Culture, safety, & sovereignty: A conversation with Professor Chelsea Watego S8E23

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners should be aware that this episode of the Speak Up podcast discusses topics that may be confronting, such as descriptions of racism, the stolen generation, all the names or voices of people who have returned to the dreaming. Welcome to Speak Up, the official podcast of Speech Pathology Australia. We bring you insightful conversations with leading professionals about key issues and innovations in speech pathology, all in a concise format that's perfect for your busy schedule. We aim to inform, inspire, and also engage. We love hearing from you, so please join the conversation on our social media platforms or email us with your thoughts and questions. And please subscribe and share with your friends and colleagues. Your support helps us grow and inform, inspire and engage others. Now let's embark on today's conversation. Welcome to Speak Up, my name is Nikita and I am Speak for theology Australia's First Nations Lead. I firstly would like to acknowledge the one of real people as the traditional custodians of the land on which I work and live, and also recognize the various lands on which all of our listeners are tuning in from. A recognized sovereignty was never stated and pay my deepest respects to elders past and present. I also acknowledge and honor the enduring connection of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to this land, to culture, to community and to country. Let us reflect on the knowledge and stories that have been shared on this land for thousands generations and commit to walking together in a spirit of respect and understanding. I am joined today by the lovely Professor Chelsea Watergo, I'm an in Jolly and South Sea Islander woman with over 20 years of experience working with an indigenous health as a health care worker and research. I was lovely for you to join us today, Chelsea. Thank you so much for having me. Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself? Where do you call home? What sorts of things do you feel passionate about and what led you to doing the work that you do? Sure, so yes, I'm a Manojali in South Sea Islander, but I was born and raised on Yagura Country in McGangin, known as Brisbane. I grew up in the out of suburbs of Brisbane and for us, maybe 20-eight years or so, I've been living in a place called Anala, which is in the out of suburbs of Brisbane and at home to a very staunch proud Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community. I'm a mum of five, five beautiful boys and I started out as an Aboriginal health worker, slash hospital liaison officer and I worked in rural health service and also have worked in urban indigenous contexts in Anala with under Professor Noel Hayman at the Anala Indigenous Health Service for some years before I moved into an academic career. So my background is as a community health worker and particularly in Indigenous health. I didn't have any aspirations to be an academic. I found myself wanting to understand the way in which health understood us as a people because when I went to university, I just turned 17, I was a bum and it was the first time I discovered that we were so sick and sad as a people and this was the 90s where there was this whole epidemiological interest in the appalling health status of Indigenous peoples and the experts were the epidemiologists and fortunately I grew up intellectually in a class full of mostly black fellas, many which were older than me, who were contesting the knowledge that were produced about us. And I'd work in health trying to convince the system and my colleagues about our ways as a people and trying to bridge the gap and improve health services but I just kept coming up against these barriers I guess and I didn't matter how much I was trying to teach people about us. There were all of these things in the way, these systems and structures that were working that seemed to be beyond my control as someone on the bottom of the health hierarchy as well as on the bottom of the racial hierarchy. So it led me to ask questions about public health, about how it imagines Aboriginal people and really I just had this, I didn't want to be an academic, I had a curiosity about the knowledge is produced about us which led to people treating us in a particular kind of way. So that led me to a PhD which interrogated critically how public health imagines Aboriginality where it was very much about being a risk factor for illness as opposed to being central to our sense of wellness as black fellas. And yeah and so I just had this constant like something's not right here, let me work out and make sense of it. And so I was never an aspiring academic but the work the experiences I'm all be having with the health system required that I ask different questions of the systems rather than questions of our culture. Amazing, I'm a little bit of a fan girl I must admit I've followed you for many years now. We've been trying to like locate your books where they keep getting sold out. Which leads me into my next question is so you have written a series of books about racism, colonial structures, sovereignty and a range of other topics. What does this mean for non-first nations people and why do you feel that reading something like your books and your text would be important for them? Well so the funny thing is my first book another day in the colony. I did the whole intro where I said this book is not for non-indigenous people and the editor at the time is like Chelsea you need to clarify that because progressive white people would stop reading the moment they read that sentence and what I meant by that was working in the health system, working in the academy I was constantly educating non-indigenous people and I found most of my intellectual labour was being exhausted on teaching others about us and with another end of the colony I was really interested in having conversation with my own people about