Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
Aboriginal people of North America espoused spiritual beliefs about the land and nature, which always
extended beyond any European sense of ownership and created no boundaries between human and
non-human species. For example, “[i]n the culturally constructed world of the Waswanipi [Cree], the
animals, the winds, and many other phenomena, are thought of as being “like persons” in that they act
intelligently and have self-will and idiosyncrasies, and understand, and are understood by men”
(Feit,1987:76).
Nature was the Aboriginal people’s spiritual heritage, since it defined their culture, their way of life,
their fundamental rights, their religious and cultural ceremonies, their patterns of survival and, above
all, their identity. When the settlers expropriated, eroded, plundered, misused or spoiled Aboriginal
lands, this amounted to cultural genocide or a destruction of a culture through physical extermination
of Indigenous people (Chalk and Jonassohn, 1986). Lack of recognition of the relationship to the land
was a denial of the cultural and spiritual heritage of Aboriginal people and, as such, became the root
cause of the loss of identity, the loss of health and subsequent degradation.
Researchers today agree that Western colonialism brought to the New World a dualist view that separates
nature from culture and places culture in a dominant position over nature. Research shows that precontact
Aboriginal societies did not have this binary distinction between nature and culture and they
did not place nature in a sub-dominant position. Examples from today’s Aboriginal societies continue
to support this contention. The Hagen people of highland New Guinea, for example, divide the world
into three categories: humans and human activity, spirits, and the wild (Strathern, 1980). The Nayaka,
a South Indian society, conceive of the natural environment with metaphors that involve relatedness
and not separateness, with the forest perceived as a parent whom one thanks with affection (Bird-Davis,
1993). Almost all Aboriginal people who live in the 21st century have these metaphors of relatedness in
regard to the natural environment.
For anthropologists, this is evidence that symbols and conceptions of relatedness (as opposed to metaphors
of duality) must have been always present in pre-industrial societies. Since the arrival of Europeans and
the introduction of the fur trade, Aboriginal people have been forced to adapt too many aspects of
European lifestyle and have been gradually dispossessed from their traditional lands. Today, researchers
agree that the fur trade was a disaster for Aboriginal people. The colonists brought with them the
Western binary distinction between culture and nature and it supported research exploitation in their
competition for economic growth. Economic growth that they experienced was possible through a
series of inter-lined crises that the invaded societies experienced, which included: massive and growing
impoverishment, food insecurity and non-availability, financial and monetary disarray and environmental
degradation. Aboriginal people found it increasingly difficult to fulfill even the basic requirements of
living and to survive from one day to the next. What social and cultural outcomes would one expect if
this kind of economic philosophy was introduced to societies whose non-dualistic conceptualization of
nature and its relatedness corresponded to economies and lifestyles that demanded less from the
environment, in terms of resources, and contributed to sustainability in the long run? As Martin
admits: “severe cultural disruption and often physical dislocation were commonplace … Missionization,
the ravages of disease, and frontier encroachment acted in concert with the trade to bring about the
Indian’s eventual cultural demise” (1978:2). He further says: “The traders economically seduced the
Indians by displaying their wares and in many other ways fostered capitalistic drives” (1978:9).
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