Photo – theage.com.au

Today, the Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus welcomed the National Deaths in Custody Program Monitoring Report (NIDCP) finding that deaths in custody rates have decreased significantly in the past decade. Let us have a look if this is really the case. The reality is that Aboriginal deaths in custody are one the rise.

The report is published by the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC).

“Twenty years after the landmark Royal Commission into Aboriginal  Deaths in Custody, the rates of deaths in custody for Indigenous and non-Indigenous prisoners, particularly suicides, are some of the lowest recorded,” said Mr Dreyfus.

The AIC report argues that between 2003 to 2011 most deaths in custody were due to natural causes. On May 20 The Stringer published Why are more prisoners dying from ‘natural causes’?

The AIC report found that Aboriginal people are now “less likely to die in prison (0.16 per 100 in 2010-11) than non-Indigenous people (0.22 per 100).”

The report found “that in the 20 years since the Royal Commission, the number of Indigenous prisoners has almost doubled.”

The report noted that between January 1, 1980 to June 30 2011 there have been 2,325 total deaths in custody across Australia and of these 450 have been Aboriginal deaths, therefore 19 per cent of the total custodial deaths. In this period, 1,397 of the deaths have been in prison custody, of which 238 have been Aboriginal, therefore 17 per cent of the total prison deaths. 905 were police custodial deaths of which 204 were Aboriginal deaths and therefore 23 per cent of the total police custodial deaths. There were 18 deaths of juveniles while in custody, of which eight were Aboriginal youth and therefore 44 per cent of the total deaths.

“Analysis of data captured by the NDICP over the last 32 years demonstrates that significant improvements have been made to prevent deaths in some areas, but that work should continue in order to reduce other forms of deaths in custody,” wrote Adam Tomison, the AIC director in the report’s foreward.

“First, it is of concern to see that the proportion of Indigenous prisoners has almost doubled over the 20 years since the RCIADC. In 1991, when the final report was handed down by the RCIADC, Indigenous people represented on in seven people in prison (14 per cent ABS, 1998) and one in seven deaths in prison custody.”

“In 2011, Indigenous people represented just over one in four people in prison and one in five deaths. Therefore, the number of Indigenous people in prison appears to have increased at a faster rate than the number of deaths of Indigenous prisoners.”

“Over the last eight years, the rate of death has been consistently lower among Indigenous prisoners than their non-Indigenous counterparts. It can be concluded that the headline finding of the RCIADC that Indigenous persons were no more likely to die in prison custody than non-Indigenous persons remains true today. At the heart of the problem is the over-representation of Indigenous persons at every stage of the criminal justice system. Any efforts to reduce the number of Indigenous deaths in custody must therefore incorporate a focus on reducing the number of Indigenous people who end up in prison.”

“A second point of concern is the relative age profile of Indigenous deaths in custody when compared with their non-Indigenous counterparts. Almost half of all Indigenous deaths (48 per cent) in prison custody were of persons aged 25 to 39 years, compared with less than two in five (38 per cent) for the equivalent non-Indigenous cohort. For deaths in police custody and custody-related operations, almost two in five (39 per cent) Indigenous deaths were of young persons under the age of 25 years, compared with just over one in four (27 per cent) for their non-Indigenous counterparts. Apart from dying at relatively younger ages than non-Indigenous persons, a greater proportion of Indigenous deaths are due to natural causes, “noted Mr Tomison.

In 2010-11 there were 85 total deaths in custody of which 21 were Aboriginal deaths and therefore 25 per cent. Therefore it appears that indeed Aboriginal deaths in custody appear on the rise rather than decreasing, and the significant reduction overall is not a significant one. The Aboriginal deaths in prison custody for the year accounted for 21 per cent of the prison population deaths, while Aboriginal deaths in police custody accounted for 26 per cent of the total police custodial deaths. Despite the disproportionate high arrest rates of Aboriginal people and the disproportionate incarceration rates of Aboriginal people these are horrific rates, both crude totals and in proportion to total numbers.

In that period there was also a death of an Aboriginal juvenile while in detention.

In terms of comparative long term trends the report noted “throughout the 1980s, the number of deaths in custody increased steadily from a low of 21 deaths in 1979-80 to a high of 83 deaths in 1989-90. During the 1990s, the number of deaths in custody continued to increase, reaching a peak in 1997-98 with 109 deaths. Since this peak, there has been a moderate decline in total deaths, reaching a 20 year low in 2005-06 of 54 deaths.

However, since this low, the number of deaths has again started to increase.”

The report noted that in the last decade “the number of deaths resulting from natural causes has surpassed self-inflicted deaths as the most prevalent type of death in prison custody.”

The number of Aboriginal “natural cause deaths in 2009-10 was the highest ever recorded and for non-Indigenous prisoners, 2009-10 was the second highest on record, with 2010-11 representing the  peak in the natural cause deaths among this group.”

Medical groups and prison reform advocates have long called for an inquiry into the rise into natural cause deaths.

A few years back the Australian Medical Association (AMA) then national vice president Dr Steve Hambleton supported the call for an investigation into natural cause deaths.

“The ages of Australian prisoners dying are alarming. The differentiation between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and other Australians makes it even more disturbing,” said Dr Hambleton.

The writer of the article, Gerry Georgatos declares an impartiality conflict of interest. He has completed two Masters which have topically included and analysed Australian Deaths in Custody and he is a PhD researcher in Australian Deaths in Custody and Australian Custodial Systems. He has written widely on deaths in custody and has called for an inquiry to better understand the rise in natural cause deaths. In Crikey, in 2011, he was quoted, “I have deep concerns about the attribution of manner and cause of death and therefore about the classification of deaths in custody. There is nothing natural about a person dying of causes that basic medical intervention could prevent. More than 50 per cent of Aboriginal folk who die in prison are classified as natural cause deaths but maybe what has occurred is that medical attention wasn’t flagged or their insulin dependency was not given proper care or they were maltreated or neglected.”

http://thestringer.com.au/report-on-deaths-in-custody-people-dying-at-high-rates/#.UZ9XOt8iPIU

Photo – AAP, Mick Tsikas

The Commonwealth Ombudsman, Colin Neave, recently released his team’s May 2013 report on ‘Suicide and Self-harm in the Immigration Detention Network’. The 165 page report opens up with, “This report contains information that some readers may find confronting or disturbing. Reader discretion is advised.”

Under the Ombudsman Act 1976 (Cth), the Commonwealth Ombudsman investigates the administrative actions of Australian Government agencies and officers.

The Ombudsman found in his report that subsequent the greater numbers of Asylum Seekers reaching Australia’s shore in recent years that despite various attributed improvements there still needs more to be done. “Overall, we believe the department (of Immigration and Citizenship) is not in a stronger position in terms of its capacity to manage the immigration detention network and associated risks and issues.”

The report noted, “There is a strong correlation between the rise in the average time in detention and the increase in self-harming behaviour during 2011.”

“Australian and international evidence supports the conclusion that immigration detention in a closed environment for a period of longer than six months has a significant, negative impact on a detainee’s mental health. The data shows that a steady increase in the average length of detention, as well as the rapid rise in the numbers of people in detention, was a precursor to the peak in the rate of self-harm in 2011.”

The report noted that between July 2010 to late April 2013 there were 11 deaths in immigration detention.

The investigation concluded many factors contributing to the self-harming by detainees and which include the personal experiences which many of the detainees had fled from, for instance torture. The factors also included widespread fears for the wellbeing of family and dependents left behind. Factors included social isolation and loneliness. Closed detention environments gave rise to disempowerment, limited privacy and overcrowding. The long delays in ‘processing’ refugee claims were major factors.

The Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) has noted that they are nearing a complete rollout of adequate psychological support programs and of a culture that will accentuate the prevention of self-harm among detainees. But when taking into consideration the reports this year alone have come out of Christmas Island, Curtin Detention Centre, Northern Immigration Detention Centre, Darwin Airport Lodge, Manus Island and Nauru these claims of rollout and the imputation of wellbeing are ludicrously way off the mark.

The report stated, “We believe the department needs to further consider the data and governance arrangements that it needs to effectively manage the risk of suicide and self-harm. The department needs to assure itself that the service providers are delivering services consistent with the contract, including providing appropriate clinical response to suicide and self-harming behaviours. “

“In our view, the department could have been more responsive to environment intelligence about the increased risk and incidence of self-harm in the immigration detention network during 2010 and 2011, such as the concerns raised by stakeholders, including this office, the Australian Human Rights Commission and the Detention Health Advisory Group, relating to the operational challenges and escalating self-harm.”

In July 2011, the Commonwealth and Immigration Ombudsman announced an own motion to investigate and “examine the incidence and nature of suicide and self-harm in the immigration detention network” and to “identify the factors contributing to suicide and self-harm.”

As at 6 February 2013, there were 24 operational immigration detention facilities including Alternative Places of Detention (APOD) “with a capacity expanded to accommodate some 7329 detainees, and a contingency capacity of 9357.”

“This investigation commenced in July 2011 in response to the deteriorating psychological health of detainees we had observed particularly on Christmas Island, and against a backdrop of several deaths and escalating self-harm in immigration detention. As the Joint Select Committee later observed in its March 2012 report, ‘An alarming number of detainees have resorted to self-harming. The Committee is not able to accurately estimate the current number or frequency of self-harm incidents, however it appears to be a regular occurrence.”

DIAC claimed it was not able to accurately estimate the incidence of self-harm because adequate data systems were not in place. In May 2012 it started producing its Monthly Self-Harm Snapshot.

The Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman during the course of their investigation sought data from DIAC and Serco on the incidence of self-harm in closed detentions. But the report has cast doubt on the integrity of their data.

