Assimilation & Oppression

The number of doctors working in Western Australia's First Nations Community Controlled Health Services (ACCHS) will be reduced from 56 to 19 under a policy proposed by the Federal Government, according to the Aboriginal Health Council of WA.

"We currently have 56 doctors working in our sector. With this decision that will severely reduce that back to 19 doctors," the council's chairwoman Michelle Nelson-Cox told ABC Kimberley. [node:read-more:link]

Letters by Noongar people pleading for the return of their stolen children or requesting access to the old age pension after a lifetime's work will come together in a new project aimed at uncovering a hidden side of Indigenous history.

Curtin University researchers are set to collate letters from state archives and correspondence held by families across Western Australia, dating from the 1860s to the 1960s. [node:read-more:link]

Apartheid and genocide are utterly evil, whether Israel’s ongoing Palestinian Genocide or Aboriginal Genocide in Australia. There is an ongoing Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide that demands international action against a pro-war, pro-Zionist, US lackey, human rights-abusing Apartheid Australia. There are huge differentials between First Nations peoples and non-Indigenous Australians in relation to life expectancy, health, wealth, employment and educational attainment. The so-called “Closing the Gap” has a long way to go in one of the richest countries in the world. [node:read-more:link]

Two Indigenous Australians who suffered through ice addictions have told a Parliament House forum they did not get any professional help on their journey to sobriety.
The former methylamphetamine addicts spoke at the event, hosted by the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO). Laurence Riley, a Nunga man from southern South Australia, said his addiction came as the result of searching for an escape from depression at work. bHe said ice had been "readily available" to him in Perth. [node:read-more:link]

"Income management through the BasicsCard Does not achieve what it sets out to achieve," said Alice Springs' Tangentyere Council research coordinator Matthew Campbell, whose team helped collect data for the study.

Income management in the Northern Territory has not led to people on welfare drinking less alcohol, sending their children to school more often or buying healthier food, according to the findings of a three-year study commissioned by the Federal Government. [node:read-more:link]

The research team will spend more than four years visiting locations across NSW where Aboriginal missions and reserves were established to collect personal oral histories and family/community recollections and records, letters, documents and photographs

Comments by the Chief Justice of Western Australia and associated media reports reveal a simplistic, unhelpful view of the complex factors contributing to the over-incarceration of Aboriginal people, according to public health practitioner Summer May Finlay.

Teenager Jordan Chapman can name half a dozen young people in his circle of friends who have taken their own lives. "On Facebook one night she (a friend) just inboxed me, seeing how was I going but I didn't have enough time to reply and I just logged out because I was going to sleep," he said. "I found out the next morning she committed suicide." Asked how someone of his age deals with that kind of loss, 17-year-old Jordan responded quietly: "I don't know. Just play football, go to school, keep my mind off it, don't really think about it." [node:read-more:link]