Transcript for
Decolonising psychology – part one

Johanna Alexi (00:00): Unlearning and the learning new knowledges and bringing that worldview of epistemological equivalence. That equivalence of the importance of all diverse knowledges, particularly Indigenous knowledges, which are thousands of years old, but yet it was such a shame that we didn’t learn that through psychology.

Narrator (00:22): Welcome to the Emerging Minds Podcast.

 

Jasmine Bald (00:29): This podcast is one of the 5-part series developed in partnership and led by the team from the Transforming Indigenous Mental Health and Wellbeing research program (TIMHWB) and the Centre of Best Practice in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Suicide Prevention (CBPATSISP). You will have the opportunity to hear and learn from inspirational Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experts and their allies in the field of social and emotional wellbeing and mental health. You will also explore key concepts and frameworks and learn how you might apply this knowledge in your own practice to better support the social and emotional wellbeing needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and their families.

⁠Jasmine Bald (01:04): Hello and welcome to the first of the two-part podcast episode, Decolonising Psychology. We are honoured today to be able to listen to Professor Pat Dugeons AM, and Belle Selkerk, and Dr. Johanna Alexi, a few of the many inspirational leaders in Australia who are challenging and redefining dominant western paradigms in psychology as part of the Australian Indigenous Psychology Education Project We will hear about the history of the project and the resilience and determination of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders who have persisted over many years to include Indigenous world knowledges into psychology curriculum.

⁠Jasmine Bald (01:39): Thank you and welcome. I’m really excited to be able to hear about the Australian Indigenous Psychology Education Project’s journey. Firstly, though, would you like to introduce yourselves?

Pat Dugeons (01:49): Well, my name is Pat Dudgeon. I’m a Research Professor with the University of Western Australia. I live and work on beautiful Noongar Boodja for at least two thirds of my life. But my people are from the Kimberley, so I come from the Bardi and the Kitja people of the Kimberley. My background is I’m a Psychologist and I’ve been working in the space for a very long time. I think my challenge has been to decolonise Psychology. So when I studied, I started studying because I wanted to help other people, but I found that we Indigenous people did not fit in to psychology back then. This is going back into the ’80s, 1980s, but we didn’t fit in. So that’s my motivation and we’re really pleased to be here to share information about our Deadly project called the Australian Indigenous Psychology Education Project. But the people who do the heavy lifting in the project are the wonderful Belle and Johanna. So I’ll ask them to introduce themselves.

Belle Selkerk (02:57): So I’m Belle. I’m a Noongar woman. I’m from the southwest, the Western Australia. My family are the Wadandi people. So that’s about three hours south of Perth. And I often say it’s a very privileged time of my life where I get to live, work, and play on my country, but also do such phenomenal work in Professor Pat Dungeon’s team and alongside the wonderful Johanna. That is a real gift to be able to live in a rural area, but also work in such a phenomenal team that does national work. So I am thankful for that and like to always acknowledge that that is a privilege that I’m holding. We all hold different privileges, so that’s one that I like to acknowledge.

Belle Selkerk (03:34): So I’m a Clinical Psychologist by training, have been practising for 13, 14, 15 years. Sometimes I forget those numbers. Predominantly worked in Indigenous and non-Indigenous programs, both here in Australia and in Canada, predominantly in adult mental health spaces. And really it’s been in the last two years that I’ve been working in research as a research fellow with Professor Pat Dugeons.

Belle Selkerk (03:58): So that’s a new kind of shift for me to move from, I guess a very strong kind of clinical and community and family focus to then moving into a research space which I’m really enjoying and definitely flexing muscles that I haven’t flexed in many years. But actually what’s really cool is seeing these two parts of the same worlds kind of coming together. So a lot of the work that we do in the Australian Indigenous psychology Education Project, it’s really nice to see all the work that we’re doing from a systems level and how that is then translating to practise, whether it’s education or working with people and communities. It’s a really enjoying part of my career, bringing both that clinical and research together to do good work for our mob.

Johanna Alexi (04:46): So just a little bit about myself, I’ll be really quick. So I have Greek Cypriot heritage. I was born on beautiful Larrakia country in Darwin where I spent most of my childhood. And just so grateful that I had such a great childhood in Darwin and always go back there and see family. So it’s really nice to connect back in with family there. I moved to Noongar country as a teenager. I also lived in Cyprus for a little bit before that. And I’ve been in Noongar country, it’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere and just very blessed to live, work, and play here and to work alongside the wonderful Pat and Belle on the Australian Indigenous Psychology Education Project.

