Aboriginal People and Intergenerational Trauma - Barbara O’Neill

[Music] lovely to be talking to you Barbara thank you start by describing the work that you do every day I work at Maroubra I work for I'm an Aboriginal capacity officer but I like to call myself the curry worker and I work on the housing estates in Maroubra there's quite a few of them and the majority of the web people I work with the women and women with children but it can be women of any age and I write trauma-informed programs that are very interactive and a feminist and empowering for the young women coming through them we will talk about the structures of poverty and we unpack it and we also connect the the poverty to trauma as well as the historical colonial context and then once we do that the participants own it they own trauma they own their history you can never heal trauma but you manage it and they draw a line in the sand and move on what are their needs what do they present with they present with barriers barriers that are inherited barriers sometimes psychological barriers I'm sometimes very very very true in physical barriers there some of them are very highly experienced and they go for a job and they don't get it and there's no white reason why they shouldn't get that job I'm not talking about one so I'm talking up to a dozen times so then we we strategize about moving around the barriers and getting out of their field that they're looking at if they constantly get knock backs and think of retraining you're talking about racism absolutely absolutely it shocks me every time a young woman comes to my groups and they show me their resume they show me the previous jobs they've done it shocks me to my core that this young woman sitting in front of me that probably has a lot of training and TAFE certificates and diplomas unemployable who's knocking them back I can't name a particular company because it's very widespread one young woman told me that she wanted to have this is only last week she is 26 with two children and she told me that she wanted to do a hairdressing apprenticeship and she was told that the customers would think she was dirty and wouldn't want to come in another one a few years ago in Penrith she was told that her cuz the customers wouldn't come and if they had never regional apprentice so what happens is people just walk away they walk away and then they think we'll all I know all I can get is a survival job and then when you when you have dreams and aspirations to join the economy it's very very hard when there's no you don't have a chance and another woman she was about 36 she had six kids and when we finished the course she it's ten weeks and she said to me she'd you know I didn't believe that I could work she said I know it she said she said I thought it was just some people that had that just look a certain way they were allowed to work said I didn't know that I could go out there and apply for a job and I would get it she said I didn't think it was something I was allowed to do so what have you told them over the course of that ten weeks about the society we live in today and the history of this country that allows them perversely to feel optimistic and empowered at the end of this okay they get to own it they own the situation they realized that the poverty is not their fault it wasn't their parents fault it wasn't their grandparents fault when they realize they don't come from a lazy background they don't come from an unskilled background we go back to Aboriginal people have always worked Aboriginal people just didn't get their wages when I give them the actual historical proof of that they realized then that they are dealing racism but they've grown up with the optic optimism that racism is somehow disappearing and going and then when their kids at school and they're good at the sport they're included and everything but it's when they come out of school and the schools try so hard and they come out of school and they go to TAFE and think that they're you know like they're winning they're killing this and they go for a job and they just can't get it they get the survival jobs but they don't get the career jobs and when you say survival jobs they're the jobs that allow you to survive in life but not thrive yeah they're the ones where you may not be happy in it you may it's a job that covers the gap till you get the job you want yeah so we're here talking about ageing if that is the background of the 36 year old woman with six kids as she starts to age and we can add ageism into the mix of of the barriers she's got a waiver come mmm what do you imagine are the other issues for her I am looking at 48 year old women that are grandmothers thinking they can go back to work and now they're custodial grandmother's so suddenly that then they're not looking after the kids they're bringing up a case absolutely and you get a lot of government workers who just assume they assume that the grandmother will take the children if there's a problem in the family I can't imagine that in the non Aboriginal community that you know non Aboriginal women who have gone through raising their families would would be the government would go and say well the kit you can take the kids back up and do it again yes not that the in our culture it's okay but then again it's not okay because the pressure is the expectation so I look at the women I work with and I'm trying desperately to guide them away from a negative aging experience because at least if a few of them have gone to University and TAFE and at least if they've got education they can think it through and use use emotional intelligence as a way to deal with it are there particular issues you imagine for people who have been institutionalized either in as part of the stolen generation or as an experience of out of home care which is doubled for indigenous children in the last 10 years since the apology the numbers have doubled so you've got all these indigenous people who have this experience of institutionalization as children what do you imagine will be the issues for them for residential aged care and dealing with that they're going back into it its cradle to grave cradle to grave institutionalization because one of the problems that we've isolated is when okay we might the we might have a woman that's probably 25 now and she has children she may be struggling with parenting then we look at her mum who's probably 45 and her mum may be dealing with addictions or she may be just dealing with exhaustion then we look at her mum who may be 65 