“On 15 March 2013, the department provided us with a dataset that it considered to represent an accurate picture of self-harm incidents reported to the department by Serco. While we continue to have concerns about the categorisation of incidents as reported by Serco to the department, we accept that this dataset demonstrates the general trend of self-harm incidents in immigration detention.”

“This office is concerned that self-harm by children in immigration detention facilities is an ongoing issue, notwithstanding the decrease in self-harm incidents since the peak in August 2011.”

“Prior to May 2012, reports produced by the department and Serco did not routinely and separately monitor self-harm by children. However, in October 2011 the department provided data to Parliament that demonstrated that self-harm involving children was at a concerning level, representing almost 14 per cent of self-harm incidents between 1 July 2010 and 30 June 2011.”

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) published an annual report on Asylum Seekers, the demographics and the trends. The UNHCR’s 2011 statistical report noted a sharp increase in Asylum Seeker applications in the 44 industrialised countries. There were estimated 441,300 claims in 2011, that is 20 per cent more than the 368,000 applications in 2010, and the highest since 2003.

Australia received 11,510 applications which was equivalent to three per cent of the applications among the industrialised countries.

The Asia Pacific regions has at this time more than 3.6 million refugees, around 24 per cent of the world’s total refugee population. In 2011, just 22 countries resettled 79,800 refugees and Australia ranked three in admitting 9,200 refugees. The United States resettled 51,500 and Canada resettled 12,900.

The Ombudsman’s report reinforces only what most know, that studies “have indicated that people who have fled violence and disruption in their countries of origin, and who may have been subject to torture and trauma, often exhibit pre-existing mental health conditions or are vulnerable to developing a post traumatic condition.”

“People detained in an immigration detention facility in recent years may have been exposed to, or involved in, suicidal or self-harm behaviours. This is a particularly difficult issue, as detainees seeking to maintain their own stability are unable to physically dissociate themselves from their environment, and often cannot choose to associate with people with more positive modes of thinking and behaviours.”

“As explored elsewhere in this report, there is a high level of mental and psychological illness among detainees, particularly those detained for extended periods. This creates an environment where many detainees are surrounded by people in the same situation, also experiencing mental illness, frustration or distress.”

“Drawing on our discussions with detainees, we believe there may be a contagion effect that magnifies dysfunctional thinking in these circumstances. Impulsive and dysfunctional methods for problem solving and drawing attention to the perceived problems may include the behaviours seen in riots and disturbance.”

The report pointed to the obvious when suggesting that the witnessing of others self-harming can heighten the risk of “imitative behaviour or contagion and lead to broader self-harm among the detention population. We have been advised that this phenomenon, known as contagion effect, has its origins in social learning theory. The basic premise of this theory is that verbal transfer of information and observation of other people ‘acts make up the basis for the acquisition of all types of human behaviour.’ Witnessing others self-harm or suicide, for example, following the receipt of bad news which is presented as a solution or ‘way out’, may serve to model for others who have similar problems.”

The report noted that in periods where the average time of being held in detention so to were there declines in recorded incidents of self-harm.

Previous The Stringer articles:

Excising Australia

May 20^th 2013 by Dr Binoy Kampmark

Nine year old boy detained at Christmas Island after father’s death

May 7^th 2013 by Gerry Georgatos

Australia’s pathway to poverty – bridging visas

30^th March 2013 by The Stringer

98 bodies thrown into the sea – 32 asylum seekers rescued

21^st February 2013 by The Stringer

Child suicide attempts in Darwin Immigration centre

19^th February 2013 by The Stringer

People smugglers they are not

5^th February 2013 by Gerry Georgatos

Robert Eggington, CEO of Dumbartung

Led by the Dumbartung Aboriginal Corporation which works with many grieving families of suicide victims a Suicide Crisis Summit was held on May 21. More than 300 attended in what was both a highly emotive experience and a direct call to Governments to reduce the Aboriginal youth suicide rates in Australia.

Australia’s Aboriginal youth suicide rate is the highest in the world. – Australia’s Aboriginal children – The world’s highest suicide rate

Dumbartung CEO Robert Eggington and his grief counsellor wife Selina Eggington called for the Summit and ensured that it was well attended by Government officials.

“According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), suicides accounted for 4.2 per cent of all registered deaths of people identified as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in 2010, compared with 1.6 per cent for the general population of Australia,” said Mr Eggington.

“Our children are dying as young as eleven years old, from suicide.”

“This experience has caused a massive rupture of our community’s spiritual heart and it is creating a traumatic burden of pain and suffering for many of our families and people.”

The rise in Aboriginal and Aboriginal youth suicide rates are all the more startling when compared with rates two, three and four decades ago. Aboriginal peoples were not killing themselves in the numbers that they are today – and this indicts Government neglects and an increasing condition of hopelessness and dejection.

The three hour Crisis Summit finished up with a list of recommendations and outcomes which were presented to the Commissioner for Mental Health, Eddie Bartnik and to Premier Colin Barnett.

“We were encouraged by the attendance, over 300 people attended enabling the Nyoongah community to vent and express what is so often the oppressed and silenced voice of our grassroots families and people,” said Mr Eggington.

“Senior Government officials turned up, the National Congress of the First Peoples sent its representatives. It was good to see Mick Gooda (Social Justice Commissioner, Australian Human Rights Commission) turn up along with many others.”

“We need now a political reaction to the pandemic of suicides that blights our youth.”

Following the meeting we had a forty minute meeting with Premier Barnett. He met with us, twelve Nyoongah representatives which also included my brother Dennis (CEO of the Aboriginal Legal Services WA), Rex Bellotti and Dean Collard.”

They stated to the Premier that it is abhorrent that an industrialised country such as Australia, the world’s 12 largest economy, has according to the United Nations State of Indigenous Peoples report the world’s highest Aboriginal suicide rates.

“In a number of towns and Aboriginal communities in Western Australia the suicide rates amongst Aboriginal populations has reached 100 times the national average.”

“Despite all the support programs and initiatives since the Sue Gordon Report the suicide epidemic among our peoples continues to surge,” said Mr Eggington.

Dumbartung has called for a triennial funding agreement for them to continue and increase awareness of suicide prevention programs and initiatives they have developed during the last three decades.

“The programs need to be coordinated State-wide,” said Mr Eggington.

Mr Eggington called for the development and funding of special Aboriginal taskforces to work alongside the Coroner’s Office, the Health Department and directly with the State Government.

“This suicide crisis is one that both the Government and our community need to work very closely together to deter the ever increasing pain and suffering that is being experienced by many of our families and communities.”

http://thestringer.com.au/political-reaction-needed-to-end-suicides/#.UZ9WDd8iPIV

Once again the United Nations has ranked Australia second behind Norway in its annual Human Development Index – for public health, social wealth, education, even happiness. But if Aboriginal peoples go stand-alone they would not be part of that 2^nd rating – they would be 122^nd.

The United Nations Human Development Index is a measure of the quality of life across 187 nations.

Aboriginal peoples in various parts of Australia continue to languish in third-world conditions despite Australia powering on as the world’s thirteenth largest economy. The Northern Territory is the worst for Aboriginal peoples but Western Australia’s Kimberley, Western Deserts and the Goldfields and South Australia’s APY Lands are not far behind – and similar with a number of regions in Queensland and NSW.

NT-Utopia

The Northern Territory township of Utopia, 350 km northeast of Alice Springs, is an example of Government neglect – it is third-world and most of its 1,200 Alyawarra and Anmatjirra peoples languish in dilapidated homes and without the suite of public services that most other Australians enjoy. The United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay condemned the deplorable conditions and described the neglect as racism. Amnesty International’s Shalil Shetty described Utopia as third-world.

Last week the Australian Government finally meted out $4 million to Utopia for housing refurbishments and facilities – this is peanuts and let us hope that most of the $4 million is not eaten up by bureaucracy and contractor payments.

The money was secured by NT Lingiari Senator Warren Snowdon from Federal Minister for Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin’s $3.4 billion Stronger Futures.

“Vital community infrastructure will be upgraded in the Utopia homelands in the Northern Territory thanks to a $4.36 million investment from the Australian Government,” said Mr Snowdon.

Ms Macklin naively stands by Stronger Futures despite no evidence to prove the Intervention has improved living conditions – in fact most evidence, anecdotal and research, points to the opposite.

“Stronger Futures has a firm focus on improving living standards for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory – in the bigger communities and also in remote homelands,” Ms Macklin said.

“The Government is providing $4 million for the Centre for Appropriate Technology to deliver a range of projects to help families in Utopia live more sustainably.”

“These will include critical work to make housing safer, helping residents to reduce their energy consumption and improving the safety and reliability of the local water supply.”

The work to improve housing in Utopia will focus on electrical and fire safety, water and waste management, and washing, cooking and food storage facilities.

Mr Snowdon said the Government will also provide funding of $360,000 over three years for a coordinator position at the Urapuntja Aboriginal Corporation so it can better represent the interests of the Utopia homelands.

“The new coordinator will play an important role in negotiating and implementing a plan with the Government to address the key areas of disadvantage in Utopia,” Mr Snowdon said.

“We will also employ two Indigenous Engagement Officers to be based in the Utopia homelands. They will be locals who understand the culture and can speak the local language.

“I’ve seen how effective Indigenous Engagement Officers can be in linking residents to important services and strengthening relationships between Government and remote communities, and I’m confident we will see the same happen in Utopia,” he said.

Photo – abc.net.au

Despite Stronger Futures, Northern Territory Aboriginal peoples – 30 per cent of the population – do not enjoy the standard of living that the United Nations Human Development Index report lauded on Australians.

The report stated Australians have the world’s fourth highest life expectancy in the world – 82 years. But this is not so for Aboriginal peoples – subtract 20 years from the Australian life expectancy average for Aboriginal peoples, and in some regions of Australia make that 30 years less off the average.