Johanna Alexi (05:26): I also have a background in Psychology. I did my undergrad and postgrad at UWA in specifically research, but in a different space. And I think, I guess my values around health equity and social justice have really led me to working with Pat and in this really great project. And just like Belle said, being able to see some of those system changes that are happening and just how much the AIPEP project has achieved already is actually so phenomenal and such a massive privilege to be able to work in this space right now. And also acknowledging the long and hard years of groundwork that Pat and team put in before this second iteration of AIPEP. So just wanting to pay acknowledgements there. So yeah, thank you so much for having us.

⁠Jasmine Bald (06:16): Thank you all for those beautiful introductions. Do you want to tell me a little bit about how the project started, what gap it was responding to?

Pat Dugeons (06:24): When I was doing Psychology, there was nothing about Indigenous culture in it. There was nothing about anyone else who wasn’t white middle class actually. So I personally didn’t witness it, but I know some of my colleagues, Aboriginal colleagues had said that they saw where Aboriginal people were mainly put under Abnormal Psychology, or the perception was that they drink a lot and they had a lot of problems, so they were put into that category, but it was scarcely any presence at all. And going through the program, it was very western. I couldn’t see how Indigenous realities fit into that at all. I gritted my teeth and went through it though. I went through it and completed. But I think for me, I don’t know, I had this insight when I was reading this journal by African-American psychologists, and they just stepped totally back from the paradigm and rather than trying to fit into it, which I think mentally I was trying to do, they actually stepped out of it and looked at the whole paradigm and saw it, named it.

Pat Dugeons (07:34): We didn’t have the terminology back then, but saw it as a colonial construct that really did not include us. And that was very liberating for me. So since then, I think for all Indigenous scholars in all disciplines, part of our job has been or our task has been to critically examine all these disciplines and see where we don’t fit, which is usually we don’t fit, we’re not mentioned or we’re mentioned in negative ways. It’s always not… It’s deficit based presence. And there was very little, there’s no respect or acknowledgement of different knowledge systems, different identities, and most of all the history that shaped us to be where we are. So that was always my bug bear. I was managing an Indigenous education centre where we did a lot of work changing curriculum, looking at trying to take education out to the community, coming up with programs that reflected Indigenous values and very much about empowering the community.

Pat Dugeons (08:41): So I did that for a long time and it was… But I still kept my, it was hard work, but I still kept my presence in Psychology. And over the years, as Belle says, we’ve witnessed this change, but from a very… Place where they didn’t, psychology and psychologists didn’t want to know about us. So there’s been this absolute transformation of the space, which is really heartening I’d say. But for me, the AIPEP project symbolises a lot of that work that we’ve done earlier. And there wasn’t only me, I was one of the first Indigenous psychologists to graduate, but there are others working in the space like Pat Swan who did the Ways Forward report. There was a lot of people trying to challenge the hegemony, which it was, and saying our perceptions of health, mental health are different to mainstream. So that conversation was happening, but it was very muffled and not part of mainstream as it is now.

Pat Dugeons (09:44): So Psychology has been very resistant, and that was very odd. I mean, Anthropology and the other disciplines were more open because they were concerned with the positions of other Indigenous people, their worldview, and so on. So I think they were a bit more open to cross-cultural appreciation at least. But Psychology never ever turned that gaze inwards. But we worked with dedicated people, other Indigenous mental health professionals, psychologists and our allies, very important. And now we see the AIPEP project, which I won’t go into detail yet, I’m going to build the listeners up so they get excited about it, and when we come to talk about it, they’ll give it full appreciation. But I’ll hand over to Belle again to talk about what motivated her and what her experiences were as a young psychologist in this area. So over to you Belle.

Belle Selkerk (10:43): So it’s interesting to kind of hear your experiences and then fast track maybe a decade later and then… So it’s probably actually early 2000s was when I did my undergraduate. And similar to your experience, I would say zero to 2% Indigenous knowledges were even referenced when I was doing my undergraduate. And at that time I had a hard time conceptualising how psychology fit for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I felt confused for a lot of the time, but had this kind of sense of there’s something more here. And I had, I guess some great people around me who just encouraged me to just keep going, even though you’re not too sure how this content is fitting for a community, or you’re not too sure how you feel about the profession of Psychology, continue on as best you can. And once you’re in the workforce, that’s when some real growth can happen.

Belle Selkerk (11:38): And meeting with other Indigenous psychologists. And in the early 2000s, there were some Aboriginal psychologists working in Noongar country. So I had a little bit of hope that there was something more to this, but it certainly that wasn’t my experience going through that education. So I think in the times when I was going through my university careers, I think as an Aboriginal student you had to have a lot of gumption and determination and kind of for better words, see the wood through the trees in many ways and almost like jump the hoops, do the exams, do all the things to get to the end.