how we think about ourselves in the world on our terms and oftentimes there's a lot of like intellectual and creative work that has indigenous content that is always centering non-indigenous people's experience of us in this sort of hopes to appeal and educate and convince of our humanity and so another day in the colony was freeing for me to speak specifically to an indigenous audience. That being said non-indigenous people can read the book and think with it but my labour wasn't focused on their experience of it which can be new but you know my great-grandmother was a domestic and I remember mum saying that long after she worked in domestic service she still put her apron on her hair and her bun and I think this bike follows we have to question to what extent are we still operating as domestics to non-indigenous people to center their sensibilities they were being their comfort at the expense of our own and so for some non-indigenous reason it can be that have a different experience of reading the book and that's okay it's okay to encounter someone's experience of themselves that doesn't center you and I encourage non-indigenous people to lean into that and to read books that they're not comfortable with rather than those that validate their sense of belonging to this place and the ways in which I didn't center the non-indigenous reader were things like I refuse to footnote this book so if people didn't understand some of the terms that's okay that part of the story was not meant for them and see it in our cultures you know with our indigenous knowledge systems we don't get access to all the knowledge freely we have to earn the right to that we have to have a frame of reference for understanding things and it's just a kind of way of saying to non-indigenous people you don't get to have every part of us and that's okay does it make us oppositional we're just following our rules around knowledge production and that to kind of refuse that possessive urge to know indigenous experience and yeah so it's been interesting I found the response to that of like this is for indigenous readers I had lots of black felters when they read the books and these really heavy emails about particularly black women who were like I'm quitting my job after reading your book and really fired up some had lots of like all the feelings lots of feelings about having heard their experience explained it on way and having a language to understand some of those experiences that were told not to speak about and I hadn't lots of well-mitting non-indigenous women who would send me emails apologising for having read the book and some tiktoks sort of book club tiktok type things where people were saying look this is terrible and you know I prefer to read other books like dark imu and not this book and so it was quite interesting the responses to it for different readers I encourage non-indigenous peoples to engage with texts and creative works that challenge them I love worth that challenges me gets me to think differently about the world and so I encourage non-indigenous people to lean into that and to think critically about why is it that we need indigenous peoples to present themselves in a way that makes us feel better what does it say about how power is working in these moments yeah and I feel like we can't grow as individuals or as communities if we're not able to challenge our beliefs and our thoughts and the way that we view the world around us without that challenge we're kind of just stuck aren't we I love the mention of how it's important to challenge people it's it makes us uncomfortable because I think so often we sit in that that comfortability because it is safe and it is something that we feel comfortable in so we're going to stay there and it's it's much harder for us to kind of move out of that yeah yeah and what I've seen out of the years is part of the racial violence that indigenous peoples experience is the exhaustion from trying to appeal to non-indigenous peoples sensibilities yeah and so it's also about giving permission to black fellas to go we can talk about our business we don't have to worry I have put it this part of our labor are the concerns of non-indigenous peoples. And it's not that we don't care about them, but there has been a long tradition of us having to be of service too. And I wanted to give a space where we can just, theorize about our experiences in a way that is not having to foreshadow non-indigenous people denying us of the experiences that we have. And we see it all the time. And the moment when a Black brother in the public sphere that's the sporting field or other places speaks honestly about their experiences with the social world, we see the violence that they encounter, the denial that dismissal, the demonization. And so this was also an exercising of the sovereignty that we speak all mean knowledge country that we have the right to express our experiences as we see fit. - Yeah, I think one of the key takeaways as well as for people who are listening, who are non-indigenous is that you may be uncomfortable, but you aren't unsafe. So that's a really big thing to take away is that you can sit in being uncomfortable and you should sit in being uncomfortable, but you're not unsafe reading these books or listening to these podcasts or engaging with First Nations people. - No, you will be fine. And I think, 'cause I'm the product of, what they call an interracial relationship. So my mother's a white Australian, my father is Aboriginal and South Sea, whose body's red as black. And it was the first time on both sides of the family where black and white married. And it's in the 60s. So it was a different time. And I was just fortunate. I grew up with a white mother who never ever discounted my experience of the world. She knew that my encounter with the social world was different to hers, even though she birthed me and raised me and knew me more intimately than others in the social world. But she knew that her experience was different and I'm so