Ngangkari

A ngangkari is a traditional healer of the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara Lands, the tri-state desert country where South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory meet. The office is not entered by application or by training in the ordinary sense. In the accounts ngangkari have given of themselves, the capacity is given rather than acquired, usually through the family and often from a grandparent, and it is recognised in a child by adults who already hold it; the child is then taught over years by those relatives. Both men and women are ngangkari, and some specialise.

The work is organised around kurunpa, the spirit, which is understood as the seat of a person's health rather than as a separate religious concern: a spirit that has been frightened, dislodged or taken accounts for illness with no other visible cause, and the ngangkari's task is to find it, retrieve it and put it back. The methods described publicly are physical and specific. A ngangkari uses the hands to locate and draw out what should not be in a body, uses breath, and carries mapanpa, the healing instruments and substances that come with the office. Beyond that the atlas does not go. What a particular ngangkari knows, what mapanpa a particular healer holds and what is done in a particular case belong to that healer, and this entry records the office rather than the practice of anyone in it.

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.