Belle Selkerk (12:10): Now that’s a bit sad but that’s actually was the state of affairs at that time, but that’s kind of what we had to do to get into the workforce. And even after graduating, so I went through my undergraduate, went through my masters, and even after graduating, going through registration programs to register as a psychologist, it was very much jumping through the white ways of doing things, hoops as I call it, all those colonial hoops.

Belle Selkerk (12:36): Again, that’s kind of a sad experience for a lot of Aboriginal people to have to experience in their education. And it makes me feel sad to think that some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students probably didn’t persist through their all, all their trajectory, went somewhere else, and maybe that for good or bad reasons. But for me, I stuck it out and I got to meet wonderful people like Professor Pat Dugeons in my very early career. And that was very helpful to have those relationships early in my career to kind of see that what I was learning and who’s practising and the kinds of works that are happening out there in the community were quite different. And I would say I didn’t really reconcile that within myself for many, many years. I think the confusion around what Psychology was for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people lingered for me for many years.

Belle Selkerk (13:27): I continue with my clinical practise and enjoyed being, and still to this day, enjoy very much practising as a psychologist. But I would say it’s really only been in the last five or more years that I’ve really felt that decolonising psychology and Indigenous psychology has really had momentum and volume around it in a way that I’ve been feeling less dissonance within myself as an Indigenous psychologist. And I’m feeling more cohesiveness and integration of, “Okay, this is what Indigenous psychology is.” We have a really beautiful collective of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander psychologists in Australia now. Of course we need more and we’ll talk about that with AIPEP.

Belle Selkerk (14:10): But we also, there’s also Indigenous psychologists all over the world, and we’re really shifting away from, I guess what my schooling experience was that there is this one psychology, this universal psychology from a Eurocentric standpoint, this is what psychology is, this is what the norm is, and anything out of that is kind of the weird or different or an anomaly or as Annie Pat said, it’s abnormal. So that was kind of by and large, I guess the impression that I had from my education. And it’s been such a beautiful but challenging journey for me to start to kind of unlearn some of these colonial teachings from my psychology education. And I’m still unlearning, always unlearning and shifting and changing and challenging in beautiful ways of how I practise as a Psychologist, my standpoints, my ethics and principles, challenging what the discipline of Psychology means as best practise or true.

⁠Jasmine Bald (15:09): Thank you, Annie Pat and Belle, for that background. Is there anything else you would like to add, Jo?

Johanna Alexi (15:15): I think coming out of the degree, not knowing much and feeling probably actually not equipped to be able to work in this space, but having the privilege of having Pat’s guidance. And like Belle was saying, that unlearning and the learning new knowledges and bringing that worldview of epistemological equivalence, so that equivalence of the importance of all diverse knowledges, particularly Indigenous knowledges, which are thousands of years old, and so ancient and important to really saving the world actually when we think about things like climate change and those sorts of areas. But yeah, it was such a shame that we didn’t learn that through psychology, but I am just so privileged that I’m working in this space that is really supporting that change and really starting to see momentum and traction around providers. So universities starting to incorporate and really do it authentically and with proper engagement around incorporating Indigenous knowledges. So the next generation of graduates are getting really core foundational knowledges and an inclusive psychology education, which is the utmost importance.

Pat Dugeons (16:27): When we did start talking about an Indigenous psychology, I think the discipline was really offended by it. They were very indignant. They said, “Well, how can you have an Indigenous psychology and who’s going to determine it and what’s it going to look like?” Then they said things like, “Well, why don’t we have an Italian psychology or a Vietnamese psychology?” And we were saying, “Why don’t you have that indeed? It’s not exclusive. You should be considering all the different cultures that make up our diverse society.” And we pushed on, I think there was a lot of the whole thing about knowledge production, who values, who makes knowledge is part of the colonising story. And I’m so grateful to be here now, and I’ve just got back from the wonderful Lowitja conference in Cairns, and it was just so… Everyone was talking up their knowledges, their projects, their research that they were doing, and it’s such a different landscape.

Pat Dugeons (17:30): And my discipline was doing things that they could never do nowadays. I remember going to one conference in South Africa actually, and they decided to have a debate on is there an Indigenous psychology and can it be scientific? But you had two white men having the debate. So we had an English person and an American person having the debate. It was so incredibly offensive. And I think a lot of people that when they had the debate, there was a lot of support for them in the audience. We were protesting of course, but there was a lot of support because I think that for these Indigenous people take their rightful place for some non-Indigenous people, it’s going to be a challenging time before they could go and do their research, willy-nilly on Indigenous or minority groups who were oppressed and no one ever questioned it. And they did it for “the greater good,” I’m putting rabbit ears up.

