Introduction: Aboriginal youth in the Northern Territory: Disadvantage, control and hope
Introduction: Aboriginal youth in the Northern Territory: Disadvantage, control and hope Book Section
Indigenous Australian Youth Futures: Living the Social Determinants of Health
- Author(s): Senior, Kate, Chenall, Richard, Burbank, Victoria
- Secondary Author(s): Senior, Kate, Chenhall, Richard, Burbank, Victoria
- Published: 2021
- Publisher: ANU Press
- ISBN: 9781760464448
Abstract: Young people are poised on the brink of maturity, of arriving at a life stage in which they are best able to contribute to the wellbeing of humankind or to do it great harm. Thus, it is vital that the challenges and possibilities of adolescence be well understood and addressed. In Australia, such understanding is most urgently needed with respect to Aboriginal youths. Not only must they adjust to their changing bodies and minds (e.g. Tanner 1990; Casey 2015), but, as Ute Eickelkamp (2011, 9) has observed, ‘they need to cope with racism, discrimination, cultural insecurities, intergenerational trauma and the socioeconomic marginal status of their families’. They are also required to do all this in the complexity of intercultural environments that we argue must be included in our ethnography if we are to understand the challenges and achievements of these young people. Thanks to scholars like Merlan (1998, 2005) and Hinkson and Smith (2005), the recently rediscovered concept ‘intercultural’ (Vogt and Albert 1966) has provided a useful assist for portraying the circumstances in which Australian Aboriginal people live. We see an ‘intercultural’ space as a social environment constructed largely by the sustained interaction of at least two distinct populations, each of which brings to the interaction an ethos and associated identity derived from ‘different forms of experience, knowing and practice’ (Merlan 2005, 174). Due to their different histories and the consequent inequalities of knowledge, wealth and status, the respective bearers of these different traditions, may, as is clearly the case between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, have more or less power over others, and themselves, in this space. The difficulties of Aboriginal youth, we cannot help but assume, arise, in large part, from their often disadvantaged positions in these intercultural interactions. However, it is not cultures that meet, but individuals (Vogt and Albert 1966, 61), and individuals invariably have varied experiences, however much shared their histories may be. Thus, it is these individual experiences that are created by, and brought to, intercultural encounters. We also recognise that each of the communities represented in this collection has arisen from a distinct series of intercultural encounters and events, and each occupies a different physical and social environment. Many of these responses, as demonstrated in the following chapters, are grounded in resilience and adaptability, and are ones in which young people uniquely draw upon their skills in both the traditional and globalised world (see also Allen et al. 2014). This collection presents accounts of youths as individuals, or as part of groups, coming of age, and engaged in and accompanied by positive and negative experience in various intercultural spaces.
- Urls: https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n8434/html/introduction.xhtml?referer=&page=6
- Publisher Location: Canberra