How do people feel, think and behave?

I have so many reactions to all the things we did on Friday at the indigenous mental health workshop. Norm's talk was fascinating, stimulating and surprising. It makes me ask again, "What is my own history? Why don't I know?" And it makes sense of why certain people don't want either white or black Australians to remember the past. But knowledge is power -- I mean power in the sense of "capacity to do something" not "power over". Forgetting is loss of power, so to move forward into the future in a good way must be to remember the past, and to preserve that memory in written and spoken words, in images, in song, in any way possible.

My reaction to Grant's program was also fascination and being intellectually stimulated, realizing how little I know about pre-colonial Australia (or North -America), and wanting to know more. But my primary reaction to Grant's program was to be moved, deeply moved. After describing and having us go through the powerful re-enactment of colonisation (in a big rush, compared to how he usually does this, but it was still effective), that he could still say what he said at the beginning and the end -- it moved me. That we have to mature as a culture and move forward to make a good life in this land based on sharing, caring and respect, for land, for people, for the environment. That if the colonists had said in 1770, "Hey, we'd like to live here. Is that OK?" that the answer would have been, "Welcome, welcome. Let's talk about it and work together to find a way to live together well." What a missed opportunity. But maybe we can still do it.

And of course, I can think of a dozen things I'd like to do in the future for our students and for next year's workshop:
-write a grant with Michael and ATSIS to fund the workshop
-make sure the workshop happens every year
-add an exercise on rules of interpersonal, cross-cultural communication
-find a way to add more training in indigenous issues into our psychology courses that professional psychologists will take
-possibly find a way to put together a postgrad program on indigenous mental health
-make sure our dept has a section of its web page devoted to resource materials on indigenous issues