Pat Dugeons (18:28): They did it for “the greater good,” and they just saw that their rights and privileges to access people from oppressed minorities was their privileged. They didn’t even question it. So all of a sudden you’ve got these people now standing up and saying, “Nothing about us without us, and what about our perspectives? What about our knowledges?” We had a big racism round table back in the late ’90s when no one was speaking about racism at the time.

Pat Dugeons (19:00): So we organised with the Australian Psych Society, a big round table to put racism back on the table. It needed to… And now we know nowadays that it’s so obvious. So we come from a situation where we were excluded, however, we’re not the only ones. Belle and Jo said earlier how it’s a global issue, and we are connecting up with our other Indigenous psychologists from other countries, particularly settler nations like Australia, so particularly New Zealand, Canada, and the US of A, but it was actually Southeast Asia that led a task force within the American Psychological Society or Association, APA, and they set up a task force on Indigenous psychology, which we are a part of, and they wrote what Indigenous psychology was all about, which is still our mantra to go to.

Pat Dugeons (19:59): And it is about taking a critical view on psychology as a discipline and being critical about can it fit us or not, but also developing local knowledges. So whether we like it or not, in most disciplines, we have to be political. We have to stand back and look at what’s happening or how disciplines have excluded us and they all have as part of that colonising story. So I personally take an anticolonial standpoint on issues because a lot of the things that happen to Indigenous people, they take over countries, the genocide, the removal of people off their country into missions and reserves, and later on, the simulation policies have impacted on our wellbeing and our sense of ourself and the importance of our culture. So we’re part, we’re all the disciplines, but psychology in particular are embedded into this colonial history, which now we’re challenging as a nation and we’re also privileging Indigenous knowledges.

Pat Dugeons (21:03): A few years ago we had won a grant to do from the Office of Teaching and  Learning to look at indigenising the curriculum. So it had two points. It had, we wanted to indigenise or look at the possibility of indigenising psychology curriculum, but also strategies of increasing Indigenous students into psychology. Just recently, we’ve had this great explosion of people engaging, but previously there were very few Aboriginal students in Psychology for a lot of different reasons. But we started the project and it was a good little project. We were working in very hostile environment though, people really, we cobbled together a group of people who were interested and were progressive in their thinking. And we did develop two frameworks, two important frameworks, three actually. But the two most important was strategies on how to indigenise your curriculum. Also strategies on how to include or encourage Indigenous students into your program.

Pat Dugeons (22:09): So we worked hard on that, and at the end of it, we had a little website up, we produced these reports, and then we all were tied and moved on to other projects. And then recently we won a big NHMRC grant, and there was three big streams of it, and one was education. So we decided that it would be a good idea to revive the Australian Indigenous Psychology Education Project. At that time, I didn’t expect it to be what it became. I thought, oh, I had visions of me and Belle and Jo probably meeting up with some colleagues at conferences and having talks and doing the odd paper, but nothing more than that. But in our absence, the world had changed, and that original project actually was a catalyst for a lot of changes happening, even though they weren’t apparent at that time. But it certainly, the accreditation body, for instance, started looking at what it was doing in terms of including diversity issues.

Pat Dugeons (23:13): So there was a whole lot of different change. Plus I think we had the old people who were probably a bit limited in their thinking. They had retired and we had new people in now, new generations of people who wanted something different from psychology, and they were very much conscious of the whole world. I think the issue for psychology, it’s tried hard to pretend it is a science, and it’s tried hard to pretend that other things don’t impact on it, the social determinants that surround us all and the holistic nature of all disciplines, and particularly psychology, which is the great gift that an Indigenous psychology brings in as well, and the importance of local knowledges and different knowledges. So that change has started happening, and we were probably a part of it. We were certainly, I think the catalyst for changes that had happened in our discipline. And so we reconvened AIPEP with not great expectations, but then it just flourished.

⁠Jasmine Bald (24:17): That must have been so rewarding to have been a part of. Belle and Jo, did you want to add to what Pat described?

Belle Selkerk (24:23): So in particular, the Australian Psychology Accreditation Council, and they’re the body that is responsible for accrediting universities who have an accredited psychology program in Australia. So from that first iteration of AIPEP, they revised some of their accreditation standards, particularly to bring cultural responsiveness into the teaching of Psychology. That was such a game changer and what we kind of call a system shift. And so universities shifted from an optional or a nice to have Indigenous knowledges or cultural responsiveness with working with diverse populations. It was shifted from a nice to have to, you must have this as part of your accreditation standards. And we want aspiring psychologists and young psychologists coming through, or students of psychology, we want them to have these essential foundational learnings and skills as part of Psychology.

