are interwoven with the social determinants. So we need to have culturally determined housing. We need to have culturally determined education and culturally determined employment. It's foundational to the social determinants. It's not a standalone domain.

Aboriginal people have always known that culture and identity are important for our social and emotional and physical wellbeing. That's because at times we've been denied it. And they are critical to the determinants of health. I grew up knowing about what we call the cultural determinants of health, because they were just embedded into my every day, into my relationships with my family and my relationship with country, in my understanding of my responsibility to care for our family, our elders, and of course, care for country. And these domains of work on cultural determinants, is the work of Dr. Ray Lovett. It was research that was commissioned by Lowitja, and I encourage you to go to the Lowitja website and download the report on it.

So being strong in my culture and my cultural identity really helped protect me from the slings and arrows of racism that I experienced when I ventured out into dominant culture spaces, like mainstream schools or health services. And I remember one young woman coming up to me and saying, how do I become the best indigenous nurse ? And I said, the best indigenous nurse that you can be is really knowing yourself and being strong in that your identity, because when you come up against those slings, those things that people tell you about yourself, you'll know they're not true.

So as a child, I didn't use the terminology cultural determinants of health. It was quite simply just about being who we really were. So the cultural determinants embraced so many aspects of our health, our connection to country, our lore our kinship, our languages, and our cultural knowledges. But of course those knowledges weren't a part of my formal learning.

Instead I learned about the brave white explorers who discovered this place we now call Australia. And I remember the uneasy feeling in my stomach, as we learned about the 'primitive savages' that roamed the lands here, living simple nomadic lives. And Bruce Pascoe has just written a book called Dark Emu, which actually, really counter balances that story. And he talks about indigenous Australians as being the earliest civilization, the most sophisticated agriculturalists in our farming. But as a young girl, I knew all the stories that are told weren't true. And I was confused about what I was being taught and also about what I wasn't being taught.

And this experience is reflected in the recently released documentary In My Blood It Runs. So this is still happening today where indigenous kids learn that Australia was discovered only 200 years ago. At school and at university, I learned nothing about the rich and complex cultures and knowledge systems of our ancestors. I learned nothing about our technological ingenuity, our sophisticated healing practices or our sustainable land management practices anchored in our ways of knowing, being, and doing. These systems and knowledges that have existed for tens of thousands of years, shared through complex kinship systems and passed down through systems of law, ceremony and song.

So for me, since time immemorial Aboriginal people have held a holistic view of health and wellbeing that incorporates the multiple realms of physical, mental, cultural, environmental, spiritual health and wellbeing. We've always known that we don't sit outside of nature, or our ecosystem, we are actually a part of it. It's why indigenous rangers in our national parks - and this is a bit of research that Lowitja has done - are so happy. Even if they don't get great pay, they're working on country, their indigenous knowledge is valued and respected and they're giving back to their community. So it makes me smile when I hear academics getting all enthused about the latest new paradigm in public health, like planetary health. Our people have been practicing planetary health for tens of thousands of years, understanding and respecting those intricate linkages between the health of humans and other forms of life, including the life of country.

I often think if only early European explorers had paid attention and respected our knowledges, how much healthier we would all be right now, our lands, our waterways and our ecosystems. But unfortunately explorer's discovery skills were limited by their racist colonial world views, which have had a profound, damaging legacy, meaning that so many non-indigenous Australians are still incapable of seeing us for who we really are. And I often share with people, some of the things, the offhanded slings that I get, which is ' but you're too pretty to be Aboriginal', 'gee you've done really well for yourself'. Those are meant to be compliments coming from people. But if you're an indigenous person that's definitely not what they are. So my nursing journey is where I learned about cultural safety. And it's from a Māori nurse by the name of Dr. Irihapeti Ramsden, you might hear about cultural security or cultural competence.

But those theories don't come from indigeneity and from the view of colonization, so that's why I'm very deeply invested in this indigenous theory. I'm sure many of you know, about cultural awareness or cultural training, cultural awareness training is a comfortable exercise of training. And it others us as indigenous people by examining our cultures.

Hence, and this is the thing that I want you to remember, the gaze is outwards. Yeah. You're learning about Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander peoples or indigenous peoples it's often then based on the simplistic notion that all indigenous peoples are the same. And as you can see by this language map, 250 different languages, and then there's even subsets of that, like every family we are extremely diverse, so there's no tick list and there's no cookie cutter approach.

But cultural safety is different. By contrast, the gaze is inwards. It's about critical self-reflection. Cultural safety training encourages us, the participants, to get uncomfortable. Your truths are being challenged. Cognitive dissonance is happening and you're critically examining yourself and your own worldviews. Your assumptions and your beliefs. And you're really thinking about how these assumptions and beliefs were formed intergenerationally and how these might be harmful for indigenous colleagues and clients.

So I'll give you my nursing story. I often talk to nurses about, do you ask someone if they're Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander or not? I get two answers, not if they don't look Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. To which I ask, where did you learn what Aboriginal Torres Strait Islanders look like? My daughter is so fair. So she's an Aboriginal woman living in fair skin. She needs to be asked. So we unpack that bias.

