Healing the Aboriginal Offender: Identity Construction Through Therapeutic Practice

In day-to-day social discourse, & in the specific case of bureaucratic & clinical practice addressed in this paper, the term “Aboriginal” has other more profound implications: here it has connotative qualities that can homogenize diverse & often competing notions of localized (even urbanized) identities. This discussion will critique the clinical deployment of aboriginality as a discursive practice within a therapeutic setting for incarcerated men of Aboriginal ancestry: being Aboriginal is both a rhetorical means to therapeutic ends & a way of reconciling a bureaucratic policy which does not adequately acknowledge local indigenous identities in the first place. (4 refs.)