Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
could stop the wanderings of the Savages, and give authority to one of them to rule the others, we
would see them converted and civilized in a short time” (Leacock, 1906:27 as cited in Allen, 1986:39).
Second, he advocated the institution of punishment: “How could they understand tyranny and respect
it unless they wielded it upon each other and experienced it at each other’s hands? He was most
distressed that the “Savages”, as he termed them, thought physical abuse a terrible crime” (Allen, 1986:39).
Third, he believed that Aboriginal children should be taken from their families and placed in Jesuit-run
institutions, located far from the children’s homes: “The Savages prevent their [children’s] instruction;
they will not tolerate the chastisement of their children, whatever they may do, they permit only a
simple reprimand” (Leacock, 1906:28 as cited in Allen, 1986:39). As Allen observes, “what he had in
mind was more along the lines of torture, imprisonment, battering, neglect, and psychological torment
– the educational methods to which Indian children in government and mission schools would be
subjected for some time after Conquest was accomplished” (1986:39).
Lastly, Father LeJeune wanted to introduce a new social structure in which Aboriginal people would
adhere to the rules of patriarchal institutions of male dominance and female submission. Following
instructions of his Church, Father LeJeune taught that a sacrament of marriage binds a man who has all
the authority and his obedient wife for life. Divorce would not be allowed under any circumstances if
the marriage had been consummated. Birth control was absolutely forbidden and birth prevention was
to be considered a grave sin. Father LeJeune was not alone in his quest to civilize Indigenous people.
All Aboriginal communities across the Americas and in the Pacific region met “their Father LeJeune” at
one point or another in their life, who, like all other missionaries, brought the same message: replace “a
peaceful, non-punitive, non-authoritarian social system wherein women wield power by making social
life easy and gentle with one based on child terrorization, male dominance, and submission of women
to male authority” (Allen, 1986:40-41). Often, the missionaries succeeded in altering Aboriginal
behavioural patterns. Trigger says that in 1648: “A Christian woman who lived in Ossossane is reported
to have beaten her four-year-old son, a form of behaviour hitherto not reported among the Huron’s and
one that they would have regarded as disgusting and inhumane. The Jesuits, who believed that the
Huron’s had to acquire a new sense of discipline in order to be good Christians, heartily approved of her
action” (1985:267).
When Aboriginal people were forced to convert to Christianity and transform their morality to adhere
to Christian ethics, they were also forced to transform their social self concurrently with a transformation
of their basic meaning system. A transformation of social self changes the sense of who people are and
how they belong to the social situation. New moral norms became a defining factor for the appropriate
gender behaviour of men and women. New religion shaped norms pertaining to sexual behaviour and
it influenced norms of dress, physical activities, entertainment and rituals. New religion also legitimated
gender distinction in work roles, home responsibilities, child care obligations, education, marriage
commitments, political duties and legal status. Women were to become subordinate to men, according
to Saint Paul’s view of the proper place of women:
Let a woman learn in quietness with all subjection. But I permit not a woman to teach,
nor to have dominion over men but to be in quietness. For Adam was first formed, then
Eve; and Adam was not beguiled, but the woman being beguiled hath fallen into
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