With education – in terms of number of years of schooling achieved and the standard of school performance – Australians are ranked second highest but that would not be the case for Aboriginal peoples who do not enjoy quality schooling in many semi-remote and remote communities.

Australia has the lowest suicide rate of the world’s top ten nations but Aboriginal peoples have the world’s highest youth suicide rates.

Nothing has improved since the 2011 United Nations State of the Indigenous Peoples report, “In Australia, an Indigenous child can expect to die 20 years earlier than his non-native compatriot.”

Last year a Northern Territory Select Committee on Youth Suicides reported, “The suicide rate for Indigenous Territorians is particularly disturbing, with 75 per cent of suicides of children from 2007 to 2011 in the Territory being Aboriginal.”

“For too many of our youth there is not enough hope to protect them from the impulse to end their lives.”

The suicide rate doubled for youth between ages 10 and 17 – up from 18.8 percent to 30.1 percent per 100,000 – in contrast to non-Aboriginal youth suicides which dropped from 4.1 percent to 2.6 percent.

It was only a few years ago that the West Australian town of Derby and nearby communities, such as Mowanjum, experienced nearly 30 Aboriginal youth suicides in the one year.

Mowanjum’s Community Director Eddie Bear said every loss is felt right throughout the community. “Everybody feels hurt, we all go through it.”

In NSW, with Australia’s largest Indigenous population, the youth suicide rate is one in 100,000. In the Northern Territory, the rate is 30 deaths in 100,000. In the Kimberley, with an Indigenous population at 15,000, the rate is at a rate of 1 death in 1,200, over 80 per 100,000.

And then there is homelessness – In the Northern Territory nearly 8 per cent of Aboriginal peoples are homeless. The 2012 ABS reported that one of the key three groups of homelessness in Australia remains Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and little has improved. The ABS reported that in 2011 alone there was a rise in the total number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples – rising by 3 percent.

Seven percent of the Kimberley’s Aboriginal peoples are homeless – the region’s homelessness rate is at least ten times the national average. The State Government cannot even keep a promise to build a $12 million hostel in Broome and instead people sleep rough at One Mile Community, Kennedy Hill and on Broome’s sand dunes.

The United Nations Human Development Index report got this right – that there had been a global improvement in human development led by nations such as Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, East Timor, but Australia’s Aboriginal peoples in the Northern Territory and northern Western Australia remain forgotten.

By Four Arrows:

In all of the states with relatively high American Indian populations, incarceration rates average four times that of non-Indians. For example, in Montana, American Indians are 6% of the population, but represent more than 20% of the people in prison. American Indian women represent the same 6% but are 32% of incarcerated women in the state. Indians across the nation also receive relatively longer sentences and have significantly higher suicide rates (Wagner, 2004).[1] With the highest school dropout rates of any minority group, the school to prison pipeline is of major concern. In South Dakota, the statistics are about the same as Montanna’s, and after living there and working as Dean of Education of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, I saw a number of “pipeline” stories throughout the state. In this essay, I combine the facts surrounding a number of cases and write an otherwise fictional narrative that combines them into one story.

The phone was on its third ring.  Too early for a Sunday morning call, Mary Red Plume considered not answering it. She had been awake and warm under the covers, working on the gumption to get up in the freezing trailer to start a fire in the stove.  She could barely imagine how cold were her friends and relatives who lived in much older trailer homes on the reservation miles away. She remembered when she was younger and lived in one that used only cardboard for windows. With no stove, her father lit wood fires on a sheet of metal placed on the floor. The roof was so full of leaks; the heat would melt the snow, causing it to drip into well-placed pots. Fortunately, the breaks in the roof filtered out just enough smoke to prevent everyone from asphyxiating.  Years later her father had been the recipient of a grant-funded project that “loaned” him a new trailer home equipped with a real stove. This was the home she still occupied.

Reluctantly, she answered the phone. The caller was Rick Two Bears. He said he had bad news for her and that he would be at her place in five minutes. She got dressed slowly, lit the newspapers she had placed carefully under the wood the night before, and put a pot of water on top of the stove. By the time Rick knocked on the door, the coffee was made. He apologized for being a little late, explaining he had slid his truck off the road and had to wait for some buddies to pull it back on. Mary sat quietly, sipping and nodding for him to say what he had come to say.

All she heard was “Tommy is no longer with us.” She blanked the rest of the details out. Rick watched as she went to the kitchen and took a small stake knife off of the table. She began cutting her graying hair and chanting a song he had heard too many times before. He knew too well how many young Indian youth killed themselves on and off reservations across the country. He had read that boys committed suicide ten times more often than the national average for children of all races in the U.S. and girls were double that, but it was not the statistics he considered. Rather he was counting the number of children whose funerals he had attended in the past few months. He thought how he himself had considered suicide often throughout his school days and later when he scavenged the garbage cans for remnants of alcohol lurking in the bottom of bottles. Saved by a commitment to his Sun Dance vows, he had tried several times to get Tommy to join him in this sacred ritual. But Tommy, like many others his age laughed at the traditional ways. After all, school had convinced him long ago to dismiss such traditions. What frightened Rick the most was how the idea of suicide somehow seemed a normal option for his people.

That Tommy had killed himself could not be a surprise to his mother. She sang louder as she sliced her long hair to avoid any chance that she would picture him choked to death by his own belt, rigged as high as he could reach on the cell bars. Rick had described it, with a comment that the jailors hardly ever took the belts away from the boys. Mary pushed out such thoughts and she smiled at the memory of Tommy when he was just two-years of age.

For the first two years after his birth, Mary, reared traditionally herself, young and unmarried, carried Tommy in a back cradle. As a result, he spent much time observing his natural environment. Surrounded by wilderness, he spent hours listening to the bird and animal sounds while his mom shucked corn outside their dilapidated trailer several miles from the dirt road that wound through the pine strewn hills for another six miles before hitting the paved road that was twenty more miles from the closest elementary school. Mary had never been to school herself. Her father, who had suffered through the horrors of boarding school, used all of his skills and influences to keep her away from the “white man’s education.” She earned money to help cover basic expenses on weekends in by selling her remarkable artistry and beadwork to tourists who passed by where the dirt road met the paved highway.

By the time Tommy was seven, he could mimic almost every bird and animal in the woods and on the plains. He spoke his Native language beautifully and possessed the patience, honesty and humility that his grandparents’ animal stories cultivated in him. He knew how to hunt and could run like the wind. His grandfather, wanting to follow the traditional ways he had encouraged Mary to do, convinced his daughter to keep Tommy away from the school and did his best to keep Tommy’s existence secret. Word got out about Tommy, however, and one warm spring morning, Mary and her family received a visit from a lady who introduced herself as a child protection specialist assigned “the case” under the auspices of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) She respectfully interviewed Mary and her parents and talked with Tommy as well. She told them Tommy was the subject of a neglect proceeding and a determination was to be made about whether the state court had jurisdiction over the tribal court or not.  The fact that Mary had never gone to school had some significant bearing on outcomes, as did the remoteness of their home and the lack of community, not to mention the criminal record of her grandfather who had been arrested several times in his early days for disorderly conduct. To complicate matters, reservation borderlines had been changed during the past year and the land on which the family lived was no longer legally on the reservation, but now belonged to the state. As such, since Tommy was not technically “domiciled” on the reservation, the state court claimed jurisdiction.

Mary recalled the look of grief in her father’s eyes a week later when he received word from his cousin that the state was mandating involuntary foster care placement and termination of parental rights. Tommy was to be taken away from his family. The next Monday after Mary learned this tragic news, she and Tommy walked and hitchhiked the 26 miles to the school and enrolled him. Mary believed enrolling Tommy, even against her father’s wishes, would prevent him from being taken away. Apparently a school bus came right past where her dirt road met the freeway, so each day they would have only six miles to walk. Moreover, Mary was offered a part-time job helping teach art classes for the children. School began and curiously the state never appeared to take Tommy away. Several months went by and even the Grandfather was starting to admit he had been wrong about keeping Tommy away from school. Tommy seemed to be enjoying himself, at least at first. Because he had not learned to read, however, Tommy had been brought into the first grade with a “special education” label. In addition to not being able to keep up with children his own age in the academic requirements, he was constantly looking out the window and “talking to the birds” as one teacher reported. A psychologist was called and Ritalin was recommended for Tommy. Mary refused to allow it, however, and she was starting to admit her father had been right!

On the fourth month of school, an unhappy Tommy, made fun of by the students and humiliated and punished by the non-Indian teachers from a border town, was called to the director’s office along with Mary. An officer from the state’s child welfare services was waiting.  This person was not as friendly as the one who had visited their home. She said that although the ICWA laws were intended to keep Indian families together, the State court was using a judicial exception to the law, quoting an “Existing Indian Family” doctrine, something from The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. She showed Mary some papers explaining all of this as well as documentation regarding her father’s Grandfather’s previous arrest record.

Tommy was taken away immediately after the meeting. Mary pleaded in vain. He was not even allowed to return to his home to gather his things or say goodbye to his grandfather and grandmother. Mary called her friend, Rick Two Bears. Rick worked for the reservation police department and had made a few visits to Mary’s weathered trailer home “in the middle of nowhere” with an eye on courtship. Rick drove to the school and found Mary distraught with grief. Her child had been taken away. Rick was not unfamiliar with stories such as this. Foster care had become an economic boon for private group home providers who brought in millions of dollars in state contracts. One in particular, the Evergreen Home for Children, had close connections with the state’s governor. The home had received much of its funding through no-bid contracts as a result. It was as if the schools were making a living off the Indian children. Less than 12 percent of the state’s population was Native but they represented more than 65 percent of the foster home population (Sullivan and Walters, 2011). Rick could not give solace to Mary but his own anger transformed her sense of helplessness into a battle cry.