grateful to have a parent and it's not uncommon in terms of interracial relationships and what they hate the term mixed race. But mixed race children were one parent's not negatively racialized to not fully appreciate what their children may experience in the world. So I think probably my mother was more radical than my black father. And perhaps because of the privilege that she called as a white woman, express her displeasure with the workings of the social world in a way that he as a black man was not permitted to. So, you know, mum would go to the real estate and dab wouldn't go inside when they went to get a house when they first got married. I grew up in a family where there was a critical race consciousness where we didn't deny the reality of the world and I think that helped me. So I just assumed that everyone's okay to talk about race because I grew up like that. And it wasn't a don't talk about that. That's a sure that you really experienced that. You know, I didn't have that which I'm very grateful. And I think about that as a mother of five about how I do not dismiss how my children experience the social world because they're growing up in a different time to what I grew up in. And there's things unloy only but my children about how they navigate the world as well. And what we need to develop is this healthy curiosity that understand that world, not worth the view to dismiss and downplay it. But to fully understand that and I've learned so much from my children in thinking about how they navigate the world. And you know, there's things that I'm able to do but there's things that in this time is somewhat different. I know that my navigation of the social world and it came to race and racism is different to what my dad did because of the time that he grew up in. And he had to put food on the table for four kids. So there were things he couldn't speak up about. His body was red differently to mine. And so I also don't judge my parents for the things they did to survive this thing and the strategies that they used. And I've worked at, well, what are the ones I can do in this moment and test out and similarly not prescribing those to my children to go, well, you've got to do it this way. Yeah. And so I think it's just healthy for us all as human beings to recognize that people experience a social world differently and we should be interested in understanding that as opposed to presuming that our experience is everybody's experience. All right, let's talk about one of your research works. Taking up the challenge of eliminating racism and healthcare through talking about race and cultures. What can transformative change look like for healthcare spaces? Yes. So I literally came to this podcast from one of our pilot training sessions from the project we're doing with children's hospital Queensland and developing a new anti-racism training package. Because in the state of Queensland, we've got a health equity legislation where every hospital and health service has to develop a strategy for eliminating institutional racism. And so we have an HMRC funded project over two years to work with CHQ to develop an anti-racism training specifically for them. And we've been transformative in our design of the training. So we're seeking to build a shared understanding of these concepts of race and racism and the types of racisms, the individual, the systemic, the institutional so that we can strategize better in trying to undermine how race works in producing poor health outcomes, particular populations. And I recognize that we cannot teach our way out of racism. Sometimes people think that racism is something that uneducated people possess. And that is a false assumption. Academic institutions invented racial science, made legitimate race as an idea. It was the health sciences that insisted on this idea for a biological inferiority. And there are people still today who believe race is real as a biological thing, who work as doctors and nurses. I remember teaching first year med students about race and races aren't real biologically, and you know, and format scientific racism. And it was funny they were looking quite venues and one student in the middle of the lecture said, "I just googled what you said and you're right." And it was fascinating because he was surprised that race wasn't real biologically as a first year med student. But also he was surprised that he could learn something from an indigenous educator and his med degree. So yeah, all the racisms, but I think there's something transformative about education. And that's for everybody, not just those that haven't had access to tertiary education. In fact, those that have degrees are the ones that have legitimized their racism in such a sophisticated way that you often can't challenge it. So I enjoy the transformative nature of education. I love what we're doing with the work we're doing with CHQ is we're not delivering anti-racism training to punish races. This training is about building communities of practice across hospital and health service and to really build an intellectual curiosity about these concepts and structures and their workings, which is very different to most anti-racism training. We'll be come to it and share our feelings about race and racism and we just focus on our feelings and we don't think about systems and structures. So I'm really enjoying that work and seeing how it leads to different conversations and people arriving at that learning themselves rather than being told prescriptively, this is how you treat the Aboriginal patient as though we are one exists as a monolith and there is this one guide. So I believe in the transformative power of developing a critical consciousness and what that can do. So we're having a lot of fun with that. But also when you look at race as a structure and you look at systemic and institutional races, some of the harder racisms to see and to fully understand, it can feel almost overwhelming. Like we can't change how the social world thinks about this