Abstract
This chapter describes and reflects on an intensive four-week pre-release educaring program run with Aboriginal women in Alice Springs Correctional Centre Northern Territory, Australia. The behaviours, or symptoms, that contributed to the incarceration of these women, who comprise 2.2 per cent of the Australian population and are 34 per cent of women in prison in Australia, reflect their stories in a colonised space—demonstrating Australia as a continuing penal colony. There is systemic failure across the whole service delivery, with incapacity to acknowledge, understand and respond to the women’s trauma experiences and provide alternatives to prison. Taking healing into a prison with the Kunga Stopping Violence Program required a journey through their layers of loss grief and trauma, walking the circle of wellbeing into anger violence boundaries and safety. This chapter discusses the outcome of this process which drew on indigenous methods of art in feelings and story in poetry that show the strength of culture in healing from generational trauma, with the opportunity to ‘circle into truth through stories’.
We live storied lives. We organise experience into stories as we share life interactively with others. The plot, characters, and morals of the stories we hear influence our synaptic connections, they change our brains. Stories also live through us. We are born into stories, those of our families, nations, religions and cultures.
—Lewis Mehl-Madrona in Healing the Mind through the Power of Story 2010, p. 180
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Atkinson, J. (2020). Symptom as History, Culture as Healing: Incarcerated Aboriginal Women’s Journeys Through Historic Trauma and Recovery Processes. In: Wale, K., Gobodo-Madikizela, P., Prager, J. (eds) Post-Conflict Hauntings. Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39077-8_12
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