Within a week of being taken away, Tommy was placed in one of the Evergreen homes located in a mostly white city about 250 miles from the reservation. Mary did everything she could to get Tommy back, but even an attorney Rick managed to have visit her could do nothing. Mary continued to work at the school but never regained her joyful way of being in the world. Two years later, when the new federal NCLB laws came down from the Bush administration requiring all classroom workers in state contract schools to have at least Associate Degrees, Mary was let go (NJTU, 2004). She returned to her efforts at selling her art but only once did she manage to take a bus into the city to visit Tommy before Rick told her he had been moved to a detention center even further away.

By the time Tommy was 11, he had been punished and suspended numerous times from the city schools he attended. Usually the only Indian student in his classes, he fought back against constant teasing.  Each time he was singled out as being the instigator of fights and soon branded as “a violent child.” When he was 13, a Mormon couple adopted him. Responding negatively to their strict discipline, he ran away several times and the discipline intensified. One day the sister and brother-in-law of the husband visited Tommy’s new home along with there 11 –year old daughter. While playing cards in the evening, Tommy was discovered “playing doctor” with the little girl in his bedroom. Within an hour the police took Tommy to jail to wait for a court date. He was to be tried as a violent sexual offender. While awaiting his court appearance, he spent four days in an adult cell with three white men. The three men raped him the first night and told him if he said anything they would find him and kill him.

At the hearing when the judge asked Tommy if he had “explored the private parts” of the girl who was the “victim” of his sexual offences, Tommy, who had been taught early on never to tell a lie, nodded his head. It did not matter and was not brought up that the two children were mutually engaged in “playing doctor” and that such “exploration” was no more than the most innocent “peak” at the girl’s blossoming breasts offered when she herself lifted up her shirt. Nor were any culturally relevant understandings offered the judge, a common problem with Indian youth incarceration (AIDA, N.D.)

With his extensive referral history of behaviors which if he had not been Indian would have been ignored or dealt with informally, Tommy was sentenced and sent to a private out-of-state “treatment” facility for youth who were thought to be not suitable for juvenile correctional institutions. With costs over 250 dollars per day charged to the state, these transfers were an economic boon for the service provider. I took three years for Mary to receive letter from the state that was sent to her via the school asking for her to sign her permission for Tommy’s medical treatment if he should need it. She signed it and asked the principal if he could send it back but she never learned where her son had actually been placed.

It was 1999.  Tommy was almost 16. This was the year a bill called the “Violent and Repeat Juvenile Offender Accountability and Rehabilitation Act” was passed in the Senate by a vote of 73-25 (S-254, 1999). Senator Paul Wellstone was a member of the Senate minority who opposed the bill because it would eliminate the federal requirement that allows states to address disproportionate minority confinement in the juvenile justice systems. Wellstone argued that minority youth in every state are overrepresented at every stage of the process, from arrest to and especially at the level confinement. In a series of questions put to Republican supporters of the bill, Wellstone asked whether when the police are out there in the streets, and we get to which kids are searched on the streets and which kids are not, you don’t think that has anything to do with race? When we get to the question of which kids are arrested and which kids are not, you don’t think that has anything to do with race today in America? When we get to the question of the evaluation of youth by probation officers, you don’t think that has anything to do with race? When we get to the question of the decision whether to release or detain by a judge, based upon who has the money and who does not have the money to put up a bond, you don’t think that has anything to do with race? And when we get to the question of sentencing, you don’t think that has anything to do with race, Senators? You are sleepwalking through history (Farrell, 1999)

Three years later Senator Wellstone, after speaking against the Iraq war resolution, died in a mysterious plane crash (Four Arrows and Fetzer, 2003)

The staff at the correctional facility where Tommy now resided were young, underpaid and mostly white. Although the laws in the state required reporting physical “take downs,” Tommy had been wrestled to the ground by several hefty counselors a number of times for his fighting with other youth and for his belligerent attitude.  Nevertheless, reports were seldom filed. The second week of his stay, he began schooling. When he walked into the classroom, the other children began making fun of his Indianness. When one boy asked him where his tomahawk was and another asked if his squaw mother was a prostitute, Tommy jumped both boys at the same time. Within minutes counselors again had him pinned to the floor. Later he was taken to a small, 3 by 5 concrete room with an iron door and a small window, forced to wear a pink colored jump suit. He spent the night in this solitary confinement with a “suicide watch” staff looking in to check on him. The next morning Tommy was back in the classroom but still in his jumpsuit. The social studies lesson this day was about “the first Americans” as was written on the top of a multiple choice quiz that identified the first Americans as Kit Carson, Davie Crocket and other non-Indian pioneers who made a living exterminating Indians (although this fact was phrased only by referring to them as “Indian fighters.”

The next morning Tommy was taken to the facility’s weekly sexual offender meeting. Staffed with local psychiatrists and psychologists, some from the state and others on the school’s payroll, the system used the traditional Alcoholics Anonymous model. Tommy followed older, seriously harmful sexual offenders in standing before the intimidating group and saying his coached and memorized statement, “My name is Tommy Red Plume and I am a sexual offender.” For the next year, Tommy suffered an education not all that dissimilar from the one his grandfather suffered in boarding schools. Like most Indian prisoners, he was denied release time or home visitations two times more often than his white counterparts. Where the other boys would be merely reprimanded for offenses against him, he received the harshest punishments for lesser offenses that he committed.

Placed in housing with the other boys undergoing sexual offender counseling and fearful he would get raped again, Tommy managed an escape. Run-a-ways were a common event at the facility and boys half frozen by morning were usually picked up several miles down the road or hiding amongst crops in the local fields. It was more than sixty miles to the nearest town. Tommy’s endurance and athletic ability, however, not to mention his early days of tolerating cold weather, allowed him to persevere. He made it to town and fell in with a gang of Indian teenagers.

Most of the children in the gang were between 15 to 17 years of age. Some were escaped foster children but others had run away from abusive homes on the reservation. Often they were arrested for “just being Indian.” When this happened to someone, he would appear in court without parents and without attorneys, but the judges would take their pleas and sentence them anyway. A number of them had been placed in holding cells at one time or another and a few had experienced the same insult that Tommy has suffered. Most of their parents had no idea where their children were. One of the gang members was a beautiful, but obviously not to be taken advantage of, Indian girl around 17 years of age. Remarkably, she had managed to get to high school graduation without experiencing the juvenile justice system.  However, when she was not allowed to wear her traditional buckskin dress during the ceremony, she wore it underneath her black robes. Just before she went on stage to get her diploma, she took off the robe. Before she made it to the stage, the principle pulled her aside, reprimanded her, and prevented her from further participation in the ceremony. She knew her brother was in the city gang and decided to chuck it all and join him. In effect, she had become one of the gang’s leaders.

By the time Tommy was 17, he had lived more than a year in the streets. He had been locked up several times and then let go because of overcrowded conditions and political opposition to adult holding cells for youth. In one instance, he made his way back to the reservation to see his mother. His grandmother had passed on and his Grandfather was still mourning her loss. Tommy knew he could not stay and Rick Two Bears drove him back to his gang’s hideout in an abandoned factory. The next week Tommy got drunk in public, was arrested, and was sent to a new private detention facility located only two hours from his reservation. This one, however, was quite different from the others.

The Beaver Trail Youth Ranch was a staff-secured (no fences nor guards) detention facility for youth convicted of various infractions including drive-by shooters from New York and a number of American Indian youths arrested for significantly lessor offences. What was different from the others was that its new director  implemented an educational/rehabilitation model based on American Indian values and learning paths.  The new program was guided largely by a booklet written by Larry Brendtro, Martin Brokenleg and Steve Van Bockern entitled Reclaiming Youth at Risk published in 1990 by the National Education Service.  Based on the belief that American Indian philosophies to child management represent the most effective system of positive discipline ever developed–one based on the empowerment of children, it followed a balanced approach that recognized independence, belonging, mastery and generosity depicted in a “Circle of Courage” medicine wheel. The program director, part-Indian himself, fired more than half the original staff, replacing them with more like-minded and qualified people. He managed to take all the children off their drugs, such as Ritalin, replacing them with “obecalp” pills. (These were actually sugar bills named by spelling placebo backwards.) Soft drink machines were removed from the facility and all students were put on exercise walks daily. Peer culture meetings took control of behavioral issues, with staff sitting outside the youth circles, monitoring and offering help when needed. Horses, cows and pigs were assigned to different youth who took full responsibility for their care. Instead of being locked up or denied exercise opportunities for infractions, students were given chances to “make things right” with logically deduced natural consequences.  Within fifteen months of taking over the facility, the director and his new team had managed to reduce physical restraints from 122 per quarter down to less than 20 per quarter. Escape attempts had decreased from a hundred per year to only one.

Tommy thrived in the new environment. Word got out that he was there and Rick Two Bears brought Mary to see Tommy as often as possible, averaging two or three times per month. Tommy’s early childhood skills made him a natural leader and the culturally relevant curriculum and traditional Indigenous approaches to classroom learning brought his reading skills rapidly to grade level by the end of the second year. He participated in traditional ceremonies led by a reservation elder and before his 18^th birthday, he had begun preparing for junior college and had submitted two applications for a scholarship. His grandfather passed away and he was allowed to go off campus with Rick to attend the traditional services. He stayed two nights with his mother, who now lived alone in the trailer, and the two caught up on their relationship.

Rick Two Bears had heard about the facility’s radical changes even before he knew Tommy was there. All the Indians were talking about it, it seemed. He also knew its existence was at risk. A number of the conservative and religious right members of the community had written letters of complaint to the juvenile justice administrators. These were the same groups of people who had been responsible for replacing the word, “youth,” with the word, “juvenile,” in the original legislation because the latter word was more detached from possibilities for compassion. They worried that without the more stringent disciplines of the past decade, the community would be at risk.  The detention facility was only “staff-secured,” they wrote, and they worried the “inmates” would run away and sneak into their homes and do “God knows what” while the homeowners were sleeping.  There was also political pressure from a few owners of other facilities who felt the new model was a bad example. After all, if it worked, as it was obviously doing, this might reduce recidivism and thus reduce profitability, although this was not their argument of course.