and we can't change the systems and we feel powerless as individuals to do anything. So what we're trying to is get people to understand how systems and structures work, what their capabilities are in attending to those. One of the cases we had today, it looked at a cardiology doctor being white, judgmental around making presumptions around hygiene in the home and overcrowding and parenting capabilities with a rheumatic heart disease. And it got us to explore some of those assumptions that we make between poverty, parenting capability, care for health, all of those kinds of things and recognizing the structural. But what was interesting in the discussion was the clinicians were able to see how the doctor failed to understand the structural conditions that were applied. But also blame the almost individualise those structural conditions so reduced it to an issue of health behaviours. And oftentimes in the health system, we do that. We say to people, we're going to pretend the structural conditions that you experience don't exist. And we're going to say, you just make better choices. And we're going to lecture about it. And we're going to judge you about, maybe you don't really care about your kids. And so just to even getting that switch to think about, yeah, the structure is overwhelming. So why do we then individualise it when we deal with clients as they come through our services? And so it's just getting people to switch the stances and which they're operating from and to critically interrogate them. The thing when I like about education, because in all of it, so that doesn't fix the things, what our position is, if we have a shared understanding of these things, and we move from the conversation away from does racism exist to how is race working, we get on with the business of doing something about it. And so Tony Morrison talks about races and mass destruction. Many of the work around racism gets us distracted from dealing with race. And what I've found is when people have a better understanding of the concept, the strategies they [BLANK_AUDIO] tend to be far more effective. We move away from putting up posters and health services that say say note of racism to interrogating our policies and procedures in the way in which those who are neglect racialized are disproportionately affected by the virtual how those policies are written. So it gets us looking a bit deeper at undermining racism. So I think that's a transformative nature of education and it actually is easy to do. I'm known for a quote about not having hope, I won't say the word, but I have stubborn insistence that we can do something about injustice and if we have better strategies for addressing it. What are three things that someone working in healthcare can do today to work towards developing their anti-racist protocols and policies? Oh, I have a few things. Okay. Have a healthy intellectual curiosity about it. Stuart Hall, one of the founders of cultural studies in the UK has a seminal article called teaching race and he talks about the fact that it's the difficulties around teaching races that people have strong emotional ideological attachments to ideas of race and racism that stop them from engaging. And so I encourage people to think about racism like they might think about cancer. How do we fix it as opposed to treating like smoking just saying it's bad. So if we can make that switch and go actually I want to know how race is working. That's really useful because then you will read and you will think and you'll strategise and you won't be immobilized. So that's really important. We are very clear around our anti-racism that itself has to be anti-racist. So our anti-racist position in our anti-racist work is we've centered the knowledge as an experiences of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people and those who have been negatively racialised. We do not discount them or deny them. People who know racism best of those who have experienced it. We know typically those who experience racism and speak out about it are demonised for it and dismissed. Sarah Ahmed in her book complaint talks about when you name the problem you become the problem we have to be explicitly anti-racist in our work and go well we're going to look at so people need to read indigenous works on race and racism not the non-indigenous version of it. And that can be from movies from memoirs as well as academic texts. It's having an interest in understanding this thing and centering indigenous knowledgees in our understanding. Of course that is the sclaimers of not burdening indigenous peoples with the labour of doing the thing. So and roll on the course don't slide in your friends DMs you know do the work do the readings and embrace mistakes you're going to get it wrong I love mistakes in the sense that I love what I learned from them and my best learnings have come from the things that I've not got right and when we make the mistake we go oh okay I'm going to do this this time so it's like ego has to go to the side and think about look we're in this and we're going to make mistakes and I'm not going to be engaged anti-racist work that has to uphold my virtue in a sense that every step of the way because we all think and racialize terms. David the O'Gullberg says race is part of the air that we breathe so none of us can claim to be not racist we all think and racialize terms we consume popular culture which deals with all kinds of racialized logics that are deeper problematic so just welcome the mistakes welcome the learning and don't get defensive and don't go on the attack if you are found I've made a mistake my little tips I think we need to think about how we protect those who are doing that work and like what kind of ally and accomplice are we to those who are being courageous when it comes to anti-racism work and if you're doing anti-racism work you better be prepared for some consequences so we need you to be courageous we need to be prepared to pay a price for the work and not just have those