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