Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
from their more conservative colleagues. This report sees the necessity of discussing issues of genocide
in a public and/or academic arena. This part of the study is intended to initiate a discussion and illustrate
the contention that Aboriginal people in the Americas, throughout the centuries, had to deal with
strong, relentless forces of annihilation that were as evil and destructive as the Nazi’s power was during
World War II. It is only due to their cultural strength that some Aboriginal people survived to pass
painful memories onto the generations after. Again, Aboriginal people’s experiences were not particular
in the world history of oppression.
It has been pointed out that historic colonialism produced a profound alteration in the socio-cultural
milieu of all subjugated societies, but Aboriginal people in North America do not stand alone in the
annals of historical injustice. Glaring examples include the forced relocations of Indigenous people in
South Africa, slavery on the African continent and the stolen generations of Indigenous people in
Australia. Terrifying examples of oppressive tendencies in other historical contexts include the Jewish
Holocaust and the internment of Japanese nationals in Canada. A few examples of societies and cultures
affected by visible genocide were presented. However, the reader should note that there were many
others.
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (1989) defines genocide as a “the murder of a whole race or
group of people.” The term was adopted after World War II to describe, according to the definition of
the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (adopted by
resolution at the United Nations General Assembly), an organized, planned action to destroy, in whole
or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Genocide may manifest itself in killing members
of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to
bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part, and forcibly transferring children of one group
to another group. Genocide is a punishable crime under international law. The world became conscious
about genocide only after World War II, in which the xenophobic nationalism of the German Nazi
movement had destroyed millions of lives across Europe and beyond.
The Nazis believed that the Aryan race (of which the Germans supposedly represented the purest
strain) was the superior race; the one destined to rule over inferior races in the East. In Hitler’s pathological
obsessions, the Jewish people were a counter-race whose aim was to enslave and ultimately destroy the
Aryan race (Carr, 1979). The Jewish people had to be exterminated to satisfy Hitler’s irrational mania.
A possible four and a half million Jewish people perished during the Holocaust, although some estimates
are much higher. “Special camps were constructed at Chelmno, Belcec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek
and at Auschwitz, where gas chambers were built on Himmler’s orders … The camp commandant at
Auschwitz calculated in 1945 that two-and-a-half million Jews had been gassed there and a further half
million had died of hunger and illness” (Carr, 1979:350).
The same fate awaited the Romanian people (Gypsies) and Slavs, as they were considered inferior. “[I]t
was known at least thirty years ago that between 500,000 and 750,000 [Gypsies] died in camps …
More recent research shows that there were as many as a million more Gypsies exterminated” (Churchill,
1998:37). Hitler’s plan for the de-population of Eastern Europe and the resettlement of Aryan colonists
was laid out by his right hand, Himmler, and involved depriving Polish people, Czechoslovakians,
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