who are racialized being the ones that are copying the hits I know someone's an ally when I know they're prepared to step in front of the attacks that come my way or stand beside me and not disappear the moment things get a bit hard and those well-meaning colleagues are suddenly all a bit racist now you've got to stick with it and not just run the moment it gets a bit too hard and my last little I'm not sure what number up to my last one is you have to find joy in the injustice of it all and that's particularly for those who are negligible racialized like no one does satire better than settler colonialism and some of the the crazy ways in racism gets reproduced in anti-racism work is hilarious frustrating but also quite hilarious and so I always make joy a conscious project in any work I do we use Schumer in teaching and that's not to downplay the light and death consequences of racial violence but joy has to be part of this if we are sustained this kind of work I'm currently working on a play which is a comedy of my failed race discrimination case against the Queensland police and it's verbatim theatre I've used the transcripts to tell the story of how hilarious it was that the race scholar took a race discrimination case not only did I lose I was determined to be the racist and made to pay costs in a no-cost jurisdiction now it's wild but it's hilarious so I I find joy in the injustice to go see isn't this wild like the racism or the racist discrimination process wow but that sustains me it was funny because the case itself well what happened to me was really bad the case itself reproduced some of that violence it wasn't pleasant at all so when I got limitation to rock this play and to workshop it I I thought about all the self care things I do each day of the creative development so you know day one I was going to soak in the magnesium bath day two I was doing the dinner date with some girlfriends and so I've done each day done the thing what was interesting though was that when I was doing this creative work and laughing at the absurdity of the racial violence I actually didn't need those things I mean it was fine it was nice but I experienced it differently because I was able to use humour as a way to make sense of how absurd irrational unjust it all was so we have to think about how to be fine joy in injustice because it's always around us and when we do entry racism work we don't always find the justice that we think we deserve or that we want but it doesn't mean we we're not doing something in the process of seeking it and myself and our colleague we work a lot with people who are going to racial complaint not because it's part of our job we just do this work on the side and the question we always ask people when they come with this crisis moment or racial complaint is getting to think about what does justice look like for you and you know what does winning look like and so we have to rethink and reset the parameters for ourselves and enter racism work about justice about winning about joy because often the processes that around racism reproduce tenfold the racism that we're often complaining about or seeking to address since writing the article have you noticed though any meaningful change in the space of indigenous any racist training look there's definitely been a change in the course of my career and when I was a baby academic I remember going to lower institute round tables where people were saying the R word my people I mean the non-inducence epidemiologist people could not say racism in health research spaces and literally said the R word or said look I say racism but I make sure I say systemic in front of it just because people get a bit upset when you say racism to now we have very explicit legislation policies that say we are going to eliminate institutional racism so there's definitely been a shift in the discourse that we can say the word that we are saying you don't have a choice of how you feel about it we have to do something about racism that landscape has definitely changed when I was first working in health research we talked about average people's cultures and behaviors and do we survive black bodies and we said look what's wrong with them and how do we fix them and the health system was the solution to the racialized health disparities now we're seeing a bit of a like switching the question to not what is wrong with black people what's wrong with the systems and structures to produce these outcomes so there has been a shift I think there has been an uptaken racism work without engaging with the racism work which is one of the I think problems in this current moment so everyone's anti-racist and we're making stuff up and just appealing on the moral virtue type line so there's some bad anti-racism stuff out there and it just has engaged with the rich tradition of indigenous scholarship and strategising that has long been in place so we see people who were never speaking about racism before suddenly you know being consultants doing anti-racism training without any expertise and not drawing on indigenous expertise and so there is the downside that is with everything it's suddenly the flavor of the month and if it says anti-racism that must be good and sometimes I've forgotten actually how is this working is this the best strategy so we still need to develop a healthier critical community of practice when it comes to anti-racism work yeah but it's definitely different I mean there is still the resistance so if you do anti-racism work that focuses on the bad faith actor and the overt racial slower people are okay with that one but if your anti-racism works at the state as a perpetrator of racial violence well that's a big battle that we are fighting we're not so to light. And we can be demonised by other people in the anti-racist space. I'm interested in policing and the violence perpetrated through policing and the over-policing and black communities. And I'm interested in the way in which the increasing number of preventable