A culture of ill health: public health or Aboriginality?

Chelsea Bond

74 citations0/0 files storedThe Medical Journal of Australia

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Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights Indigenous Cultures and History Race, Genetics, and Society

Abstract

A culture of ill health: public health or Aboriginality? y career in Indigenous health was first ignited in my teenage years as part of an overall desire to "work among my own people".At that point in my life, I never really felt "Aboriginal", owing, in part, to my being of "mixed descent", light-skinned and having been raised in a predominantly white neighbourhood in an urban area.My claim to Aboriginality somehow felt a little inauthentic in light of the public imaginings of Aboriginality that I had been exposed to growing up.My perception of the "real" Aboriginal people were those who possessed dark skin, occupied the remotest parts of our country, and had retained a "pure" and "uncontaminated" Aboriginal culture.Rather naively, I had imagined that I would graduate from university and work with those people, sharing my expert wisdom of health knowledge and, in return, finding a connection with my "true" self -my Aboriginality.Funnily enough, I did achieve my goal of finding myself and my sense of Aboriginality.It was just not in the place, and not in the form, that I had first anticipated several years earlier.The chronicling of this journey is not meant to be a purely narcissistic endeavour.It revolves around two plights -one personal and one professional -which together describe the disjuncture between the lived experience of being an Aboriginal person and the described experience of Aboriginality that is manifest within public health practices and hampers our ability, as health professionals, to have a meaningful and positive impact on Indigenous health.It was upon undertaking a degree in Indigenous health that my romanticised ideas of a noble people quickly came crashing down.

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References

1997Social capital, income inequality, and mortality.2003The Structuring of Ethnic Inequalities in Health: Economic Position, Racial Discrimination, and Racism 2003Paved With Good Intentions: Do Public Health and Human Service Providers Contribute to Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Health?2004Strong in the City: towards a strength-based approach in Indigenous health promotion

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