Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
regardless of context and objective reality. However, this is how Aboriginal people became bracketed in
the category of inferior human beings. Obviously, categories are simple to manipulate. Once the
conquered world was organized into convenient groupings (we and they), both materially and conceptually,
it was easier to control, command, supervise and order. It was like taming water: it cannot be carried
unless it is put into containers and once it is contained, it is even possible to change its state from liquid
to frozen.
The history of colonization of the New World is a tragic story in which the main protagonists are the
powerful forces of dualism, domination, representation, enframing (categorizing) and instrumentalism.
The Indigenous traditions were perceived by the dominant culture as an obscure repository of outdated
traditions, far inferior to the achievement-oriented, competitive and intrepid Europeans. As
Wright states: “whites are soldiers, Indians are warriors; whites live in towns, Indians in villages; whites
have kings and generals, Indians have chiefs; whites have states, Indian have tribes; Indian have ghost
dances, whites have eschatology” (1992:x).
Before contact with European invaders, Aboriginal people had their own cultural world-view that was
an objective and stable social fact to each and every individual born into Aboriginal societies. Their
sacred universes were well articulated and their spirituality was validated in a variety of social situations;
thus, reinforcing its own stability in a continuous social process. Aboriginal people’s world-view, however
alien to the newcomers, was an objective system of cultural meanings by which people, past and future,
were integrated into a coherent cultural biography. In this biography, passed from generation to generation
through means of social transmission, every Aboriginal person could locate herself or himself in relation
to other members of the society or to the world outside, and could position himself or herself within the
social order and in the sacred universe.
The continuity in individual and communal life is dependent on the coherence of meanings in the
cultural world-view. When this coherence is disturbed and eventually destroyed, cultural and social
transformation follow, which causes discontinuities in cultural identity formation. The shared cultural
reality is destroyed and people are no longer able to find their way in the forest of new cultural idioms
and symbols. When people’s expert knowledge about the world around them is discredited, they are
incapable of understanding the outside forces that forcibly shape their lives. Consequently, they stop
participating in their own destiny, become marginalized as un-knowledgeable objects caught in the
process of transition, dislocation and oppression.
A total cultural transformation in any society always begins with a change in the system of beliefs and
practices. Indigenous people of the Americas always emphasized direct contact with The Spiritual.
This was understood in both their immediate surroundings and what is beyond them. The focus was
placed on establishing and maintaining close relations with spirits.
In the beginning were the people, the spirits, the gods, the four-legged, the two-legged,
the wingeds, the crawlers, the burrowers, the plants, the trees, and the rocks. There was
the moon, the sun, the earth, the waters of earth and sky. There were stars, the thunders,
the mountains, the plains, the mesas and the hills. There was the Mystery. There were
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