Strength From Grief: How Aboriginal People Experience the Bushfire Crisis

How do you support people forever attached to a landscape after an inferno tears through their homelands: decimating native food sources, burning through ancient scarred trees, and destroying ancestral and totemic plants and animals?

A fire being prepared for a traditional smoking
ceremony during a protest by indigenous
Australian people against Australia Day, a day
 synonymous with decades of systematic
 abuse and genocide, on January 26th, 2016.

The fact is, the experience of Aboriginal peoples in the fire crisis engulfing much of Australia is vastly different from that of non-Indigenous peoples.

Colonial legacies of eradication, dispossession, assimilation, and racism continue to affect the lived realities of Aboriginal peoples. Added to this is the widespread exclusion of our peoples from accessing and managing traditional homelands. These factors compound the trauma of these unprecedented fires.

As Australia picks up the pieces from these fires, it’s more important than ever to understand the unique grief that Aboriginal peoples experience. Only through this understanding can effective strategies be put in place to support our communities to recover.

Read the Yes! Magazine story - “Strength From Grief: How Aboriginal People Experience the Bushfire Crisis.”