Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Indigenous people responding to the early deaths and high imprisonment rates of Aboriginal men and how these facts relate to the loss of traditional roles and cultural practices. A young woman talks about the loss of her Aboriginal partner and the effect on herself and her children. Then Sasha, Josie and Greg each address their wide-ranging concerns. The interview footage is intercut with animated scenes that illustrate the issues, with relevant statistics as intertitles. Indigenous music accompanies the animated scenes.

Educational value points

• The clip is from Loved Up – Endangered, a film that developed out of discussions between director Tracey Rigney and friends about the lack of Indigenous men available as potential partners. The clip illustrates the meaning of the title through statistics of premature deaths and high rates of incarceration of Indigenous men, and through the responses of the interviewees, who reflect on the significance of this loss to families and communities.

• The clip provides one example of the long-term effects on a family following the death of a young Indigenous man. The young woman talks about the death of her partner and how ‘it hit me really hard’. She says that her daughter Dana, who was a baby when her father died, ‘is really feeling it now’ at the age of 6. The young woman also speaks about the personal history of her partner, including his adoption at 6 weeks of age, meeting his birth mother when he was 15, and never meeting his white father.

• Another interviewee, Sasha, reflects on how difficult it is for some young Indigenous men to escape situations of violence and abuse. In many cases these patterns have become cyclical and intergenerational. Those working to develop interventionist policies in this area usually locate the discussion in a historical context that includes the Indigenous experience of dispossession, loss of traditional cultural knowledge, kinship systems, poverty and the effects of removal policies.

• One of the interviewees, Josie, expresses her perception that for some Indigenous men imprisonment has become a contemporary rite of initiation. She refers to the traditional initiation of young men in Indigenous communities, the rites of passage from childhood to adulthood in which knowledge of country, customs and Dreaming is passed on by Elders. Because communities and families are often dispersed, young men do not always have access to Elders, and therefore to cultural practices to prepare them to take up their roles and responsibilities in society.

• The final interviewee, Greg, raises the question of historical determinants in the patterns of ill-health and the over-representation of Indigenous men in the prison system. He links these patterns to loss of identity and a lack of valued roles in society.