In the Clinic as Well as the Community

The ngangkari is one of the few Aboriginal religious offices in this atlas that can be described from the holders' own published words, because the ngangkari decided to publish them. In 2013 the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women's Council, an Aboriginal organisation, brought out a book in which ngangkari speak directly about their work, their training and their understanding of health, with their own photographs and paintings; it won awards and went into a further edition. That is a custodian source in the sense this atlas means the term: the people who hold the knowledge decided what went into it. The same council employs ngangkari as staff. Since the 2000s ngangkari on its payroll have worked in clinics, hospitals and mental health services across a region of roughly three hundred and fifty thousand square kilometres and more than twenty communities, seeing patients alongside doctors and nurses rather than instead of them, and the arrangement has since been extended to services beyond that region.

Two things follow for the atlas. First, this is present tense. The office is not a survival being recorded but a working profession with employment, referrals and a place inside a health system. Second, the boundary between what is public and what is not was drawn by the ngangkari themselves, which is the only authority the atlas will accept for that line. What they have described is here. What they have not described is not missing; it is theirs.