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Interview with Professor Juanita Sherwood transcript

Hi, I'm Claudia - as you know - from the Faculty of Health, I'm a lecturer there.  Could I just ask you to introduce yourself and talk a little bit about how this work we've been doing together has evolved.

Okay. Hi, I'm Juanita Sherwood. I'm the Professor for Australian Indigenous Education in the Faculty of Arts and Social Science.  I've been at the university since September 2011, when the rolling out of the Indigenous education policy and strategy occurred.  That policy was important in relation to supporting the graduate attribute process that was going on within teaching and across the university.

I made contact with Joanne Gray and we discussed the opportunity of supporting and growing a faculty graduate attribute for Indigenous health.

Fantastic.  And now of course though, we've developed the graduate attribute as a working party together and also some course intended learning outcomes.  Really looking at the idea of meaningful engagement with communities and making a difference -- a positive difference to the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, which is great.

As we've talked about all of that work, we kept coming back as a working party to three key principles that we've now termed REM with the R standing for respect, E for engagement and sharing, and the M for moving forward.  Could you just talk through a little bit, in terms of your understandings of those different concepts.

Basically respect is a core protocol value of Indigenous culture, and it's something that's really vital to how I believe cultural safety can be provided.  It's a space that Indigenous Australians haven't often had experiences from non-Indigenous people.  There has been a great deal of lack of respect of our peoples, and our cultures, and our languages, and our heterogeneity.  Respect, however, is very core to our Elders, and the way we share information, the way we live our life, the way we respect our country.

Respect is probably the most important aspect along with country to our lives, and I wanted to see cultural competency running from that core ideology of respect, so that's something that brings us together.  We all know what respect means, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous people need to be sharing that respect perspective.

So your views on engagement and sharing.

Engagement and sharing is something that is a process for learning, and we have another word called reciprocity which is about balancing that sharing and engaging.  It's about growing a space that is a collective, it's not individualistic, it's about supporting one another.  It's about becoming a community.  It's about building relationships, and out of building those relationships, you grow trust.  I felt that if we could grow that within our committee then we can share that process further out to the faculty and with our students, and I think that we've achieved that.

Absolutely, and part of that has been we've started yarning circles just a month ago that we'll continue monthly within the faculty.  There's a lot more conversation generally, which is just fantastic.

And it feels like people feel safe about talking in this space.

Absolutely.  So the last principle that we're working with is about moving forward, if we could just talk about that a little bit.

Well moving forward - I think the way we do move forward is that we need to be working together.  The whole reason why we want cultural safety, we want graduate attributes around safe practice with Indigenous peoples in our communities, is that we need to be working together, and we're going to gain a fantastic wellbeing.  Not just for Indigenous Australians but for non-Indigenous Australians.  We all need to be working together, this is everybody's business.

Absolutely.  Thank you.  The last question I have, as a non-Indigenous academic, have you got any key tips, or hot tips, for how I can really help my students develop these skills and attributes to engage in a meaningful way with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, communities and organisations.

Straight away philosophically, I think, de-colonisation is the strategy.  I think everybody needs to realise, or know, that everyone has been colonised, and that we haven't had full access to the truths of this country, and they're only just starting to be available now.  People had their stories, but they weren't highlighted, and many stories were condemned as not real histories, not real stories.

We know now that there are many truths, and we need to share those many truths, we need to engage in those many truths.  That's how we're going to move forward, as well, by being part of that process.  But we all need to know that that's our story, all of our stories.

In other ways to get in to meeting Indigenous Australians, working with Indigenous Australians, go and knock on the door of your Indigenous unit at your university.  Connect, relate, have a chat, have lunch, and be guided in your readings.  Be open to having a critical eye in your reading as well.  Be discerning as to: why did someone write on this level, in this way.

Health has been a place that we've had bad news stories about Indigenous Australians.  Many people think, or have been shown through media and even health papers, that Aboriginal health is problematic because Aboriginal people are problematic.  In fact the problems were created through colonisation.  The issues that Aboriginal people are dealing with today are a result of colonisation, and I think that's probably the most vital lesson people learn.  Then, that deficit, it has been promoted as a value to subject Indigenous people, and that's not been effective, in fact it's caused more health harm.

So we need to shift our ways of dealing with health, and we need to be respectful of many ways of knowing, and being, and doing in health.  I think that's having a shift.   That's our moving forward.  Health isn't just one path, it's many paths.

Thank you so much.  And just broadly also from the faculty perspective, thank you so much for the sharing of your Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, and also this work.

Thank you.