Aboriginal - Girls Action Foundation

By Stephanie Wood
Aboriginal women’s leadership can take on many meanings. It means women in the
Aboriginal community getting involved in the community, taking roles and making
changes for the better of Aboriginal people. It means Aboriginal women making better
lives for their children after the many scarring effects on mothers after residential
schools. It means Aboriginal women completing their education to get a good job to
support themselves or their families on their own terms. It means Aboriginal women
helping their children with school or sports. It means helping other women who have
found themselves in messes they can’t make their way out of on their own. It means
doing all you can for others, as well as working to make your life meet your own
expectations. The Aboriginal women who deserve to be admired are not only those who
can take on titles, though they definitely deserve credit. Those who deserve admiration
are all those women who work through struggles and efforts in their lives continuously
until they can say they are happy and strong. Those who deserve admiration are those
who work hard for those close to them, and when I think of strong women leaders, I
immediately began to think of those within my family.
I strongly admired my great grandmother, Eva, for living through the oppression of
Aboriginal people through the twentieth century, for surviving, for not letting herself
fall apart but staying a gentle person until her last years. She did have struggles; many
women were weren’t fully capable, as mothers, as they had their own experiences
haunting them, living on rough reserves and having dark pasts of harsh education and
meager home lives. She passed some years ago, but when she was young she had a
husband and children, and her life at home I still don’t know much about. I know that
it was hard. I know that she was greatly loved, greatly respected, and greatly cherished
among our family and friends and in the Aboriginal community. I know her house
was comforting, and I know she helped everyone she could and watched over my
grandmother’s children when it grew to be too much. To be remembered so vividly
and valued as someone devoted and as a giver is to be an Aboriginal leader. Aboriginal
people value these qualities, and my great-grandmother Eva expressed them through
her life.
Stephanie Wood
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