The second thing that they'll often say is no, because I don't want to offend them. These are nurses, asking people when they last opened their bowels or what religion they are or how much they earn.

Therefore we begin to get enlightened about what we've learned about being Aboriginal. There must be something shameful in that. So why would I ask that and get the reaction? So that's some of the, beautiful enlightenment work that we get to do in cultural safety. And importantly, whether a health service or an organization is culturally safe, is not judged by the provider of the service, but by the recipient of the care.

Cultural safety, therefore has the power to be transformative in challenging entrenched power dynamics and Western ways of doing business. And I love this analogy by Greg Phillips that puts that into perspectives. " Men wouldn't be asked if sexism was eradicated, nor should women be asked to fix it." Similarly, white people wouldn't be asked if racism has been eradicated and indigenous people shouldn't be asked to fix it. Cultural safety unpacks the concept of dominant culture. When you're a member of dominant culture, your identity is constantly affirmed and reinforced in ways that you possibly don't even realize.

So what do we mean by dominant culture? It's the set of values, beliefs, standards, and systems that govern and organize our lives. They were brought to this country by Britain when they claimed and colonized Australia. This includes the laws, the structures, the decision, making the processes, the ideas... the systems were established as normal based on that.

And they are the basis of how we do things now and used as a required norm for everyone who lives here and also who arrives here. Life is normal for the people that are living inside that center circle. But for those of us living outside of dominant culture, it can be challenging. Our identity, our ways of knowing, being and doing are rarely acknowledged or affirmed by the normal.

Cultural safety asks us to unpack and challenge power dynamics, particularly in systems. It asks us to think about what we don't see. For example, here in Australia, we have a game called the Australian Football League. We have amazing over representation of indigenous players in the league. But we don't have any indigenous peoples when you look at the coaches, when you look at the governance systems, and when you look at the CEOs of that system of all of those teams. so it's really saying we're good enough to be players, but we're actually not reaching those higher echelons of of the system.

So cultural safety provides the means to challenge or eradicate the institutional racism that our people face in accessing healthcare. So institutional racism occurs when the dominant culture is upheld as the best and right way of living. And it overrides the values, belief, standards, and systems of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander cultures. Often we talk about a vine, what happens first are all the trellis are laid in the vineyard and the analogy is that those trellis are the legislation and the constitution and the systems, and then the vine grows over it . And that's the people, the population and of course the the grapes of the fruit of that. But if you take those trellises away, the vine still continues to grow in the same way. So even though we've taken away a lot of racist legislation in Australia, our systems are still built on that. And so is the population thinking.

So cultural safety is not the responsibility of health professionals. It should be a part of the core business of everyone - and I'll tell you a bit about the work that I've done on that in a moment - from the hospital cleaners to the hospital boards, to the CEOs and the administrators, and of course, beyond health, into all aspects of our work and our life.

Cultural safety also talks about privilege. And I got into hot water talking about privilege in Australia and that'll come off a little bit later in my presentation, but what do we mean by privilege? It's benefits associated with being a certain identity in our society that are not available if you are not a part of that identity. So privilege is a system of advantage based on race. Something that you cannot take up or give. We are part of a system that gives it to us. It's hard for those who have it to see it, but easy for those who don't have it to see that you guys do have it. and it can be difficult to talk about because people don't feel privileged.

And over time we've recognized other forms of privilege, male privilege in contrast to women, able-bodied people in contrast to people with disabilities, different types of disabilities, heterosexual people privilege compared with LGBTIQ. So those are the sorts of privileges that we've talked about in Australia, but we're just embarking really on what it means to have race privilege.

And so what does that mean? So it's the unearned benefits that comes with simply being born white in a society where white is the expected and the accepted social and cultural norm, like in Australia. As a result of privilege, you're more likely to be included. You're more likely to be accepted. You are definitely more likely to be believed, have a look at our judicial system. You're more likely to be trusted and you're more likely to be treated as an individual rather than a representative of your whole race. So I worry, because often when I do things in the public eye that actually reflects on all of indigenous Australia, not just on me.

Earlier this year Western Australia's Edith Cowan university honoured the work that I've done in cultural safety, where I worked with Aboriginal and non-aboriginal nurses to embed cultural safety into our codes of conduct for nurses and midwives. And this code of conduct for cultural safety is now being embedded into the education system and across all registered health professionals because of that work that we did together. And I'm really happy to take questions about how we did that, particularly about bridging narratives. But our united front was particularly important when we were met with media opposition, because we talked about cultural safety and because we talked about privilege this was the type of media backlash that we got - some of those headlines "nurses told to acknowledge white privilege in new code of conduct". And that actually went on for about two weeks in the media. And if it wasn't for the Commonwealth games and some Russian spies being poisoned , could have gone on for a lot longer.