Belle Selkerk (25:17): So that really created such a groundswell of change amongst our higher education providers. Part of the Australian Indigenous Psychology Education Project is really supporting universities and higher education providers to do those curriculum changes that they need to do, not just as a matter of accreditation standard, but actually legitimately to, in a heartfelt and ethical way, bring Indigenous knowledges into the teaching of Psychology and educating students around the discipline of Indigenous psychology.

Belle Selkerk (25:51): So aspiring psychologists or people to be aspiring to complete their university education. We didn’t get to see our lived experiences reflected in that curriculum. And I think that really impacted then on my learning trajectory. So the reforming curriculum is important for everyone. So like what Jo said in her introduction, having everyone, whether you’re Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander or not, need to have these foundational knowledges going into the workforce, whether you continue into the psychology workforce or related fields, we need to have these knowledges as part of our foundational understandings. We need to be able to work in culturally responsive ways with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and diverse peoples. So the whole workforce benefits from this decolonial shift that’s happening in Psychology education. And we’re really hoping that more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people or even mature adults who are wanting to return to their education, that they are inspired and can see how Psychology is relevant in their lives, their family lives, their communities’ lives.

Johanna Alexi (27:03): 80% of universities have signed up to this community of practise. And I think that really speaks to the level of importance of capacity building at the moment. So Belle had mentioned that the AIPEP standards that had come in around 2019 and since then has created this really massive movement where university educators now need to upskill themselves to be able to teach this content and do it confidently and also do it justice as well. And that is a massive process because it involves engaging with consultants, engaging with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations, hiring Aboriginal staff. So there’s actually a lot of groundwork that needs to happen, relationship building, and that takes time and process. And so part of that piece has been upskilling university educators, and it’s a big part of what we do in terms of that community of practice. There’s also work around actually embedding Indigenous content in textbooks.

Johanna Alexi (28:04): So there’s some textbook projects that we’re part, involved with. One of them has recently been published. We were a part of Lorelle Burton’s Psychology textbook, which is an introduction to psychology. And I was very fortunate to be a part of Pat, Belle, and Kate’s writing team in doing the Indigenous psychology in Australia chapter, which was one of the first chapters in that textbook. And that’s just been released, and it’s part of that, I guess, foundational work of supporting current workforce, but also what can you do to start supporting that kind of, those textbook materials that go alongside that teaching? So that’s been a really great project.

Pat Dugeons (28:46): When we were studying psychology, the textbooks we had were either American or British. So you never had even Australian based textbooks. So you read all, you look through the textbooks, all the examples were from a different country and English speaking, but different country and all the photos, the case studies, all the content was very much American or British. I think Lorelle Burton herself did a milestone when she produced an Australian introductory to psychology textbook. And all of a sudden you were seeing photos of Australian situations, people that you knew, and Ed’s case studies and whatnot. So that was really a wonderful thing.

Pat Dugeons (29:34): But now we’ve gone with Lorelle Burton’s support a step further, and one of the first chapters in the latest edition of that Introduction to Psychology is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Psychology. The second chapter, because this book is meant for Australia and New Zealand is a Maori psychology chapter. So that’s absolutely fabulous. So going from not recognising yourself overall as a country in a textbook to seeing your country and then your people in there and your realities has been a big step forward. And I think that impacts on everyone, and particularly the students who are studying those textbooks. We’re not on the outside looking in, we’re actually in the room now. So that’s been fantastic.

Belle Selkerk (30:24): But I guess what we’re kind of showing here is that within AIPEP, we have… I’d say we have 101 projects happening at once, but they’re all projects that line up together, that comes together in this kind of multifaceted, decolonising journey, and there’s no one approach. So we’re working with higher education providers. We’ve started working with some partners in high school space, we’re looking at textbook projects. We have partners with our professional psychology bodies. We’re building this workforce of culturally responsive psychology students and hopefully psychologists in the field. But we need to also support the workforce to support these new graduates when they’re coming out. So we need to build that bridge a bit so that when our students of psychology, whether they become registered psychologists or not, but when these new graduates are coming into their field, they are being supported.

⁠Jasmine Bald (31:22): Thank you. This has been a wonderful conversation. I look forward to hearing more in the next episode. And to our listeners, if you would like to learn more about this work, there are interactive papers and fact sheets that accompany these podcasts. Please visit the Emerging Minds website at www.emergingminds.com.au to learn more.

Narrator (31:44): Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com.au to access a range of resources to assist your practise. Brought to you by the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health, led by Emerging Minds. The National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.