and she she's most likely stolen generation so she has not grown up with the experience of being parented with love so therefore then when she has her child there she is struggling to be a parent so there's no genetic memory of parenting with a lot of our mob they have and they have children because that's their value that's the self value is to be a mum so therefore when if someone's been a stolen generation child so therefore they're institutionalized or they're shared the statistics are that any child now who goes into Karen doesn't end up with grandma or family will have at least 14 homes by the time they're 18 and leave so you've got that background then they come out and they try and access the economy because they know it's the way then they have the barriers of accessing the economy then you they're going to interviews with that that I'm delaying anger that comes from their experience so employers just you know back right off so then unless we can work with them and work on that trauma and that anger that's going to carry through then when they're about 45 if they've had children and then their children are having children oh this is not this is not a fact this is an observation they may feel guilty because they are pressured from a non-aboriginal point of view to parent in a certain way so they overcompensate as a grandmother and then there's a lot of guilt and then they take on the children all we've done is really grown up in a loveless situation had children hoping that someone would love them namely their child struggled to bring my child up the best way they know how then the wheels fall off then the child is taken then their child is reliving their experience so this 45 year old woman runs she has her grandchildren with her then the grandchildren obviously grow up father times she's 65 she's exhausted she is exhausted and then if elder abuse kicks in our elder abuse is nothing to do with greed our elder abuse is mental health and how does it manifest okay so supposing you're a 65 year old woman and you're a great-grandmother by this stage and you're the one that's well enough to take the children so you get the small amount of money that the government pays what I have seen is the both of the parent mother and father well because they're they've got mental health issues and drug effected or alcohol they will then go to the carry they've the Kin carer and wonder why the money's going to them when that's the money they've moving on so they just assumed that that money's theirs that's now gone to the grandmother it's really difficult situation and so the grandmother knows that they can't live on new start so gives them that money that they're supposed to be there for the children so the grandmother is then going into poverty and hunger feeding the children because she's trying to keep the chopper own child who's now an adult out of the system by giving them the money so they won't go and steal or get into trouble so it's very circular when thinking about developing a strategy and some visibility around elder abuse in the community how would you recommend that stakeholders do that in a way that is inclusive of the particular needs of indigenous people it just goes back to everything else about the Aboriginal community we need self-governance like for instance there is no way seniors rights and advice could set up a shop and it's expect Aboriginal people to walk in because we don't see it as a legal issue we see it as a community issue as a family issue so we need people an organization like seniors rights and advice if they could get the right funding could train our community members to be aware of the triggers aware of the behaviors and be able to have a yarn sit down have a yarn with the mother because of her self judged lack of parenting she's not going to she's not going to want to put in her kids Kushiel's she'll think that she has put them in that position in the first place I wasn't a great mum now x.25 yeah I'm not going to Dobb the men even though I'm in a terrible way and so of the grandkids yeah because I could have done better but they couldn't have done better they couldn't have they didn't have the means they they might have you know like this is they need to be educated that if they gave those children love and and really cared for them and brought them up as the best they could there's nothing else they could have done it's not an issue of of having been a bad mother it's an issue of poverty and racism and so really there's no way to have a strategy that includes that that isn't a specific indigenous strategy developed from the grassroots there's nothing around that I know of there could be in in discrete communities and I only speak for the urban community in New South Wales but there it can happen it definitely can happen it can happen with consultation and actually going into the communities going into the communities and having a yarn up and saying well what do you want how do you want to deal with it because we're a hundred and forty-two Nations and each nation is going to want to deal with it differently and we're not asking for billions of dollars we're not we're just asking for the right amount of money to train up our people and there is the community is looks after it in a sense that if it's getting violent they will step in and call the place and they will call the authorities rather than the than the abused adult but it's not something that that person's being abused we'll go and do not at all because they're at their compensating it's it's complex it's interconnected and it's into generation to generation we know a culture was all about the elders caring for elders loving elders and now well I can sort of get it because the globally this is happening where there's just this disconnect between elders and younger people but in our community mainly it's about this whole thing of kin care and or at Simkin its mental health it is mental health that it really is because if you've got a community where they're strong emotionally and they're strong spiritually you don't get much of this it's wonderful to talk to you thank you so much for taking me through the complexity of that issue thank you very much you

Channel: Seniors Rights Service

Views: 4,249

Rating: 4.609756 out of 5

Keywords: Barbara O’Neill, elder abuse, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, 5th National Elder Abuse, seniors, elders, rights, community, human rights, ATSI, A&TSI

Id: 6BYw0u6JHwA

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 03 2018