deaths or black fellas in the hospital health system and how that's being enabled and already attention to that. So I'm like, yeah, that racism is never as black forest school used to that kind of racism. We're pretty resilient. Not saying it's okay, but it's it's the invisible eight-sensual racism. That you know, it's the racism of the Close Negap strategy, which has failed now for 18 years, still being rolled over without revision. The Close Negap has failed now longer than AdSick ever did. The difference was, AdSick, we had a black leadership infrastructure across this country as elected by black people, which resorts the black community control sector that doesn't exist anymore. And so we're seeing the state have greater control, not getting improvements in outcomes for the most parts, certainly in Queensland, not very good at all, yet we're still doing more the same, even though we know it's not working. So the public health professional me goes, wait, what about the evidence base? This isn't working. So can't we change it? So it's, yeah, state sanctioned racial violence remains one that we haven't dealt with properly as a nation. Yeah, I feel like it's an uphill battle with that as well. It's going to take a bit of time. But thankfully we have people like yourself who are just staunch black fellas really doing the work. So on behalf of everyone, I applaud you in this work. Spot is one of our core values as anti-racist. So Spot is a very productive emotion and I'm not sure I've been the youngest to four. I'm always being up against it with my older siblings, but if you tell me I can't do something, well, I'm going to prove you wrong. The spite feels a lot of that. And so going up against the state, I kind of have drawn to that challenge of it. And oftentimes it's, well, what can we get away with? How can we challenge? And I remember I'm trying to think of her name out, but she was quite a highly regarded epidemiologist. And this was at a time and I was first coming to race and I started being marginalized in the health space. And I remember her saying to me, Chelsea, the way in which you move the social world and affect change, it's not at the center. It's at the margins where you're pushing the edges. And so I had to accept my place at the margins. I think it was only two years ago. It was my first public health appointment as a academic. I was always pushed over in humanities and in other spaces because I was told I didn't belong in public health because I asked the wrong questions, even though I was public health trained with all of the awards. And so I learnt the power of the work at the margins. And so you might be popular. And you may be not invited to the round tables or the certain spaces in which the reformists might be working. But I remember her saying to me that because you're pushing that that boundary line here. And people may not see it in the centre, but you're pushing that. And so I had to lean into going though, there's power at the margins and really taking stock of those small ships and being nourished by that as opposed to the uplaws from those who are benefiting from racial violence. I love the dimensions, but as well, because honestly, I vibe with that so much. I feel like when God made blackfellas, it wasn't sugar and spice, it was sugar and spite. The things Fiona Folley tells the story in her book, pretty sure it's Fiona Folley. And Gary Fraser, I think it was one of the first mission communities set up in Womensian reserves in Queens along the Protection Act. And there was this old fella that used to catch his boat across to the mainland. And they were trying to stop him from coming across, because he was supposed to stay there on the island. And so one day they chained up his boat to a tree. And you know what he did, he just cut three down. And I just was really nourished by that of like, yeah, there's these things that try and restrict us, but I don't know, it's way around it. Just cut down the tree up. But just thinking that time that uncle was like, no, I still have my own power and authority. And I just, yeah, those kinds of stories nourished me. And I think we have a lot of stories as blackfellas across this continent of spite that can nourish us our hero stories with filled with humor. And oftentimes you will think about, you know, Aboriginal history, it's so sad and traumatic. And it's, you know, black-arm band view and guilt and no, our survival stories are like glorious and humorous and nourishing. And a reminder of like who we are as a people. And so I love looking to history to be nourished and to know also that the generations before us have walked every step that we're walking in in this moment. Uncle Graham Brady, who's a senior elder, who's doing a PhD with Akron Brunstertuch. He reflected on the fact that, you know, we have a generation of people who think that the moment they open their eyes, that the world began. And he calls for us to think about remembrance and going back not to take that power from those stories, but to think with them, to get an understanding. And so I get really nourished hearing some of those stories or the people have gone before us to go, I can't suck about my oppression now. I'm going to be more innovative and courageous and clever. There are more spiteful. I pull together. You know, every now and again we get, we can get defeated. We can't, but I'd be like, you know what? I'll just go along with everything. I just want to be back in the center of things and be accepted and and be seen as a good health professional like everyone else. And it's natural to feel like that at times. It'd be like it's a bit too hard. And I just go, well, got to be nourished by the stories of Athermore because we're not in this alone. And I'd love being able to expand and build community practice and learn and laugh with Athermore, who are navigating the nonsense of the colony. So this episode will mark part of speech pathology Australia's acknowledgement of the coming of the light festival and