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 />
immoral people who had no concept of property (Williams, 1986). The Europeans saw the seemingly<br />
w<strong>and</strong>ering <strong>and</strong> homeless tribes as not being aware of the value of l<strong>and</strong> they walked upon. Such a view<br />
allowed the Europeans to justify the appropriation of <strong>Aboriginal</strong> l<strong>and</strong>s (Attwood, 1996).<br />
There was no respect for the existing <strong>Aboriginal</strong> law <strong>and</strong> culture: “We must starve them off to get rid of<br />
them - they are a squalid dirty lot” (Elder, 1988:54). Elder cites opinions of many non-<strong>Aboriginal</strong><br />
people: “The best thing that can be done is to shoot all the blacks <strong>and</strong> manure the ground with their<br />
carcasses” (William Cox, L<strong>and</strong>owner, 1824 as cited in Elder, 1988:42). “I look at blacks as a set of<br />
monkeys, <strong>and</strong> the earlier they are exterminated from the face of the earth the better” (cited in Elder,<br />
1988:9). Those who resisted British domination were killed as being “nothing better than dogs, <strong>and</strong> …<br />
it was no more harm to shoot them than it would be to shoot a dog when he barked at you” (Reverend<br />
William Yate, 1835 as cited in Elder, 1988:9).<br />
The non-<strong>Aboriginal</strong> people represented the attitude of domination over nature: “Consciousness is human,<br />
<strong>and</strong> involves reason. A serious gap exists between us <strong>and</strong> the rest of nature. Nature is to be watched,<br />
pitied, <strong>and</strong> taken care of if it behaves” (Bly, 1980:8). Aborigines, like the wildlife, were bracketed in the<br />
category of worthless species: “it will be a happy day for Western Australia <strong>and</strong> Australia at large when<br />
the natives <strong>and</strong> the kangaroo disappear” (Whitelock, 1985:43-44), as one member of the Western<br />
Australian legislative assembly said in 1892. In only 200 years of settlement, this contemptuous attitude<br />
for the l<strong>and</strong> <strong>and</strong> its Indigenous people, coupled with the genocidal tendencies of the invaders, generated<br />
a profound change in the social, cultural <strong>and</strong> physical l<strong>and</strong>scape of the <strong>Aboriginal</strong> world. Then came<br />
the missionaries who, as Tatz admits, were:<br />
[A]ctive agents of various governmental policies, such as protection-segregation,<br />
assimilation, so-called integration <strong>and</strong> some of the latter-day notions like selfdetermination<br />
<strong>and</strong> self-management. More than agents, they were delegated an<br />
astonishing array of unchallengeable powers. Uniquely - in terms of modern missionary<br />
activity in colonized societies - mission boards became the sole civil authority in their<br />
domains. They ran schools, infirmaries, farms <strong>and</strong> gardens, provided water, sewerage<br />
<strong>and</strong> similar public utility services, established dormitories, built jails, prosecuted<br />
“wrongdoers”, jailed them, counselled them, controlled their incomes, forbade their<br />
customs <strong>and</strong> acted as sole legal guardians of every adult <strong>and</strong> every child. Almost<br />
incidentally, they also tried to Christianize the inmates according to their varying dogmas<br />
<strong>and</strong> doctrines, with little success (1999:18-19).<br />
As Tatz says, for non-<strong>Aboriginal</strong> Australians today:<br />
[G]enocide connotes either the bulldozed corpses at Belsen or the serried rows of<br />
Cambodian skulls, the panga-wielding Hutu in pursuit of Tutsi victims or the ethnic<br />
cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. As Australians see it, patently we cannot be connected<br />
to, or with, the stereotypes of Swastika-wearing SS psychopaths, or crazed black tribal<br />
Africans. Apart from Australia’s physical killing era, there are doubtless differences<br />
between what these perpetrators did <strong>and</strong> what we did in assimilating people <strong>and</strong> removing<br />
their children (1999:2).<br />
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