Towards de-colonised practice: using narrative practice to develop storybooks and documents by Grace Drahm

Grace’s discussion focuses on the different maps of narrative practice that she has utilised to support Aboriginal young people and their families to develop storybooks and therapeutic documents which centre and honour their Aboriginal worldviews.

 

Grace Drahm is a Social Worker who has worked in Remote Aboriginal Communities in Cape York for nearly a decade in supporting mental health and wellbeing. As a non-Aboriginal woman, Grace is working towards a de-colonised practice that assists her to engage in practice as political action, which challenges the dominant ideology of a Western system, and which tries to ensure that she is not perpetuating colonisation, but rather seeking to honour the stories that people tell.   

Published October 27, 2017

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  1. Charmaine

    Hi Grace, I thoroughly enjoyed your presentation. I am a Murri just learning Narrative Therapy and I want to thank you for working within a de-colonised framework. I loved hearing you tell the story of Lenny and the boy who liked to go hunting. These stories reminded me of when I worked in Central Australia, my son told me about the time he was traveling home on the school bus a 35 km unsealed and extremely bumpy road. When one of the boys (aged 10 or 11) saw a goanna on the side of the road and yelled to the bus driver to stop so the Aboriginal boys could hunt it down, which they did successfully. My son was invited back to help cook it in a fire at the back yard to eat for tea. These stories are rich in their diversity and when one comes from a de-colonised stance, we see the story of traditional culture at work as opposed to dangerous, cruel or in other words, non-indigenous world view based on how you think the world should be.

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