Guided Reflection on Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander People

Running Head: Guided Reflection 1
Guided Reflection
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

Running Head: Guided Reflection 2
Guided Reflection
The main emphasis of this assignment is to provide a guided reflection on the interaction with
Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people during a tenor of my academics while taking a subject
of Contemporary Indigenous Health and Wellbeing (CIHWB). A short analytical consideration
will be discussed that follows the importance and the nature of the reflection. For describing the
reflective exercises, Gibbs Cycle has been used. On the whole, a description of the problem,
reflections on issue, evaluation, analysis conclusion and action plan will be included in this
assignment.
Aboriginal people have strong cultures and communities and are the first people of Australia
(Omer & Abdularhim, 2017). Before interaction I have no idea about the cultural believes of
Aboriginal people. That’s why I took interest to interact with different people of my class so that
I can understand about their knowledge, believes and values that they have related to their
culture and health. I know people from different religion and believes have different knowledge
and believes about their culture and they do not want to change in it. I realized that for the
improvement of the health, a responsive and culturally respectful health system is important to
introduce in the Aboriginal people (Qureshi, 2017). For the considered reflection, I have
followed with three activities following this subject to determine the health and wellbeing needs
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community. I am looking forward to support my
reflection with learning and development activities, which is suitable for people’s development.
The plan is focused on setting a plan while recognizing the communal, social and emotional
wellbeing using policies and procedures.
In yarning circle of CIHWB different types of activities were completed. Entire class participated
in these activities under the guidance of our tutor. In the first activity, in week 4 we were

Running Head: Guided Reflection 3
introduced to a short documentary named Barbakiureia followed by an in class group discussion
(Winkel et al., 2017). The documentary reflected on Aboriginal people and showed the
unfairness of Australia’s present and past Aboriginal policies. It sums up the role of the social
attitude and policies towards the Indigenous people of Australia. The documentary was based on
the reverse role where whites were Aboriginal people and other group played as colonizers. It
basically tells the viewers that when one group tries to control over the second group, then what
will be the wrong in society. I was shocked to see the past condition of Aboriginal people
through this documentary. My thoughts were completely blank for few seconds. In the past
Aboriginal people had suffered a lot physically and mentally, which I can’t even imagine. They
were asked to leave their houses, children’s were taken away from their parents, there were
hardly any jobs and facilities (transportation, education and health) were available for them to
survive. Before watching the documentary I had different thoughts about Aboriginal people. In
past I always thought that Indigenous people are always engaged in illegal activities like
alcoholism and drug abuse. But after watching the documentary my thoughts have completely
changed. I recognized that socially isolated behavior of the Aboriginal people is a reflection of
their previous experiences. Due to their past experiences, it is very difficult for Aboriginal people
to trust anyone. But for the wellbeing of the Aboriginal peoples, it is very important and
necessary to bring them back to the society. And to do this it is necessary to build up the trust
with them. After knowing the history of Aboriginal people how they lost their land and access to
facilities I felt empathetic towards Aboriginal peoples. It made me realize that my thoughts were
stereotypical about Aboriginal people. Watching a documentary was an effective tool, which
helped me to be non-judgmental about the behavior and appearance of Aboriginal people. This
documentary played an important role to change my thoughts and I started searching and leaning