NATOquake. Could you talk a little bit about what these days mean to you and to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people? Come over the light in today that's significant to Torres Strait Islander people. So I can't really speak about coming of the light in that cultural context because I'm not connected to that cultural group. Without my sister's elder ancestry, we did have a connection with Christianity and grew up with a church in our child and stuff. And so it's an interesting relationship that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have with Christianity in terms of historically as an apparatus of quiet ill control. But at the same time, it aligns also with the sense of spirituality that many Blackfellas share and connect with. So for me, it's not an either law. I think it's complicated. And so it's recognising that the significance of that in that community is celebrate coming of the light while you may have other communities that deeply uncomfortable with celebrating the arrival of Christianity to communities because different communities had different experiences of that. Look, I think NATOquake should be every week for Blackfellas. I prefer NATOquake than reconciliation week. Reconciliation week is for Allies NATOquakes for Blackfellas. I love it as a time for joy, unmitigated blackness and black excellence. I celebrate NATOquake in an aisle. I take my culturally when I go to an aisle for a family fund day. So I don't do any educated of work in NATOquake for colonisers. I spend time with my community and have fun. So I spend the Wednesday in an aisle for our out of an aisle. NATOquake goes off. It's one of the biggest ones in Brisbane. And then also, again, we have Musgrove Park on the Friday, which is massive and so I just love connecting with mob and just celebrating ourselves in our own terms. As speech pathologists, we are required undertake cultural learning as part of our annual certification. Do you have any particular resources or things that you feel would be really important for us to look into, especially heading into coming of the light and NATOquake? I mean, I think it's, it is a life-level learning journey. So I think we're going to learn about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and look for ways to do that. I think great examples of that are Aboriginal Kindies and Presbyls. They do it very differently. And for speech pathologists who may probably working, if they're working in more of a mainstream schooling system, it's finding a way to connect with the Aboriginal preschools where they exist because it's a whole different kind of vibe. Part of the reason not me and my husband chose to raise our kids an annale because we had a black candy. We had a football club that was black. There was high proportion of black kids at the local schools. So we knew that had this sense of belonging and connection to a community that they wouldn't have to consciously work at it was just taken for granted. But in the go of the civic, they know any someone, so and so and so knows who they belong to. That the, we told the epistemological violence with the curriculum that that would be minimized because when the kids went to my last eight school, they also got to learn nutritional dancers from community organisation that insisted on going to the schools to look after our kids on that, they're learning journeys. So yeah, so love, love, love Aboriginal preschools in kindergarten. I think they're really beautiful places for our kids and I did find what I think about the Aboriginal child. I think what speech pathologist it's worth thinking about and this goes right now in my work in education is to think about how you deal with your whiteness because it's not always about the culture of the native kids and there is a rich tradition of this idea that Aboriginal children need saving and that the speech pathologist or the pediatrician or the child health nurse or the kidney teacher will save Aboriginal children from their terrible circumstances, their unloving family and their traumatic communities and their tragic histories. And so we have to really interrogate what are the racialized logics we're working on? We work with the Aboriginal child and their families and look, I've had five kids, so I I I experienced that. I know it so well. And we need to think about how the power dynamics are working there because there is there's a whole lot of like like I'm not making this up. There are movies, I think Australia and higher ground all have the imagery of the white woman grasping the Aboriginal child. And saving them. It is a thing. It's like the Michelle Fife the syndrome from what was that maybe you know when she goes to the poor neighborhood and she teaches them and she rescues them through poetry. Can't think of the name of it. But anyway, it's called the Michelle Fife the Syndrome. What are we doing in our practice? How are we thinking about the Aboriginal child and the way that is affirming our sense of saveurism? Securing out innocence and virtue, particularly as white women which teaching particularly it's largely white women who are being sent to our communities to save Aboriginal children. So we really need to interrogate how whiteness is working, not better starting the culture of the native so much. Though there are things we need to learn about different cultural communities. I've done some work in the Torres Strait. We've been smoked for a couple of years and I know it's a very different cultural community. some of them are a bit of fairy and I hear that language and protocol and process are so very different and so I'm able to know some things but there's a lot I don't know and, so there's some things I have to learn but also think about my place, I'm a visitor to that place, you know I'm Aboriginal but i'm not from that place, how do I behave in that place? There's someone else's child or a family member, a community member. So as Black thought was we're constantly going non-p possessive and recognising