True to the prediction, after 18 months of operation, the director of the youth facility was fired. His dismissal came about because he had been ordered to start receiving out of state youth even if medical releases from parents or guardians were not yet on hand. According to the state, too many youth were being sent to other states with more lenient policies. For these reasons, the Youth Ranch was losing money as a result. The director, after consulting with his physicians, learned that this would put the youth at risk if there was ever a need for a serious operation . Additionally , his staff did not have time to find parents or guardians and get signatures as he was being asked.  If he could not attain signatures, he would have to continue to require medical release for all new admittances. The next day the head of the larger corporation arrived with apologies, a two-week severance check and a replacement for the director. Within a month, all the innovations were replaced with the standard educational and disciplinary approaches. The children, who were managing well without the drugs, were placed back on their medication regimen .

Two weeks into the “new”  program, Tommy overheard one of the newly hired staffers refer to him as a “fucking Indian” in a private conversation with another staffer who laughed and ridiculed the previous director’s affinity for the “savages.” Tommy burst through their office door and jumped both of them. They wrestled him to the ground, called for reinforcements, and Tommy was placed in the concrete solitary room until state police officers arrived. He was taken to the city’s crowded holding facility, placed in an adult cell, again with several drunken Caucasians. At approximately 4:20 AM, according to the coroner, Tommy managed to choke himself to death with his belt. There was nothing spoken about whether or not he was abused by the men as had happened years before.

Epilogue: There are approximately 26,000 American Indians in US jails and prisons. This is a rate of almost 40% higher than in the general population.  However, if African-Americans, who constitute about half of all prisoners, are excluded from the calculation, the disproportionality is far worse. The role of “education” and anti-Indianism in all of this is fundamental (Four Arrows, 2013).  Too many Indian youth tormented by the hegemony of Western education, then caught in the undercurrents of the social welfare system experience, and further discouraged in youth detention centers, will continue to face what “Tommy” experienced. . In his review of my text, Teaching Truly: A Curriculum to Indigenize Mainstream Education, William Ayer’s speaks to the problem of anti-Indianism with which we must all come to terms when he says that a “spiritual and material collapse” is upon us as a result of a “techno/imperial/capitalist juggernaut” (IBID, backcover).  In referring to the goal of incorporating Indigenous value systems and knowledge into our contemporary schooling, Noam Chomsky’s review of the book offers that we must do a better job of taking care of our Indian youth as well as all children, before it is too late: “We must nurture and preserve our common possession, the traditional commons, for future generations, and this must be one of our highest values, or we are all doomed (IBID).

doomed.

REFERENCES

American Indian Development (AIDA) (n.d.)

http://www.aidainc.net/Products_Services/mentoring.htm

Farrell, J. 1999) Senate Passes Juvenile Crime Bill S. 254; Wellstone opposed measure over disproportionate minority confinement issue” in  Common Dreams

http://www.commondreams.org/pressreleases/may99/052199a.htm

Four Arrows and Fetzer, J. (2003) American assassination: The strange death of senator Paul Wellstone. New York: VOX Publishers

Four Arrows (2013)    Teaching Truly: A Curriculum to indigenize mainstream education. New York: Peter Lang

New Jersey Teachers Union (2004) “Highly qualified teachers need not apply” The free republic

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1087288/posts

Sullivan, L. and Walters, A. (Oct. 25, 2011). “Native foster care: Lost children, shattered families” National public radio

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/25/141672992/native-foster-care-lost-children-shattered-families

S-254 Bill, 106^th Congress.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c106:S.254

Wagner, P. (Dec. 14, 2004) “Importing constituents” in Prisoners of the census.  http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/montana/importing.html

Jeff McMullen is one of Australia’s premier journalists.

Mr McMullen delivered a March 13 address on the Future of Families at the Families Relations Australia Conference 2013. During the address he encouraged people to think about all that is good about family and then to view this experience through the yes of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander child.

Mr McMullen outlined a number of steps that could make a difference and subject to there being the will to undertake them. 

There are some who think the family is finished, that barely half of partnerships will survive in any form and that many children increasingly must grow up adrift from the love and the strengths of kinship.

This is such a bleak view of the human family that we should challenge the failure to celebrate what is good.

Family and community have been the eternal source of well being for all human beings and if we look at the longer timelines of history, family and community are also the key to the extraordinary resilience of the world’s oldest cultures, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Coming to see and understand Indigenous families in this light is to experience joy, laughter and learning, as well as all of the conflicted emotions that come from so many generations of the Struggle for human rights and dignity.

This is not to underestimate the depths of the crisis that now engulfs so many Indigenous families but to question the policies of those who think that assimilation is the answer to all of the woes.

Look at the future through the eyes of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander child in any family, urban, rural or remote community.

Can anyone say that Australia has succeeded in offering all of these children an equal chance of health, a good home, a first-rate education, life fulfilling work and happiness?

After you have answered truthfully, NO, you must surely wonder are Australian Governments indifferent or insensitive, or just plain incompetent and unaccountable?

The wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander families is the single most important test of whether Australia ever becomes a great society. It challenges those cherished national ideals, the way we view our selves as egalitarian, fair minded and fundamentally equal.

We seem so far from passing this wellbeing test as a nation. Yet in the 21st Century we have failed to abandon the mistaken government approaches of the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries.

Dispossession, disempowerment and disrespect remain the major themes of a Government approach that has taken control of so much Indigenous family life. The results, we all know, are wretched.

Australian Government policy and society as a whole have failed to alter the most disturbing realities for so many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families.

To give you some measure of the pain and loss experienced by too many Indigenous people put yourself in the shoes of a family that has lost a young person to suicide this week. This is happening at a very frightening rate.

Even just twenty years ago Indigenous suicide rates were at the same rate as for all Australians. Today Indigenous youth suicide and self-harm have reached crisis proportions in many but not all communities and we need to look closely at this pattern of why in some places there is hope and in other places despair.

In the Northern Territory for example, the percentage of all age Indigenous suicide has increased from 5% of total suicides in 1991 to 50% of the total in 2010. The most alarming increase, however, is among young Indigenous people aged 10 to 24. Indigenous youth suicide increased from 10% of the total in 1991 to 80% of the total in 2010.

None of us living anywhere in this country should stand by while so many families lose their children.

All Australians, including all Governments, should be asking themselves, why do we go on doing the same things when clearly the despair and loss of hope is growing worse in so many communities?

Mainstream approaches are not succeeding in addressing the dangerous spiral and numerous government inquiries have confirmed this. Yet we so rarely draw on the Cultural strengths, the experience and knowledge in those communities that maintain an extraordinary resilience and ability to foster wellbeing.

The truth is that still today there are many Aboriginal communities, remote, rural and urban, where there is a strong sense of Cultural identity, where school attendance and learning is so much higher, where neglect and malnutrition have improved and where there is not that endless procession of funerals.

Traditionally, of course, Culture, community and family ties maintained the balance of life and were the source of genuine wellbeing for most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Today these same values are the targets of a neo-liberal onslaught on Culture that undermines traditional Indigenous support structures. Controlled by new Great White Protectors, Aboriginal people are expected to sign away any real control over their destiny.

Bullying interventionist policies such as the Northern Territory Emergency Response including welfare management, punitive school attendance strategies and many other instruments of social engineering are now thinly disguised under misleading titles like STRONGER FUTURES and CLOSING THE GAPS. In truth, Australia is merely continuing that old pattern of dispossession, disempowerment and disrespect.

All of today’s social engineering is occurring while the Australian Government and both major political parties declare with studied sincerity that they seek bi-partisan agreement to improve family services.

This is an outrageous claim if we look at the hard Government evidence from the first five years of the Northern Territory Intervention.

Government measurements of family wellbeing show that suicide, self-harm, children at risk and numbers of young people going into detention have increased alarmingly during this period of sweeping disempowerment of Aboriginal communities.

It is time for governments to wake up and take stock of this crushing humiliation of Aboriginal families. I challenge every government minister and departmental head to look closely at the social damage caused by this policy and then to ask yourselves, would you subject your family to this treatment?

No matter how many Big Lies were told in the Federal Parliament about this state of emergency in 73 remote communities, no matter how often the Government dismisses the United Nations criticism that these measures are deeply discriminatory and in breech of International Covenants, this offensive social engineering was never even likely to succeed because it did not respectfully consult let alone engage Aboriginal people.

Both the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott have admitted that the top down approach was a mistake and yet this approach continues in most dealings with Indigenous families and communities.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people will work with others who offer support if Government and other organisations show enough respect and common sense to listen carefully to what is actually happening in these communities.

This has rarely happened and it has created a gulf between us historically.

Apart from youth suicide, the increasing removal of Indigenous children from their families is generating Indigenous mistrust of Australia’s entire social system.

Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families are truly frightened of the government family services.

Within any family and the surrounding community there is collective trauma surrounding the loss of a child removed to some other social setting. This is so profoundly disturbing not only because of the heartache every family would experience at such a time, but also because of the waves of cross-generational trauma that are still flowing from the original removal during the Stolen Generations of up to 100,000 Indigenous children.

Are most Australians aware that right now over thirteen thousand Indigenous children have been taken away by the Government and placed in out of home care? We are not talking about the madness of the past but the cruelty of today. This means Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children make up about one third of the total number of over 39,000 Australian children in out of home care.