 So I just wanna now go through with you just some learnings, from working with this group of nurses. Firstly, I thought I was working with a group of feminists. And when we began to unpack some of our priorities, I began to see the intersectionality of sex and race. Aboriginal women's priorities were very different to those of non-aboriginal women in that group. And then we had to go back and honestly, as a group, do some historical truth telling together. And I asked everyone in the group that was non-indigenous to read a book, a powerful book from Professor Aileen Moreton-robinson. It's called "Talkin' up to the White Woman" and it talks about how indigenous women were actually locked out of the feminist movement in Australia and indigenous women were also through historical truth telling we found out, locked out of the feminist movement within nursing.

 Many of you in the health professions, particularly in nursing, will know of Florence Nightingale. She's the feminist icon for nurses. And what she circulated about indigenous women, not just here in Australia, but throughout the South Pacific, she writes "There is nothing more filthy, loathsome, revolting a creature than a native woman in her wild state. Native women are all together unlovable".

So that's how we kind of bridged some narratives between non-indigenous nurses and indigenous nurses. We unpacked historical truth telling through cultural safety training. Because they had done that cultural safety training and a lot of critical self reflection, these non-indigenous nurses understood about their power and their privilege, and that it wasn't the work of indigenous nurses to counterbalance that backlash. It was their work. They needed to do it. And most of the media that was done actually didn't need to be done by me. My non-indigenous counterparts did that. They stepped up to the plate.

 And thirdly, my work through the cultural determinants perspective has also centered on birthing on country here in Australia, so that our babies can be born on country with family. And birthing on country also promotes the restoration of birthing practices. We now have a whole generation of Aboriginal kids, reclaiming indigenous names, which is fantastic.

So nursing's played a really critical part in my life and I've worked to connect with indigenous nurses globally through my Atlantic fellowship. And just to see if the work that we've done in Australia is transferable with them and their country and through that indigenous ethos of reciprocity and sharing trade, and because of our large footprint in the workforce and our ability to, access healthcare for our peoples and also build health literacy. It's important to work globally and for them to work with their non-indigenous nurses to focus on decolonizing nursing globally, and the thinking.

So I've been working to bring this work to the Lowitja Institute, to really think about privileging indigenous health researchers and uphold our ways of knowing, being, and doing, when challenging that blinkered Western academic model that continues to cause a lot of harm for indigenous peoples.

And that's where I'll really halt my journey today. Looking to build strong links globally with our organization and indigenous health researchers. And thank you for your interest.

Kirsty: Wow. I just want to acknowledge that I find this so difficult and confronting to talk about. And that if it's that hard to even listen to how difficult it must be to live through and talk about.

Ariadne: I know. Pervasive racism, and it's so hidden here, particularly in Australia and we pretend, and we try not to see it. And then you hear people's stories and the impact of how racism affects just everyday life and how we so need to change those stories and turn up in different ways. And I just want to acknowledge Jeanine's resilience and ability to continue rising above and changing that story. It's really powerful.

Kirsty: Yeah. And to thank you for sharing with us so honestly,

Ariadne: and generously, thank you, Jeanine.

Kirsty: Ari, what are the things that really stuck out for you?

Ariadne: I think one of the key things for me is this really important concept that we can only travel at the speed of trust. And that trust takes time and that you can have all the technical solutions in the world, but really it's this relational piece between people. The other point that really stood out for me was the importance of almost, like a stranger within the community, someone external to your own circle who came in and saw in Janine this potential. And that really inspired her and it just takes one person to believe in you to really be able to create change. For me, that was really powerful and the importance of our own agency and leadership and thinking about how we turn up and what we bring with us and the stories that we bring into the spaces that we work and how important it is for us to connect with our own stories so that we can be the change leaders and create space for others to feel safe.

Kirsty: Yeah, that was really interesting to me too, Janine your definition of cultural safety as including being able to see yourself in a strengths-based way, and having others see you in that way too. It's a really interesting way of looking at what safety means. That ability to be able to see yourself and be seen in a particular way.

One of the other things that I found really impactful was that discussion about the ongoing nature of colonization and how it continues to have a devastating, ongoing impact on cultural, spiritual, emotional, social wellbeing, and health of indigenous peoples, and how important it is to continue the practice of decolonization - that those impacts really do have intergenerational effects. And we have to really continually be thinking about that in an environmental sense, in a social sense, in a health sense that it's a really ongoing and broad reaching impact.

And one of the other things that I thought was really important for everybody to take away from this presentation was the point about challenging institutional racism. Thinking about what we don't see. Janine's example of in football where we don't see indigenous peoples as coaches, and we don't see them as CEOs. Seeing where those gaps are. It's all, it's important to actually hold that space as well, I think.

Thanks so much to all of you for listening to Janine's inspiring story today. If you're interested in hearing more inspiring stories with us, we'd love to have you. So please do subscribe to the Ampliseed podcast series or head over to our website to learn more. We'd like to close with a special thanks to the BHP Foundation whose support makes this work possible.

Ariadne: And to let you know, for our next episode, we will feature Sam from the 10 Deserts Project, who will share her inspiring story with us and her experiences and insights on how to create culturally safe workplaces. Till then.

 

 

 

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