Recently Australia celebrated NAIDOC Week, and at St Edmund’s we began Term Three with a special assembly to recognise this significant occasion for our First Australians and help educate our community about the importance of NAIDOC week. NAIDOC Week usually occurs during the July Winter holidays. The season of Winter for many Indigenous communities is when traditional ceremonies and festivals were held, so this week of cultural acknowledgement helps to foster a sense of unity and appreciation of traditional Indigenous culture for all Australians.
This year the NAIDOC theme was ‘For our Elders’. This theme was chosen to recognise the essential role that Elders within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities play as custodians of culture, language, knowledge, stories and community. This year we have been asked to honour the wisdom, guidance and resilience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders and how they have been able to preserve cultural heritage and ensure that traditions of our First Nations people continue today. It is through their resilience and determination, that we are able to celebrate the vibrant, diverse and incredible history of Australia’s original custodians.
In thinking about the resilience of all elders in our society and what so many of our parents, grandparents and great grandparents have lived through, seen and experienced, I started reflecting on how we continually aim to build resilience in our young people and how the term ‘resilience’ can sometimes be misconstrued.
Resilience is more than ‘bouncing back’ from difficult situations or adversity. Difficult times, life challenges and adverse situations can change a person and sometimes we can’t go back to how things were. Resilience therefore is harnessing how we grow through these difficult times, how we effectively cope with the emotions we experience in states of stress and hardship and how we apply these learnings in our everyday interactions and activities. Resilience is being able to feel connected, to have a sense of protection as well as feel respected by ourselves and others.
In order to develop effective resilience, we have to identify warning signs of when things are getting out of balance, effectively analyse the situation, step back and find a way to re-energise. A life-long skill that we continually need to work on and develop.
So in referring back to NAIDOC week, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have demonstrated incredible resilience in their capacity to adapt to adverse change. As we are an Edmund Rice School, I can refer to The Edmund Rice Centre for Justice and Community Education and their partnership with Indigenous communities. Together they have constructed the First Nations Resilience Project to help educate all Australians. “The Edmund Rice Centre has worked with Aboriginal communities across Australia to document stories of resilience as it relates to the ability of Aboriginal people and communities to rebuild and strengthen themselves and their communities through their own knowledges, practices and agency”.
If you would like to learn more about this project please go to: https://www.erc.org.au/first_nations_resilience
Ms Monica Day
Assistant Principal – Student Wellbeing