With the same misguided logic of the Stolen Generations era these children are supposedly being removed for their wellbeing but almost half of them are also being removed from kith and kin and any of the traditional strengths of Culture.

Yes I know that all governments are supposed to have signed onto important priority principles to put such kids with Aboriginal extended families. But this isn’t happening for too many Indigenous children. In the Northern Territory some 66% of children are removed to non-Indigenous homes.

Across the country at least one third of Aboriginal kids in non-Indigenous out-of home care have revealed to government that they have very little contact with the Culture of their community, the life force that orients them towards a sense of place, a sense of identity and a sense of purpose.

We already know the pattern of misery that will flow from futile attempts to tear out the Aboriginal essence from the mind of a child. Mental illness and depression become a river of sickness flowing on to other generations.

Clearly the white fella way is incapable of managing the crisis that historically White Australia is most responsible for, despite our persistent denial or convenient amnesia.

To be blunt, it is racism in its most dangerous form to try to blame the victims, by stereotyping Indigenous families and particularly their Culture as the cause of this crisis in family life. This neo-liberal war on Culture displays a striking ignorance of the Aboriginal way of seeing and understanding how this overwhelming sadness descended over so many people.

So where is there hope?

Many elders have told me that the family counselling efforts trialled in Central Australia tap into traditional approaches for alleviating social crisis by involving members of the extended family and community services to discuss how to improve the safety and wellbeing of the child. This approach can reduce the removal of children from family and we should be supporting the local efforts vigorously.

Similarly, Aboriginal suicide prevention programs and other youth services can make a huge difference to the state of mind of these young people at risk. Yarrabah, the large and proud community near Cairns, pioneered a very successful suicide prevention program.

There are effective programs supporting Aboriginal children and families in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia as well and they all draw on the core strength of the local community.

Alarmingly, these exceptionally effective Aboriginal programs are the exception. And Governments show little interest in adequately funding more of them.

In the Northern Territory an official inquiry led by the Children’s Commissioner, Dr Howard Bath, Muriel Bamblett and Rob Roseby recommended major changes because the mainstream child protection system could not cope.

So what do we see?. The Northern Territory Government has slashed the budget for the community sector including for the peak Aboriginal organisation set up less than a year and a half ago, known as Strong Aboriginal Families, Together.

In Queensland, Campbell Newman’s Government has slashed hundreds of positions for people experienced in working with Indigenous young people most at risk.

The excuse always offered by Governments is that budgets must be trimmed. But even those ministers know that the guaranteed outcome of cutting the support for families is that it will eventually cost far more for children removed from homes, sent into juvenile justice or through the revolving doors of prison.

Everyone knows that prevention is a better approach to create wellbeing for children, families and communities. But Australia can never get serious when it comes to a consistent, coordinated preventative approach.

For example, Aboriginal elders plead with Government to show some genuine responsibility and improve the terrible living conditions that have such a drastic impact on any child’s wellbeing and future prospects. In my lifetime I have watched people move from smaller humpies to larger sheds, from 44 gallon drums of water to leaky toilets and sewage running across children’s play areas. I see rusted cars pulled up around tumbled down walls and old men, near blind, forced to hobble around without any real care or compassion.

For all of us, physical and mental health is largely a consequence of social determinants. At least 70% of our health is determined by the kind of home we live in, degree of education we access, nutrition and medical care we receive from birth and all of those other interconnected facets that make up home and community, especially a feeling that we belong.

All of this has been denied to so many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across so many generations that escaping the poverty trap, the welfare trap and that great malaise is constantly defied by a system that stubbornly refuses to listen.

While the Australian public may wince at the large amounts of money invested unsuccessfully in the controlling welfare management of Indigenous families, so many Indigenous people are even more deeply disturbed that Australian can throw billions at child removal and another billion by 2014 to develop family and community support services when these Indigenous families know they are still missing out.

The parents who call me when they have to bury a child who has taken their life know that we have all been silent for way too long.

I cried with a much loved Aboriginal friend, a woman schoolteacher whose oldest son, aged 20, killed himself.

I sat with an Aboriginal elder a week ago who said to me, “When my son killed himself I could only deep into my Culture… and I said to my family, ‘I forgive you son, for the pain you are causing everyone now.”

I want you to put yourselves in the shoes of that man and woman.

As a nation we have not listened to the cries for help, we have not taken the right kind of action to prevent this totally preventable contagion of loss of life.

Here are some of the ways Aboriginal people say Australia can help to make a difference.

1. Why can’t we empty our heads of that old poison called assimilation and listen to the Aboriginal elders and organisations who can tell us what is going wrong and why the mainstream services don’t reach so many people.

2. If we were objective we would admit that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are not truly ‘community controlled’ because they struggle with myriad agencies that still want to dispossess, disempower and disrespect them. It is time for empowerment!

3. Often government funded family support programs are positioned in direct competition, undermining the natural strengths and authority of Aboriginal groups. Let’s start respecting the rights of communities.

4. The workforce of many Government funded family services still requires a vast education and reskilling effort to help even experienced counsellors appreciate who it is they are working with and the nature of the complex causes for dysfunction.

5. It is also a major flaw in Australia’s approach to ailing communities and families that we go on unsuccessfully treating what is always characterised as ‘the Aboriginal problem” but we show great reluctance to address and alleviate the causes of this 21st century poverty and national neglect.

6. No one can claim that we don’t have the wealth to build a decent home in a reasonably serviced community for half a million Indigenous Australians. Let’s be fair Australia.

7. If we held ourselves to that same standard most Australians expect and demand for their families we would address the overcrowding, the lack of sewage, the second rate health care and education, the lack of opportunity and the refusal to engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on their terms.

8. If Governments can ever admit that they don’t have the answers to the wellbeing of Indigenous families then Australia may be ready for real change.

9. It is time to empower Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and community organisations to swell the ranks of the hopeful.

10. Provide adequate funding for the size of the task, invest in the children and we will see a truly greater society.

Together we can get this work done.

Yes, families are hard work but for all of us they are the source of our greatest strengths and joys.

Address to Family Relations Australia Conference. Canberra. March 13th 2013.

http://thestringer.com.au/the-future-of-the-family/#.UZnDH98iPIU

Deaths from natural causes have become the most frequent cause of death in Australian prisons. In 2011 PhD researcher in Australian Deaths in Custody, Gerry Georgatos called for an independent investigation to explain the sharp rise in the number of Australian prison deaths attributed to ‘natural causes’. This year there has been a staggering wave of natural cause deaths in Victorian prisons.

Last week, Victorian Corrections Commissioner Jan Shuard said to the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee that there had been 12 prisoners who had died in prison custody since the beginning of the year. This figure is startling because in most years deaths in custody in Victorian prisons average less than this number.

Nine were described to have died of ‘natural causes’.

In 2011, Gerry Georgatos’ research underwrote the opening and closing articles of an eleven series Deaths in Custody investigation by reporter Inga Ting for Crikey.

http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/06/22/deaths-in-custody-why-are-more-prisoners-dying-from-natural-causes/

http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/04/15/deaths-in-custody-20yrs-after-a-royal-commission-why-are-fatalities-rising/

Gerry Georgatos pointed out in Ms Ting’s article that natural causes accounted for almost three in four prison custody deaths in 2008 and this statistic has continued. He also pointed out that equally disturbing are the young ages at which many of these prisoners are dying.

In the 2011 Crikey article Georgatos said, “You can’t have people dying in significant numbers at these young ages – in their 20s, 30s, and so on – and deem them as natural causes.”

“We would not, and do not, accept this elsewhere. We seek the cause of death and whatever may have contributed to premature deaths and, where possible, lay charges in pursuit of culpability and liability.”

In Ms Ting’s Crikey article Georgatos rejected the Australian Institute of Criminology’s (AIC) claim that the rise in natural cause deaths is “probably linked to an ageing prison population and a prison population with more health problems than the general population”, and said that these “assumptions” need validation.

“I have deep concerns about the attribution of manner and cause of death and therefore about the classification of deaths in custody,” said Georgatos. “There is nothing natural about a person dying of causes that basic medical intervention could prevent. More than 50 per cent of Aboriginal folk who die in prison are classified as natural cause deaths but maybe what has occurred is that medical attention wasn’t flagged or their insulin dependency was not given proper care or they were maltreated or neglected.”

At the time he called for an inquiry, and he still continues to argue that such an inquiry is needed. At the time of Georgatos’ call for the inquiry, Australian Medical Association (AMA) national vice president Dr Steve Hambleton told Ms Ting that he would support an investigation into natural cause deaths. He said that the AMA had previously campaigned on this issue.

“The ages of Australian prisoners dying are alarming. The differentiation between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and other Australians makes it even more disturbing,” said Dr Hambleton.

Victoria’s spate of prisoner deaths this year should be an opportunity for Georgatos’ and Hambleton’s calls for an inquiry to be heeded.

Commissioner Shuard’s disclosure had followed silence on the issue and the Productivity Commission’s latest report which suggested there are no apparent unnatural causes of death in prison custody.

Two weeks ago a prisoner at the Melbourne Remand Centre committed suicide.

In February, a 36 year old inmate hung himself at Port Phillip Prison.

In the beginning of February a 31 year old man hung himself in his cell at the high security Barwon prison. The cell was supposed to have no hanging points.

The Barwon death was in a unit of the prison, Banksia, where prisoners were locked for 23 hours a day.

“The number of deaths in custody goes up and down. There is not a regular number, it can be as high as 14, I think, as it was in 2007-08, and this year so far there have been 12,” said Commissioner Shuard.

Human rights advocate Charandev Singh said to The Age reporter Andrea Petrie that he had never come across so many deaths in custody in such a short period.

He said to Ms Petrie that he knew of two other Victorian prisoners who were in critical condition in hospital, one from Port Phillip and another from Barwon.

