Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
people (and people versus spirits) were maintained and on seeing that the needs of the vulnerable
(elders, children, women) were met through caring. Aboriginal people saw morality in terms of protecting
the integrity of relationships and minimizing the hurt. Their perception of what was appropriate and
right was dramatically as different from the convictions that non-Aboriginal people hold as their respective
perceptions of reality. Dorothy Lee, an anthropologist interested in how people from different cultures
perceive their immediate environment, described what she saw while looking at trees outside her window:
“I see trees, some of which I like to be there, and some of which I intend to cut down to keep them from
encroaching further upon the small clearing I made for my house” (1959:1). In the same passage, she
contrasts with the perceptions of Black Elk, a Dakota Native who “saw trees as having rights to the land,
equal to his own … “standing people, in whom the winged ones built their lodges and reared their
families” ”(cited in Lee, 1959:1).
For non-Aboriginal people who invaded Aboriginal lands, morality was a system of rules for adjudicating
rights with competitive individualism defining their social relations. Overlaid on these conceptions
was a sense of linear-directed change, a kind of evolutionary progress, by which the future was not only
to be different from the past but also inevitably better. If they could only change how the Aboriginal
people thought and acted for them to participate in the new dawn of civilization!
The missionaries and the settlers also brought into the New World an old European social hierarchy: “a
woman’s proper place was under the authority of her husband and that a man’s proper place was under
the authority of the priests” (Allen, 1986:38). Their Bible gave permission to use corporal punishment
when women and children misbehaved. Their one and only God was not eager to share his absolute
reign over earthly domains with Aboriginal spirits and manitous. Those not subscribing to Church
dogma were savages in need to be civilized. As Allen (1986) observes, the old social systems of Aboriginal
people were cooperative and autonomous, peace-centred and ritual-oriented, based on ideas of
complementarity and inter-connectedness. For the missionaries and settlers, Aboriginal philosophical
and spiritual concepts were beyond their comprehension, as for most of the Europeans at that time.
Just like in the Americas, Australian missionaries also taught the Aborigines that “men were to be
responsible for the “masculine” productive tasks of the vegetable gardens, and the women were to care
for the feminine decorative display of the flower gardens” (Attwood, 1989:20).
Aboriginal women … who had been the basic providers in the traditional hunter-gatherer
society-had functions in the mission economy which were very limited and marginal …
Like women generally in the nineteenth century, the Aboriginal women … were confined
in small domestic and vocational spaces … As a result of missionary policies, then, the
women lost most of the power they had previously enjoyed in traditional society
(Attwood, 1989:44-45).
As Attwood (1989) further explains, missionaries not only emphasized the boundaries between private
and public space, but also wanted to implant into the Aboriginal minds a duality of mind and body, a
concept totally alien to the federative philosophy of Aborigine people, in order to “civilize” them.
Allen (1986) writes about Father Paul LeJeune, the Jesuit, and his quest to civilize the Montagnais-
Naskapi of the St. Lawrence Valley in the mid-sixteenth century. Father LeJeune’s plan had four parts.
First, LeJeune wanted to establish permanent settlements governed by official authority. “If someone
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