Reflection About Aboriginal Studies

Megann Schmidt

Final Reflection

Intro to Aboriginal Studies

1.) Throughout this course, I have experienced many different forms of personal growth, but I would say the two major areas were open-mindedness and research skills. Before this course, I alway thought my lifestyle was the correct way to live because it seemed to work very well for me. However, after learning more about the Aboriginal way of life, I have become much more open-minded to other lifestyles and cultures. I no longer think of my lifestyle as being correct, but I recognize this lifestyle is fulfilling and best for me, while another culture or way of life can make someone else just as happy and be just as fulfilling for them. Therefore, I’ve grown to be more open minded and

One challenge was dealing with how depressing parts of this course were when we had to learn all about how terrible the Aboriginal people were treated. Many times I really dreaded watching the lectures because I felt like every lecture was just describing another way Aboriginals were treated unequally. Therefore, during that time, I tried to do my continued research into Aboriginal success despite these challenges, so I could finish the discussion and posts feeling more upbeat. However, once we started to learn more about Aboriginal success and new rights, the course became a lot more interesting and rewarding to me, so I no longer dreaded the lectures. Additionally, another challenge I faced throughout the course was that I had basically no background knowledge on Australian history to use to understand the time periods and circumstances of events we learned about in the course. Consequently, I had to do additional research while watching the lectures to learn what was going on in Australia at certain times so I could understand the context of events discussed. This forced me to put more time into the lectures, but because I did had previous knowledge of American Indigenous cultures, I believe I was able to understand Aboriginal culture deeper by comparing it to Native American cultures. Therefore, in the end being from America turned out to be both a blessing and a curse throughout this