Leading from Between by Catherine Althaus

Author:Catherine Althaus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2019-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

6

Barriers to Indigenous Participation

and Leadership Practice

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter we present interviewees’ understandings of the factors that act as barriers to Indigenous participation and the development and exercise of Indigenous leadership in the Queensland and BC public services. In the next chapter we will report their views on what changes are required in government policy and practice, and on the part of non-Indigenous public servants, if those barriers are to be addressed. As in the previous chapter, our approach reflects our goal of giving voice to the Indigenous public servants who participated in our study and our narrative is designed to provide a frame for their experience and understanding.

BARRIERS AND OBSTACLES EMERGING

FROM NON-INDIGENOUS SOCIETY

Overt Racism

Some interviewees in both BC and Queensland shared examples of overt racism and prejudice in the workplace and outside it, affecting themselves, colleagues, and family, and the Indigenous community more broadly. While less frequent than discussion of racism in its more subtle forms (see next section), these examples serve as a reminder that though overt racism may no longer be an everyday experience in the government context, it continues to exist. The experience of one Queensland public servant illustrates this point:

the first week that I was there [in a child protection agency] I remember very clearly I jumped in the lift and all of a sudden bang, bang. These two big fellows [senior police officers] standing beside me. All of a sudden as the lift moved, one of them sort of gave me a bit of a nudge and I looked at him and he turned around and I won’t swear, but he used a few swear words, and he said basically, ‘So you’re the f***ing black so and so that thinks he is going to come here and change everything.’ I just said, oh, not really mate. I said there are quite a few of us around these days. You know, if you get rid of me, we’re still coming.

BC participants cited examples of racist name calling, lack of managerial action to call out racism and, in the final case mentioned below, racist acts intended to end a participant’s career:

The conservation officers were really prejudiced. This one guy. He called me a stupid Indian. I told my supervisor and he said [if you want to bring it forward] you need to find out the source, [but] you need to let it go.

There’s a couple of people here who I’ve worked with and I will never work with again, based on how they treated Aboriginal staff.

Another time, a couple of years after we were having a silent auction for Christmas, I said I would donate some fillets of salmon. [After I brought in the salmon] … I got a call from the Conservations Officers because they said someone had claimed it was a case of illegal selling of salmon from an Indian. They were going to take it to Ottawa. And [they] did.

Another interviewee recounted a colleague saying to him “‘You write well for an Aborigine.’ And

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