Today I listened to a talk by Kirsten Thorpe titled “Critical Librarianship – Indigenous Librarianship”. She brought up a very good point about Indigenous trauma in collections and archives. She said it should be recognised that archives are places of Sorry Business (an Aboriginal term meaning grieving, death, loss, and traumatic events). As such, should also be a trauma-based approach to helping Aboriginal people when navigating this, and workplaces should have special means of support for Aboriginal people. The support that Indigenous people need is different to the standard applied for non-Indigenous people and institutions have to recognise this and educate themselves.
She provided the following resource about supporting Aboriginal people who have been affected by the Stolen Generations:
https://healingfoundation.org.au/
There is also a course by the Australian Society of Archivists called “A Trauma-Informed Approach to Managing Archives”:
https://www.archivists.org.au/events/event/a-trauma-informed-approach-to-managing-archives