Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Introduction
According to De Kerckhove, in an oral culture one only knows what one can recall, thus, “there is a
heavy emphasis on memory, not merely the private memory … but the collective memory of the audience
… This kind of memory is contained, not outside the rememberer, but in the words, rhythms, gestures
and performances of enacted recollections” (1991:82). De Kerckhove also says that, in oral cultures,
sense is made and organized around vivid images acting in context: “the oral discourse is build around
narratives” (1991:83-84).
It is proposed that early periods of colonization, during which Indigenous (oral) culture experienced
ultimate death and destruction and during which the images of death became, in a sense, imprinted
upon Indigenous people’s collective (non-) remembering consciousness, constitute the nucleus of
traumatic memory. This nucleus is so condensed with sadness, so pregnant with loss, so heavy with
grief that its very weight constitutes a good reason why people often do not talk about it or, as one
Aboriginal woman said, “it is probably too horrible to turn our gaze in that direction.” 1
Probably, “it” is so horrible because the trauma is now on the inside, as its images and grief became an
unspoken internalized narrative of Aboriginal people. This study (including the findings and conclusions)
may cause some uneasiness in the reader. Difficult issues are discussed and painful memories are recalled.
However, it needs to be done, together with a purposeful universalization of Aboriginal people’s experiences.
Making someone’s experience (and his or her reaction to this experience) universal, means to make it
available and understandable to everyone. The process of this universalization of trauma is in direct
opposition to another process that has been employed so many times by researchers, government
institutions and the general public: particularization. In this process, Indigenous people’s experiences
and their memories have been turned into something unusual and exotic, something singled out among
many “normal” lives, “normal” reactions and “normal” memories; something minute, specific only to
“them” and not to others; and something encapsulated, something marginal (and “marginal” also means
close to the limit of acceptability). This study writes from these margins to which Aboriginal people
were pushed by particularization of their suffering because, as McCormick says: “The time has come …
to move beyond a culturally encapsulated view of the world” (1998:295).
1
Personal conversation with the authors on 14 March 2003.
10