Truth Telling and the “Lead Splinter”: Aboriginal Elders’ Perspectives on Community Service Provision and Intergenerational Trauma

This article is based on PhD research aimed at improving community services for remote Aboriginal people with intergenerational trauma. It focuses on the role that Yamatji Aboriginal Elders played in cocreating a framework to enhance service provision for Aboriginal clients and the importance of local truth telling in this endeavour. Elders specified that local truth telling was essential in building shared understandings of healing from intergenerational trauma between Aboriginal people and community service providers. The characterisation of intergenerational trauma as a “lead splinter”, continually poisoning the wellbeing of Aboriginal people provided an illustration of trauma and the complexities of facilitating healing. The findings emphasise the need for community service providers to undertake truth telling to understand and resolve these key challenges. This engagement facilitates the decolonisation of social work practice through deeper knowledge of local history, incorporation of Aboriginal perspectives of wellbeing, and the development of culturally based approaches to social work with people with intergenerational trauma. IMPLICATIONS Understanding historical trauma and intergenerational trauma can inform meaningful social work practice with Aboriginal service users. Decolonising community services and social work practices needs to include an emphasis on local truth telling.