“At least one of those men does not look like he is going to survive, so the figure might rise to 14,” he said to Ms Petrie.

Mr Singh said he believed the circumstances of these so-called ‘natural deaths’ were more indicative of various medical neglect and inaccessibility to appropriate health care.

The Australian prison population has more than doubled in the last twenty years from 15,000 to 31,000. Between 2000 to 2008 prison custodial deaths attributed to natural causes rose to 24.6 per cent per year nationwide. From 1990 to 1999 natural deaths had been 16.3 per cent and in the 1980s they had been at 10.6 per cent.

Georgatos has said that Australia has one of the world’s worst prison suicide rates and the classification of so many unnatural deaths should be examined. Ultimately it is the Coroner who determines whether a death is natural or otherwise but Georgatos said that firstly the criteria in determining classifications should be re-examined. Secondly, he said  an inquiry into prisoner health should be commenced.

http://thestringer.com.au/why-are-more-prisoners-dying-from-natural-causes/#.UZnCht8iPIU

OXFAM CEO, Helen Szoke said that Australian companies are circumventing the intentions of the Native Title Act and that informed consent is not being secured.

“We looked at the policies of companies specifically within the context of how they dealt with the issue of consent of Indigenous peoples to use their land,” said Ms Szoke.

“Disturbingly what we found is that the majority of companies do not have any transparent policies about how they gain that consent and how they go about negotiating with local Indigenous communities.”

“The second problem is if the negotiation process isn’t sorted out there is an enormously adverse impact on local communities.”

James Anaya – Photo, un.org

Last year the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and for Mining visited Australia while on a worldwide investigation on how the resources sector engages with Aboriginal peoples over compensation for Land Access Agreements and what mining benefits are returned to them. During much of his lengthy visit, Mr Anaya was accompanied by the National Congress’ co-chairs Les Malezer and Jody Broun. Mr Anaya visited Aboriginal Corporations, Traditional Owners and met with mining companies. He also visited the mining boom region of the Pilbara.

Mr Anaya focused his inquiries on extractive industries and to which he said that they pose “a major and immediate concern (for) Indigenous peoples all over the world.” Last year, Mr Anaya who is also a Professor of Law, announced that he would spend much of his second term prioritising the need for an international report on how extractive industries engage with Aboriginal peoples.

“The issue of extractive industries is a major and immediate concern of Indigenous people all over the world,” said Mr Anaya.

“I have seen examples of negligent projects implemented in Indigenous territories without proper guarantees and without the involvement of the peoples concerned.”

Mr Anaya had been involved in drafting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

He argues that there is a need for Governments to ensure good practices are enabled between Aboriginal peoples and the resources sector. He argues for legal and policy reforms that ensure the rights of Aboriginal peoples are secured in terms of benefits from mining being returned to them. He argues that the whole community should benefit and not just individual operators. He has argued for substantive returns from mining to Aboriginal communities.

The Oxfam report and Mr Anaya’s arguments are timely with the annual National Native Title Conference scheduled for the first week of June – in Alice Springs. There is much wrong on the Australian landscape with Native Title, with some of the resources sector ripping off blind Aboriginal communities, with the so-called mining boom having returned contextually little to Aboriginal communities, and with huge inconsistencies in compensation payments for Traditional Owners signing Indigenous Land Use Agreements.

Recent controversies with the Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett threatening Kimberley Aboriginal peoples with compulsory acquisition of their land for a gas hub have dogged Native Title into disgrace. More importantly the Office of the Registrar of Aboriginal Corporations (ORIC) and the National Native Title Tribunal (NNTT) have demonstrated inexplicable reluctance to investigate the many alleged improprieties that dog Native Title negotiations and agreements and how allegedly the resources sector circumvents Native Title or steamrolls Aboriginal peoples into signing (for peanuts).

It is a fact of life that some resource companies do not work with Aboriginal communities in terms of informed consent, that they hoodwink them and divide them, and all just to screw them out of a few dollars that would have made a huge difference to the Traditional Owners and their communities. Considering Australian Governments have failed to reduce horrific trachoma and otitis media rates among Aboriginal peoples let alone the horrific mortality rates, the funds that these communities have been screwed out could have made a difference to Aboriginal lives. It is fair to comment therefore that some within the resources sector are indirectly responsible for the increasing Aboriginal youth suicides and the horrific Aboriginal prison incarceration rates.

Two years ago the UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay described Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal peoples as “racism”. Recently, international documentary filmmaker and legendary journalist John Pilger investigated the ‘mining boom’ and how Aboriginal peoples are being ripped off.

“The story of the first Australians is still poverty and humiliation, while their land yields the world’s biggest resources boom,” wrote Mr Pilger in The Guardian UK on April 30.

“Barely a fraction of mining, oil and gas revenue has benefited Aboriginal communities, whose poverty is an enduring shock.”

“A mature society would not accept the myths that surround Aboriginal life right here in Australia,” wrote Mr Pilger.

In 2013, the annual National Native Title Conference will be convened by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and the Central Land Council (CLC) on the traditional lands of the Central Arrernte people, the Native Title holders of the Alice Springs area.

Rest assured, that there will be changes to Native Title practices end of the year but sadly they will not be favourable to Aboriginal peoples.

This year’s Conference title is “Shaping the Future” but for whom?

Themes of the Conference will include “The Native Title Act 20 years on, where to from here?” But to be honest, it should be back to the drawing board. The Native Title Act was skewed from its original moderate intentions by Prime Minister Paul Keating to a weak policy structure that allowed the resources sector and developers to steamroll Aboriginal peoples. The weakness in the Act is that negotiations between parties are to be had “in good faith.”

The Act was further watered down by Prime Minister Bob Hawke. The Native Title Act has continued on as the outrageous (racist) joke that it has been ever since cheating Aboriginal communities out of opportunity and equality and turning not only Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples against each other but also Aboriginal peoples against one another.

The remaining themes of the Conference are how to manage the little returns Aboriginal Corporations secure from mining industries for their Traditional Owners – ‘development options’ and ‘Indigenous governance.’ The Conference would better serve impoverished Aboriginal peoples and Native Title holders if it instead themed Oxfam’s report – that only one of the 53 biggest miners on the Australian Securities Exchange had a public commitment to the principle of informed consent for Aboriginal peoples.

http://thestringer.com.au/oxfam-report-mocks-native-title/#.UZm8398iPIU

By Mick Estens

Today in the Northern Territory along the Roper Bar road on the Aboriginal Alawa people owned Station of Warrigundu you will find no activity. The part time Aboriginal station staff was sat down in early December last year by the lease holders of the property, the Indigenous Land Corporation (ILC). While sitting down for two or three months over a wet period is nothing new in the top end, the pay systems the Aboriginal boys operate under within the ILC is. The permanent ILC staff operates under a work agreement that gives them a 37 hour week, holiday pay, overtime rates and general benefits we all have come to enjoy in this country. The Aboriginal station workers are employed and operate under a different system that the ILC calls National Indigenous Pastoral Enterprise (NIPE). NIPE has the Aboriginal boys working a minimum 50 hour week before any benefits come their way. The boys can build up Time Off In Lieu (TOIL) up to 5 days and only more with the Managers permission, but they cannot bank more than 20 days. When you are being sat down for a wet period of 60 – 90 days it is hard to keep your family feed and the problems this causes affect the entire Aboriginal Community.

In February 2012, several Aboriginal Trainee stockmen from Minyerri signed on with the ILC to be taught a range of skills needed for working on Stations in the top end. The work contract they signed is for 12 months of real on the job training including four weeks of leave and the promise of “real jobs” at the end of their Traineeship.

These ILC Aboriginal Trainees preformed their duties to a good quality, some exceptionally well.

During the year the Trainees and I were kept busy mustering and branding the 15000 head of ILC station cattle on Warrigundu.

Unfortunately for these young fit men with dreams once they are not needed, or the Certificate 2 in Agriculture is finished, so are they. Today these Trainees are sitting in Minyerri with their families and have been doing so since 10th December last year, some a lot longer. The bulk of the trainees have had one or two weeks work in the last five months as two of the boys got to go and look at ILC operations in West Australia and because of the lack of skilled Trainee Supervisor cattlemen willing to work for the ILC, the other boys had to be sat down.

I have visited the Trainees several times this year and their family life, sanity, and belief in their futures are all vanishing fast. One girl who is a partner to a Trainee has been treated for thinking of suicide as she feels let down. These young Aboriginal men now cannot get Centrelink benefits as they need a separation form signed by the ILC to release them, but the ILC don’t release them as eventually, they will pick them up and a graduation ceremony will take place, then they will tell us and their ILC Directors what a good job ILC Training has done. The young Aboriginal boys could take action against the ILC through Industrial Relations, but they know the chances of getting employment on their own property leased by the ILC after that would be nil. One boy beat the system and has found employment with CDEP as his children were starving and he had to find work and money.

The parents and grandparents, wives and girlfriends are all looking after these virtually unemployed men caught in a catch 22. All the ILC have told them is that they have generator problems at the station and that is why they cannot be re employed. Even if this is true, apart from the fact three months is amply time to fix the problem, the Trainees live 6 kilometres from the Station and could be picked up and dropped off daily.

It is fast looking like the ILC Training Department is taking advantage of the less fortunate Aboriginal men from Minyerri. The forms of injustice put upon these young Trainees are so that in the long run the ILC Training Department can keep statistics looking good and costs down at the expense of the Aboriginal students and their families way of life.

With no large amount of employability outcomes since the inception of the ILC training Aboriginal men into station work, it is hard to see why they keep getting large amounts of money from Government to keep this Training ongoing. I doubt there would be one Aboriginal Station Manager, Overseer or Head Stockmen in employment in the country that the ILC trained and got there on their own. Where are the hundreds of ILC Certificate 2 and 3 qualified Aboriginal men now? It is time for ILC to dump the senior people within the Training Department and replace them with true believers that will get these men employed. At the least, by now in a Corporation such as the ILC, all staff in the Training Department and HR should be Aboriginal. After all, it is the Indigenous Land Corporation.

