Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
transgression; [and became a transgressor;] but she shall be saved through the
childbearing, if they continue in faith and love and sanctification, with sobriety (1
Timothy 2:11-15, ASV).
Many contemporary Aboriginal thinkers are convinced that, historically, the destruction of the social
sphere began with a rearrangement of gender roles in Aboriginal societies and the devaluation of women.
Traditionally, in many Indigenous societies around the world, women, together with men, were the
repositories of cultural knowledge, responsible for handing down tribal law and custom. They were one
of the forces that made possible the stability and continuity of life. Aboriginal women traditionally
shared with men a common religious heritage based on their relationship with nature. Women, as well
as men, were linked without discrimination to the same founding ancestors. Social benefits, as well as
social responsibilities, were, in principle, the same for both sexes. Those societies, in which the centrality
of women to social well-being of the entire community was never questioned, were also characterized
by an equal distribution of goods with the welfare of children and elders of paramount importance.
According to Allen:
Christian missionaries, like their secular counterparts, could not tolerate peoples who
allowed women to occupy prominent positions and decision-making capacity at every
level of society … The colonizers saw (and rightly) that as long as women held
unquestioned power … attempts at total conquest of the continents were bound to fail.
In the centuries since the first attempts at colonization in the early 1500s, the invaders
have exerted every effort to remove Indian women from every position of authority …
and to ensure that no American and few American Indians would remember that
gynocracy was the primary social order of Indian America prior to 1800 (1986:3).
When all the compartments of a social structure become damaged, a society cannot exist anymore; it
loses its social self, which is a group’s cognitive, psychological, and emotional definition and understanding
of themselves as social beings. It includes people knowing where they begin and where they end in a
social and cultural environment, what aspects of the cultural world are parts of the social self and what
aspects are parts of others. It encompasses self-understanding of the group’s capabilities and limitations,
strengths and weaknesses, emotions and cognitions, and beliefs and disbeliefs. On an individual level,
the social self is acquired through a process of socialization. However, this process becomes disrupted
and sometimes impossible when the socializing agents (parents, teachers, shamans) manifest a profound
sense of social worthlessness and inadequacy, and when the social norms become discredited. According
to Sotomayor:
The self-concept can suffer irreparable damage if the socialization process prevents
significant and familiar symbols to be present and reinforced at various levels of
experience. The sense of belonging, crucial in the development of the self-concept,
becomes blurred if one’s language, cultural patterns, and ethnic experiences are not
reflected and supported, but rather given a negative connotation in the environment (as
cited in Bloom, 1980:51).
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