Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
In 1975 through to 1979, the world witnessed the Cambodian Genocide ordered by Pol Pot, the head
of the Khmer Rouge regime, in which 1.7 million people lost their lives (Yale University, 2003). Through
1991 to 1994, the Tutsi elite in Rwanda killed off almost an entire population of the peasant Hutu
(Human Rights Watch, 1999).
There were witnessed genocides that did not look like genocides. Marilyn Young reviews the devastation
of the American war against Vietnam:
[I]n the South, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets, 25 million acres of farmland, 12 million
acres of forest were destroyed, and 1.5 million farm animals had been killed; there were
an estimated 200,000 prostitutes, 879,000 orphans, 181,000 disabled people, and 1
million widows; all six of the industrial cities in the North had been badly damaged, as
were provincial and district towns, and 4,000 of 5,800 agricultural communes. North
and south the land was cratered and planted with tons of unexploded ordnance, so that
long after the war farmers and their families suffered serious injuries as they attempted
to bring the fields back into cultivation. Nineteen million gallons of herbicide had
been sprayed on the South during the war (as cited in Neilson, n.d.:6).
Zinn adds: “By the end of the war, the U.S. had dropped seven million tons of bombs on Vietnam …
or almost one 500-pound bomb for every Vietnamese” (as cited in Nielson, n.d.:3). The same source
states that in a study conducted by the University of Massachusetts in 1992, Americans, on average,
estimated 100,000 Vietnamese deaths, missing the true figure by only 1,900,000.
The consequences of genocidal acts are always tragic: people become dehumanized, terrorized, enslaved
and sacrificed. Clinical experience and research with survivors of massive psychological trauma (such as
witnessed or remembered genocide) indicate that these people are especially prone to suffer from posttraumatic
stress disorder, depression, and changes in memory, consciousness, identity and personality.
Researchers also agree that the memories of genocide, trauma and tragedy stay in people’s collective
memory for generations to come. In his book, Blood on the Wattle, Bruce Elder describes massacre after
massacre in which Aboriginal people were killed in Australia. These massacres, as Elder says:
[L]ive on in the Aboriginal memory - as if the tribal group survived. At night, beside
the camp fire or under the stars, the story would be told and retold. The massacre, or
massacres, became tribal history. They were told in the peculiarly clipped, and poetically
repetitive style, which characterizes so much Aboriginal storytelling. The central truth
of the tragedy is revealed and the details are spun around it like a beautifully symmetrical
spider’s web. It is only when someone - an Aboriginal person, a researcher, a government
officer - records them in print or on tape that they are revealed to people outside the
tribal group. They are like fossils. They lie dormant, waiting to be exposed (1988:192).
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