Lusankya wrote:Broomstick wrote:In the US, native peoples are only 1.37% of our population. I was a bit surprised by that, proportionally your natives are a greater slice of your overall population than ours are.
It's probably because there's a bigger difference between the number of people North America can support on a H-G lifestyle and the number of people it can support on an agricultural lifestyle than there is in Australia.
That's a good point. Unfortunately, Australia's geography works against dense populations, even if modern technology enables us to get around that somewhat.
Broomstick wrote:I wasn't clear on that - people who have been living as H-G's and nomads all their lives, educated within those lifestyles (which doesn't mean literacy but rather how to survive and support oneself in such circumstances) do not always want to settle down. Some do, and there are historical examples of people who thought houses and fresh baked bread were so wonderful they consciously made the choice to assimilate. Others, however, fought to the death to resist having their lifestyle taken from them, over here we call that the "Indian Wars", and after the natives got horses and firearms it took an organized military years to defeat them.
If the majority of the people in these communities still had access to the H-G skills, then I'd tend to agree with you, but they don't really. Mostly they're just sitting out there in community housing with really not much going on.
That's a sticking point for sure. I mentioned the Kalahari nomads who wanted to go back to that lifestyle, but that group was still maintaining that way of life into the second half of the 20th Century, there are still people alive who have first-hand experience with that life and were raised within the intact culture with a full set of required skills. Given that this information is passed orally and via one-on-one (at most, one on few) tutoring it only takes one or two generations for the knowledge to be completely lost. The knowledge involved also usually involved very specific data on many details of specific territory, so even if there's a group in, say, Western Australia with intact H-G's that knowledge may not be sufficient to enable survival in, oh, I don't know, far northern Queensland because of different resources, flora, fauna, weather patterns, and so forth.
Broomstick wrote:The ones that don't work usually have a combination of corruption and substance abuse in the community. They're also often places where they are self-governing, but also haven't maintained any of their tribal customs. Unlike in Illinois, there isn't really any oversight, so the corrupt leaders rarely face any consequences for their corruption. Chicago also doesn't have anywhere near the level of poverty that faces aboriginal Australians. Nor is it 200km from the nearest anything (with the nearest anything also being over 100km from IT'S nearest anything). Whenever I (or anyone, really) mentions a factor, we always mean it in the context of all of the other issues: it's not just corruption. It's not just poverty. It's not just distance. It's all of those things and everything else combined that makes it such a difficult issue to deal with.
That is the difficult part of these sorts of social and cultural problems. They're always multifaceted. Just as you can have an upward socio-economic spiral in a community that value education, hard work, thriftiness and other positive traits you can wind up with a sprialing descent as well where poverty, drug abuse, illness, lack of education and so forth combine to drag entire communities down.
The groups in the middle are often the ones that have banned alcohol and/or petrol within their community limits. Obviously they're still dealing with substance abuse or these measures wouldn't be necessary, but at least the symptoms are decreased.
Sometimes you can't fix things - in which case all you can do it mitigate damage and give the next generation a better chance at things.
Broomstick wrote:I agree that it's good that the idea came from the community, but for every one community that comes up with ideas, there are ten with the exact same problems without that kind of community leadership. Should we wait for them to come up with their own solutions to easily preventable blindness, or should we try to enforce some hygiene standards on them in order to prevent another generation from becoming blind?
Mainstream cultures also wrestle with that problem - that's why we have child protective services, to enforce at least minimal standards of care, and if they aren't provided, to mete out consequences. In your referenced article it seems they were attempting to make it a matter of community peer pressure rather than top-down authority. It's one thing to duck imposed authority, it's another to ignore the nagging of your thousand and one relatives and neighbors who want X and won't get it unless YOU cooperate, too. Fascinating that it was outsiders who labeled the plan paternalistic and the Aborigines who stood up and insisted that it was their idea and they wanted to do things that way.
Keep in mind that the community in the article is probably better off than many communities (after all, it was allowed petrol), and they still had to be bribed into making sure their kids washed their faces. That's how bad the "good communities" are.
Well, as you said, it all ties in with multiple factors. The community apparently lives in very crowded conditions, and in poverty. Those are two risk factors right there. We take daily face washing for granted, but that's a cultural custom and is dependent on clean and abundant water sources - not a universal in human history, and not at present, either. I don't know how the water supply is at Mulan, but in other parts of the world tracoma exists in impoverished desert regions where people keep their limited water for drinking and cooking more than for washing their bodies.
Having the children wash their faces twice a day at school has the virtue of developing a
habit - and that's half the battle. Think about toothbrushing, a custom we now take for granted and train children early to do, but my parents are old enough to remember when almost no one owned a toothbrush and people were walking around with green teeth. No wonder losing teeth before 30 was common! (The turning point here was WWII - men entering the military were issued a toothbrush as part of their hygiene equipment and were ordered/expected to use it, just as they were expected to shave daily. After a few years the habit stuck, and they took it home to their families. It wasn't the only factor, but considered a significant one).
It may sound outrageous to bribe people into having their children wash their faces daily, but if that's what it takes then that is what it takes. This generation grows up washing their faces daily and it's much more likely the next generation will do so as well.
Sounds like Mulan has dire problems but at least some structure for dealing with it - I looked them up on the internet, it seems that isn't their only Share Responsibility Agreement, either. Their most recent involves a sports complex to give children a safe place to play and something to do outside of school.
