Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
relations. Acts of encroachment, caused by missionaries, settlers or governments, destroyed the central
meaning of culture and its entire social structure. People deprived of their cultural traditions have no
meaning in lives that become reduced to a mere physiological routine. With the loss of moral values
and a sense of heritage, social deterioration inevitably follows.
The colonizers came to North America with their voracious appetite for new lands and economic
resources. When they met with Aboriginal cultures, they quickly realized that, in order to achieve their
ambitious economic goals, they had to apply fixed, dual categories to the inhabitants of the New World.
If the newcomers were “we,” then Aboriginal people had to become “they” or “other” in order for the
colonizers to steal what they wanted, simply because one does not steal from oneself. The invaders did
not see order in the Aboriginal social organization because without familiar structures (British or French
laws), a known code (Christian morality), a text (Bible), they were lost. The invaders clung to the belief
they brought with them. If their conceptual constructions, such as an organized economy, evolution
and development, were fruitful in achieving desired economic ends in this new place, their Aboriginal
opposites (with an emphasis on maintaining balance, different belief systems, oral traditions, reciprocity
and redistribution) must have been detrimental, primitive and, therefore, would lead to stagnation. For
growth (in the European understanding) to be achieved, the colonizers would have to impose their
conceptual constructions on colonized societies to order the perceived chaos.
European desire to command what they saw as chaos was exercised by a method of enframing
(categorizing) or breaking up the existing Indigenous order of spiritual relatedness and substituting it
with an order of known signs and representations (or what became new laws, new religion, new morality)
and containing it into dual categories (ours and theirs). Abstract notions, such as authority, law and
order, were brought to life within the conceptual realm and proclaimed as “objectively existing.” Apparent
objective existence of these notions was evident only through their representations: organized army,
obedient citizens, churches full of practitioners and carefully arranged economic structures. Once the
existing Aboriginal social and cultural structures were rearranged and organized according to the new
laws brought by the colonizers and once the other Indigenous culture was separated from its reality and
incorporated into an abstract meta-reality of new European signs and representations, the process of
colonization was complete and North America fully discovered, regardless of the fact that Dehatkadons,
a traditional chief of the Onondaga, said to Ronald Wright: “You cannot discover an inhabited land.
Otherwise I could cross the Atlantic and discover “England”” (cited in Wright, 1992:5).
Thus, through contact with the missionaries and settlers, Aboriginal people were introduced not only
to new beliefs, but also to a dramatically different canon of acceptable social behaviour. In any stable
society, social actions that people perform follow directly from the norms. The social norms prescribe
what is to be done in any given situation and action follows almost automatically. This kind of automatic,
agreed upon action is vital to social integration and to the integration of the social personality. If people
pause to consider the meaning of every act, their ability to make decisions would be seriously hampered;
they would get frustrated, confused and, eventually, would be unable to act at all. Social norms develop
from moral values. The latter develop from people’s experiences, from the teachings of religions and
from socially accepted ethical principles. Before first contact, Indigenous societies had their own culturally
prescribed norms of proper and acceptable social conduct. These norms developed from years of shared
experiences, from contact with nature seen as a spiritual domain and from what worked in their societies.
Aboriginal people’s morality before contact placed more value on ensuring that relationships between
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