Recreating Songlines from Trauma Trails: The Ceremony of Indigenous Facilitation Practice - Country Holds the Space
Description
This one-hour presentation, designed for the Outdoor Health Forum, explores Indigenous Facilitation Practice as a Country-led, trauma-integrated healing process. Grounded in the principle that Country holds the space, this session highlights how the natural world is not just the setting but a central participant in therapeutic and restorative work.
Session Outline
Participants will be guided through the cultural, ceremonial, and embodied foundations of Indigenous healing practice, approaches that have long existed within First Nations communities and resonate deeply with outdoor health modalities. The presentation focuses on how to create and sustain culturally safe circles for truth-telling and storytelling, mapping trauma, and recreating personal and collective songlines.
Key components of the session include:
Establishing safety through cultural protocol and ceremony on Country
Understanding the Country as co-therapist and knowledge-holder
Mapping trauma through embodied, creative processes: art, movement, music, storytelling
Navigating grief, loss, and identity through layers of emotional release and meaning-making
Deepening facilitator capacity for cultural humility, reflective practice, and debriefing
Building strong, sustainable communities of care and culturally responsive practice
While primarily didactic, the session includes short, guided experiential elements to help participants connect more deeply with the material. Attendees will leave with culturally informed, trauma-specific tools that can be integrated into outdoor and nature-based health settings. This presentation offers a bridge between Indigenous ways of healing and contemporary outdoor health practice, centering Country as guide, witness, and healer.
Dr Carlie Atkinson
Bundjalung & Yiman Woman, CEO | We Al-li
Carlie (Caroline) Atkinson is a Bundjalung and Yiman woman and an accredited Social Worker with a PhD (Charles Darwin University, 2009). Associate Professor Atkinson is an international leader in complex and intergenerational trauma and strengths-based healing approaches in Indigenous Australia. She has focused her career on the interplay between trauma and violence in Aboriginal peoples in Australia, has developed extensive community and practice-based experience through her collaborative co-designed resource development work, and developed Australia’s first adapted, culturally sensitive, reliable and valid Aboriginal trauma assessment measure. She is the CEO of her family organisation, We Al-li, designing and coordinating delivery of Culturally Informed Trauma Integrated Healing Approaches (CITIHA) training and resource development for organisations and communities across Australia focusing on systems transformation and implementation. Associate Professor Atkinson is regularly invited to participate in policy and other high-level meetings for government and non-government organisations including expect advisory positions. She is an Associate Professor (honorary) at the University of Melbourne and Chief Investigator on the NHMRC funded Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future project the MRFF Replanting the Birthing Trees national project. Associate Professor Atkinson is also the founder of the Northern Rivers Community Healing Hub, an Indigenous Framework response to the catastrophic floods in the Northern Rivers in 2022.