So today, while some staff of the Training Department of the ILC is sitting in Adelaide, others flying around the country, staying in great Hotels and enjoying good food and a beer, Trainees,  my young Aboriginal boys in Minyerri, are suffering family stress, hunger, a feel of desperation, and a disbelief in what ILC promised them.

http://thestringer.com.au/ilc-keeping-aboriginal-men-in-the-long-grass/#.UZm7ft8iPIU

By Lester Ranby.

Photo – treatyrepublic.net

Ear disease is ravaging the lives of a generation of Aboriginal children and destroying their chances of an education, but Australia has decided that it doesn’t want to know.

The disease strikes babies just a few weeks old. Infection and fluid builds up behind the tiny infant’s delicate eardrum, causing the membrane to bulge and eventually burst.

For these babies, it should be a period of hearing and learning, a critical time to acquire language. Instead, their world becomes deadened. Voices become indistinct, and sounds become dulled, sometimes forever.

The medical term for the condition is ‘otitis media’, which simply means middle-ear infection. But the severe form that is devastating Aboriginal communities across Australia is causing permanent hearing impairment and lifelong disadvantage for many of those it infects.

Sydney audiologist, Samantha Harkus, says that non-indigenous babies can also get infected ears, but usually in a much milder form. “It’s something that your kids get from time to time which hurts quite a lot and then it goes away,” she explained. “But in the Aboriginal community it’s not like that at all. It’s a recurrent or chronic problem that has much bigger ramifications for many parts of their lives.”

The reasons why chronic otitis media affects Aboriginal people more than the general Australian population are not fully understood. Some researchers speculate that the disease may have arisen when Aboriginal people transitioned from a nomadic lifestyle to living in settlements.

It is believed that overcrowded housing, poor access to medical care, poor nutrition and exposure to tobacco smoke are contributing factors. Infants are more likely to contract ear disease if they are not breastfed.

“They’ve been struck right from day one!” exclaims ear, nose and throat surgeon, Associate Professor Kelvin Kong. “The kids come into my office where they’ve been in trouble at school, they’ve been the naughty ones. They’ve been hanging out with the wrong people. They’re not paying attention in class, when in actual fact, they just don’t hear.”

Kong understands the challenges that Indigenous people face in Australia. He’s the only Indigenous Australian ever to become a qualified surgeon, though he likes to point out that traditional Aboriginal ‘Nunkari’ healers performed surgery in ancient times.

Based in the city of Newcastle, Kong travels to Aboriginal communities around New South Wales, treating children who have chronic otitis media. If the number of burst or perforated eardrums rises above four percent of a population, then it is classified as a “massive public health problem” requiring “urgent attention”, according to World Health Organisation guidelines. What Kong has encountered in Australia is far worse.

“In our Aboriginal population that rate is over 60 percent,” he said. “In some of the smaller communities that I visit, you’re talking about 85, 95 percent of people with perforated eardrums.”

It should be a simple, treatable disease, but for Indigenous people ear infections routinely continue through adolescence and into adulthood. Often there is permanent damage done to the structure of the ear. The effects can keep cascading until ear disease ends up destroying their lives.

“Now you can’t tell me that with the hearing loss that it doesn’t lead to a lot of the troubles that they’ve been getting in,” said Kong, “and it leads to the problems that the media think is the problem, that is alcohol and substance abuse.

“Alcohol and substance abuse are purely symptoms of the underlying social fabric that is not being developed properly. So a lot of these diseases that we’re talking about are actually diseases of social determination.”

Poor school grades caused by poor hearing can lead to unemployment, poverty and often an encounter with the criminal justice system. The number of Aboriginal people with hearing impairment who end up in prison is staggering.

There have only been three recent studies into hearing loss amongst Indigenous prisoners in Australian jails. A 2006 study in the State of Victoria found that 78 percent of Indigenous prisoners aged 17-20 years had hearing so poor it corresponded with the bottom 10 percent in society. An unpublished 2010 survey by an audiologist at Bandyup Women’s Prison in Perth revealed that 46 percent of Indigenous inmates had significant hearing loss.

In 2012, the acting superintendent of Darwin prison instigated a study of Northern Territory jails, which found an astonishing 94 percent of Aboriginal inmates suffered significant hearing loss. The report attributed this hearing loss to ear disease the prisoners had contracted as children.

Once imprisoned, Aboriginal inmates with hearing loss feel greater hardship and isolation than other prisoners. Many have difficulty hearing the instructions of correctional officers, the Darwin study found. Australia imprisons Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at a rate 15 times the general population, yet the country has not fully investigated the reasons why.

Incredibly, most Australian states have not surveyed the extent of hearing loss amongst the Indigenous inmates in their custody. New South Wales holds the most Indigenous prisoners but doesn’t keep reliable statistics on the extent of hearing loss. The question remains, why not?

“I can’t answer that,” said New South Wales Member of Parliament, Linda Burney. “You could assume it would be very similar, in particular to the Victorian statistics.”

Burney was the first Indigenous person to become a Member of the State Parliament in New South Wales, and is now Deputy Leader of the Opposition. For twenty years she has lobbied for more action to help Indigenous people suffering the effects of otitis media.

“Obviously, the impact of it on the adult population is not something being discussed and probably not being dealt with,” she said. “In that context, the profile of it needs to be raised, particularly the implications for people as they go into adult life.”

Just how many Aboriginal people in Australia are suffering hearing loss as a result of otitis media is not known. In 2005, Darwin paediatrician Peter Morris recommended that a standardised national survey be done, but none has happened.

Morris conducted his own study of Aboriginal children across the Northern Territory, and discovered that severe otitis media was rife. He found that only 20% of the children had normal hearing. The rest required medical intervention or hearing aids. Puss was seen oozing from the ruptured eardrums of babies as young as 19 days of age.

“The first thing that needs to happen is that there be a comprehensive understanding of how deep the problem is,” said Burney. “If the statistics in the Northern Territory are replicated in other states, which we don’t know but would assume that they are, then we do have a crisis in relation to hearing for Aboriginal people.

“The issue is, where does it fit into some of the more life-threatening health issues that Aboriginal people experience? Outrageous rates compared to the rest of the population. And maybe it’s about priority. If heart disease and cancer and diabetes, which are life-threatening, are soaking up the space and the money, then you can begin to understand that.”

Some health professionals in the field are already working very hard to improve the hearing of Indigenous children. In the southern arid region of the Northern Territory, Harkus has taken her audiology clinic on the road as part of an outreach program run by Australian Hearing. She visits the remote communities of Lytentye Apurte, Aputula and Titjikala, on the edge of the Simpson Desert, to bring electronic hearing aids to children and eligible adults.

“They want to find out about amplification to make it easier for them to hear,” she said. “It’s around helping people to hear better with the hearing loss that they have.”

Some of the children are unable to have hearing aids fitted due to the fluid discharging from their infected ears. Australian Hearing’s solution is to fit electric transducers to the baseball caps the children wear. The ‘hearing hats’, as they’ve become known, send the amplified sound through the wearer’s skull bone. It’s a bit like that old thing where you bang a tuning fork against the table and place it against your head,” said Harkus. “As far as we can tell, we’re the only place in the world that does that on such a large scale. They work really well.”

It’s not just remote areas that have a problem otitis media. Two thousand kilometres away in Sydney, the city of over four million people has little awareness of the otitis media problem in its midst.

“Western Sydney has the highest Aboriginal population with incredible amounts of ear disease out there,” said Kong. “We need to get the research papers done in Western Sydney so that we can see that it’s a similar problem, to make it more available, to make sure more people get involved in there.”

The problem is exacerbated by the reluctance of many Indigenous people to attend hospitals. In Aboriginal culture there’s a belief that if you go into hospital you never come out. With little in the way of Aboriginal-friendly decorations or signage, and few Indigenous staff in attendance, the hospital system can appear intimidating, and become off-limits to Indigenous people.

“Why if I’m non-Aboriginal do I have access and ability to utilise all these resources, whereas if I’m of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, I don’t,” Kong questions. “Why is there that dichotomy?

“We may as well divide Australia into two and put all terrible disease and Aboriginal people and poverty onto one side and all the affluent on the other, because there’s such a distinction there, there shouldn’t be that distinction.”

The John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle had been experiencing low Indigenous attendance rates at its outpatient clinics. Kong set out to show how things could be improved, and he found a solution.

As a trial, he moved one of the clinics away from the hospital grounds, and is now holding it at the community-controlled Aboriginal Medical Centre. The move resulted in a dramatic surge in attendance

“They now have a clinic which is run by the hospital, so it’s still a hospital clinic, but it’s run in the community,” Kong said. “Now, the attendance rate is 98%. We get inundated with too many patients who actually get there now than what there are places.”

Despite pockets of improvement over the past decade, Kong feels that little progress has been made to stop the scourge of otitis media. He’s calling for a centre for Indigenous ear excellence to be established to bring together the best minds in research, clinical practice and education, with the aim of eradicating ear disease from the Indigenous population.

“I think that if you can eliminate the factors you can deal with, such as ear disease, and make that a bit more of a level playing field, then there’s no reason why we can’t have an Aboriginal prime minister,” he said.

Kong wants to raise the profile of Indigenous ear disease with the Australian public, and put it at the centre of every politician’s mind. However, with government still unaware or unwilling to investigate the social ramifications and extent of otitis media, he still has a long way to go. So far, Australia is not listening.

http://thestringer.com.au/a-nation-turns-its-back-on-its-children/#.UZm6Ut8iPIU