"Milbulgali Bagili": A systematic scoping review of the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advocacy 1940-1970

Issue addressed Health promotion, the process of enabling people to increase control over their health, implies advocacy and empowerment on behalf of others. This does not account for the phenomena whereby Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have advocated to strengthen the determinants of their own and their communities' health. This paper provides a systematic scoping review of the published literature that documents Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advocacy to improve community empowerment during the time 1940-1970. The objectives of the review were to establish: 1. The extent to which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advocacy has been documented; 2. The extent to which the literature is written from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspective; 3. The extent to which local community-level advocacy has been documented; and 4. How advocacy occurred. Methods The Informit database was systematically searched, publications selected against inclusion criteria, and themes synthesised to map key concepts, types of evidence and gaps in research. Results Based on this systematic search, 30 papers were found. The four key themes identified were: individual advocates, black organisations, international solidarity and black and white people working together. Conclusions Despite the many gaps in the literature, there is documented evidence of considerable outcomes from advocacy. So what? The concept of advocacy and indeed, health promotion itself, may need to be decolonised, and that the concept of "everyday resistance" may more accurately encompass the diverse repertoire of actions which took place between agents of resistance and agents of dominant power.