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