NAIDOC in November

Happy NAIDOC everyone!

In response to the pandemic NAIDOC this year is at an entirely different time to the usual July celebrations, but the week feels no less important to our community. The 2020 theme is the powerful phrase Always Was, Always Will Be.

So what is NAIDOC? Singer songwriter Dewayne Everettsmith explains to TSO Daily Dose before performing It’s Like Love:

NAIDOC Week for me personally is an opportunity to showcase my culture and my values to the rest of the community of lutruwita/Tasmania. However, I’d like to note that, as Aboriginal people we’re always celebrating who we are. There’s not just one week out of a year that we celebrate who we are. Our pride and our cultural values, our cultural practices, our ceremonies, we do that all the time.

So NAIDOC Week is an opportunity for the broader community to take the time to come in and celebrate with us and be part of our stories and hear our stories that go back a long way and connect with us meaningfully.

It’s Like Love is a song that recognises the importance of unconditional love in our life in the sense of giving unconditional love and, more importantly if not equally, receiving unconditional love, opening ourselves up to be able to receive unconditional love.

The song for me goes back to a really personal place. It’s about my grandmother, Bev Smith, who’s the wife of Stan Smith who’s the great-grandchild of Fanny Cochrane Smith from the Nichols Rivulet area. And the song is about how she instilled pride and dignity. My grandmother, she’s a non-Aboriginal woman, but she still went out and she learnt our culture, as Aboriginal people, and she instilled that pride in our family.

So It’s Like Love is about that unconditional love. And it highlights the importance that non-Aboriginal play in instilling pride in Aboriginal people and in, specifically, our young people. Everybody has a role to play. Everybody is connected to the stories that go back over 60,000 years.

And similar to NAIDOC Week is about taking that opportunity to not lose 200 years of history but gain 60,000 years of history. That their history and stories go back 60,000 years not just 200 years. Us as Aboriginal people, we always had that connection. Always known the importance of that connection and the belonging but NAIDOC Week is an opportunity for you to understand how important that connection and belonging to Country is.