I find it interesting that the SRA (which I actually went and read instead of just reading the article) wasn't just about face-washing, it also involved daily showers, getting the children to school, day care, and health appointments on time, cleaning up trash, and paying rents on time. In exchange for reducing disease rates, keeping the place clean, and keeping social commitments they get fuel, which they want not only for their own use (the SRA specifies "non-huffable" fuel) but also to attract more tourists to the area, which is apparently a source of income for them. Well, gee, clean the place up, wash yourself daily, you reduce disease AND the tourists are more likely to drop by and buy your arts and crafts or hire you as local guides, especially if you can also refuel their vehicles, too. No doubt there's a little mark up on that, and probably snacks and soda to buy at the depot, too, right?
Somebody
protested this idea?
Good lord, isn't that the multi-prong approach these problems need? Create reinforcing habits that help reduce and prevent disease AND encourage activities that benefit the local economy. And apparently it's working - Mulan has entered into four of these SRA's, and their latest one plans to involves some participation by neighboring communities in local sports leagues, which promote healthy activities and something for young people to do with their time.
I see that Mulan is in Western Australia, not the Northern Territory that the OP's horror story originates from. The SRA website shows that there are nearly twice as many SRA's in WA as in NT... but apparently there is some success with these.
Billiluna, another WA community, has an SRA where the community is taking steps to improve its health, hygiene, and nutrition to improve health and treatment and reduce the needs for emergency evacuations. In return, their airstrip (ah, that transportation thing we've mentioned!) will be improved for greater safety, particularly for improved safety for the Royal Flying Doctor Service (that might make medical personal more willing to make the trip) as well as to possibly improve tourist traffic in the region. The community will be trained to maintain the airstrip, and also trained to provide retail services for those using the airport, which (one hopes) will encourage people to come back (and spend some money).
You know, these SRA's seem like really, really good ideas. I'm trying to find some information on how
effective they are, because whether or not they work is the real test of these things.
I notice that almost all of these agreements focus on improving health, school attendance/education, and giving young people something to do. Economic benefits, such as increase tourism, are welcomed but not the first focus. These are community set goals, not imposed from outside, and their goals tend to dovetail. And they seem to be harnessing peer pressure to accomplish some of these goals, rather than top-down authority, which might be more effective in these communities. Group projects also get people into the habit of cooperation, which is usually of benefit as well.
With the lack of trust, a solution has to be orchestrated by the aborigines themselves, which requires either a top down approach with strong leadership, or a bottom-up approach where individuals can take charge of their own opportunities. This, of course, is difficult when there is no effective leadership, poor educational opportunities, wide-ranging social problems and a severe cultural disincentive from leaving the community.
Yet the SRA's seem to be using a bottom-up approach with some success. Perhaps that is an avenue that should be pursued in the future?
Broomstick wrote:More money would be a good start. If debt/loan forgiveness won't work for lack of debt just offer more money. Get reliable power to those communities so they can have things like air conditioning that make the climate more bearable and reduce the physical discomfort. Teach people to fly airplanes (it's not that difficult) so they can get into and out of those remote areas themselves in a decent amount of time. It's going to cost some money to do these things, yes, but that's a minimal start.
More money would definitely work, though it would face opposition in that people already get extra welfare if they can claim to be 1/8th aboriginal and self-identifying as such (I think - could be 1/16th - weemadando would know better than me). Money's being spent already, but ineffectively.
Here, access to specialized programs for natives is usually contingent on being a member of a recognized tribe/band/nation (the terms vary) and each group has their own, self-determined membership rules.
I do want to note, regarding transportation, that the communities involved in these SRA's all seem to have airstrips. Is that a common feature of aborigine communities, or not? If not, I would expect a significant difference in conditions between those with and those without such facilities. Proximity to roads and rails would likewise be factors to investigate and weigh.
My preferred solution has always been to work on the community level - providing material and monetary assistance to communities that come up with their own ideas about how to improve their economy and living conditions. Combined, of course, with an actual education programme to let them know that this option is open to them.
Like the SRA's, for example?
It wouldn't solve the problems facing the communities that are really screwed, but it would help the marginal ones. I really have no idea what to do with the ones that are really screwed - and there are plenty enough of them.
In the Americans (both north and south) some of the better off native communities are lending assistance to other native groups - perhaps if you help the mariginal to not-too-bad communities sufficiently they may be able to have some influence over the really bad cases, being fellow Aborigines, that non-Aborigines don't have.
It seems to me if you can revitalize some of those old social networks that used to support aborigine communities in the old days you might, at some point, reach a sort of critical mass or tipping point at which point these groups become much more self-sustaining and able to lift themselves out of their current morass.
Any meaningful change really has to have aboriginal leadership, or it's doomed to failure. How do you create strong leaderships within communities that are not your own?
In a peer-pressure powered situation there is a tendency for "natural" leaders to emerge, somebody is always leading the herd. That might be a way to promote leadership. It also promotes self-responsibility.
Welfare in Australia is targeted terribly for aborigines, though. Even in the cities where there is adequate welfare - and we know because white people take advantage of it and receive adequate welfare - the services are, for whatever reason, not taken up as well by aborigines.
Can you expand on that somewhat? Is it language barriers (including illiteracy)? Do they make appointments but not show up? Something else?
Yeah, most Australians are bloody racists, this may not have anything to do with HOW to fix the problems aborigine communities have.