limitations of our relationships with their own people and sometimes on Indigenous people because there's still that sort of colonial mindset to not think about some of those protocols and I need to respect that that's different and that's okay and the idea that if you're working with Indigenous children particularly that you're going to save them. If you're thinking about saving Aboriginal children then you're actually going to do a lot of harm to our families and to those children and it's hard because in the health space and particularly you know engendered spaces where there might be a promptly female workforce, there is this idea of womanhood, white womanhood, caring, virtue, innocence, benevolence. We've got to check some of that. Yeah absolutely. I think if any of our listeners have listened to recent podcasts episodes that we've had we've talked about language preservation and and that sort of thing too so go back and listen if you haven't already but we talk about the importance of different is just different it's not wrong we don't need to fix we don't need to assimilate to fit this mold we are allowed to be a different mold and that's okay you just got to figure it out like do some learning challenge yourself. And different isn't always deficit and I remember many years ago working with Tarot Lewis, amazing black speech pathologist who you know her work was challenging the over diagnosis of speech and language issues with Indigenous children because of the methodology of the assessment and that sometimes our mob may not communicate not because they're unable to but because the way which we do assessments just doesn't align with how mob yarn and talk so yeah the distinguishing that difference is not a deficit it's just different and how do we think through that and do things differently as opposed to rushing to a diagnosis of in capability yeah. Of all of the things that you've created your books your your research the things that you're working on now if a speech pathologist or anyone listening was to pick one thing to get themselves started in challenging their mindset figuring out a good way to move forward what is one of your works that you feel would be the best to start with? Since we're a podcast I'm going to recommend a podcast we produced last year that is called Read the Play and it's a 13-part episode where we've collected quite a number of conversations with Indigenous scholars, organizers, activists including some of the people I've spoken about during this conversation and we've collected a series of conversations that we've had over two years and compiled them into our first and last season of an Indigenous critical race toolkit and so each episode is themed in a certain way so we have some of our amazing scholars like Professor Leicester Rigni talking about Indigenous intellectual sovereignty we have some very clear ones about racial complaint we also have which I'd say like go to the last episode is last year we did a national anti-supposeum on racism which we got into a lot of trouble for the Murdoch Press around about 60 articles on it and it was I think headline does a festival of hate because we gathered lots of people doing anti-racism work but what got us into trouble is the day before we did an event called the greatest race debate and we assembled a range of speakers who are negative racialised to give us their best force take on race in the colony and it is entertaining humorous and we wanted to finish on joy with the podcast but it looks at different ways in which not just blackfellas but different people have experienced race in the colony in a very humorous way so if you're like I don't want to do that heavy stuff just yet go to the final episode of Read the Play and there's a colorist critique of multiculturalism in Australia compared to other countries the African refugee experience and the resistance against that it's quite a broad conversation about race so read the play and the episodes are stands aligned and so there's quite rich descriptions as well as reading resources that are connected to that there are some warnings about that some episodes are dealing with racial violence and death and some cases that we've worked on so for some of you might want to think about just reading the blur before you click on the episode but there's also some really nourishing episodes from our senior Indigenous knowledge holders that what we do in our anti-racism work is centre Indigenous humanity what does it mean to have a humanity not configured through hierarchy we know that as blackfellas because that's what we had we didn't have a society organized through hierarchy and so through our anti-racism work getting to people's of anything what does it mean to be human and it's a very inclusive way of thinking about a humanity rather than the siloed the different anti-racism and I think that makes me really proud of the blackfellar that we do have the answers about how to fight racism because we as a society was never organized around that and we had hundreds of nations that for thousands of years coexisted respecting those boundaries we didn't colonise other nations we didn't impose our language on to nearby nations we co-existed for earlier don't time and so there are lots of beautiful gems there for people listening to think about reimagining a world without hierarchy from First Nations peoples and there's just amazing think they're like all our favourite thinkers so yes I would encourage read the play it's made for an audience that aren't race scholars it's people that want to think about race thank you so much Chelsea for being a part of this podcast with us I have learnt and immense amount of information and I am so eager to continue learning more thank you so much for your time today I really appreciate you coming on we hope you've enjoyed this week's conversation please subscribe to the podcast and share with your colleagues and friends you can also visit us at speechwithologyAustralia.org.au thanks for listening bye for now