Healing Trauma: Perpsectives And Attitudes, 49

What about forgiveness? A lot of people are angry these days, about a lot of things, and often not without some justification. The collective survivors of the worst possible collective trauma are going to have the most difficult time with this. Maybe. I have known privileged white people to hold grudges over the most trivial offences. Aboriginal peoples in Canada tend to be on a particular wave of rage right now. Hostility, actually. It would seem that the progress being made towards truth and reconciliation isn't enough for some, and that is to be understood. I would imagine that there are some indigenous persons who won't be happy until the colonist structure of Canada is completely dismantled and everyone who is not native returns to Europe, China, India and the Philippines. This is not going to happen. I think the vast majority are more reasonable than this and would settle for something that will help them to move forward out of poverty and cultural and social marginalization. There is a revival of interest in preserving and learning and speaking the languages of the First Nations, though many are still dying out. There is also a revival of "Native Spirituality and Spiritual Practices." Yes. Great Spirit and sweet grass. They don't like Christianity, at least a lot of them don't. Given that Canada is a secular country, this antipathy towards Christianity is going to be encouraged. There is a general attitude that Native people should practice their own spiritual traditions since Christianity is for them a religion of oppression brought over from Europe by the Colonizers. This is more truism than truth. There are First Nations people who are also faithful and practicing Christians. Their attitudes and positions towards their native spiritual practices are going to be mixed and diverse. There will be those who will want to find some way of compromise and integrate the various practices and ideologies. There are some who completely disown their traditional spiritual beliefs because for them Christianity is going to be it. A couple of years ago, in northern BC there was just such a controversy when members of an aboriginal Christian church protested against a sweat lodge being built on their property, claiming that these were demonic influences being introduced into their sacred Christian space. Even though I am a Christian, I'm playing neutral here. I quite understand and support First Nations people's desire to reconnect with their traditional spirituality. I also understand, as a Christian, that Jesus Christ is not a uniquely, nor particularly European entity. He actually was born and lived in the Middle East, and the Christian religion, with or without European help, is represented quite strongly all over the world. Unfortunately this has also come to be conflated with European cultural values and, given the complicity between church and stare during colonization, is it any wonder that the Church would be tarred with the same brush as the government, especially for the role they played in not just cultural assimilation, but cultural genocide. Still, when the heirs of the colonizers, whether in government or academia, assume that native people should naturally practice native spirituality, I would say that they are being insufferably patronizing. Native people, as persons and individuals, alone can make that choice for themselves, be it to revive their traditional practices, become Christians, or atheists, or agnostics, or Jews, or Muslims, or Buddhists... or whatever. I don't expect that forgiveness is going to come cheap. It never does, nor should it. I am also aware of the huge importance of restorative justice and that it be demonstrated in ways that honour the integrity of all parties concerned. However, back to forgiveness. This is really the only way out of the suppurating wound of trauma. Nothing else is going to heal it. Otherwise, more generations will remain trapped in a festering anger that will lead to more suicides, more violence, more self-sabotage. I feel I have a right to make these kinds of statements, even though I am white, because White Privilege or no White Privilege, as one who has been harassed and humiliated by police, lived in poverty and underemployment and now has to make do living in social housing, and probably for the rest of my life, I have also suffered at the hands of the same oppressors that our indigenous people are justly angry at, and I have suffered in much the same way. Skin colour is no guarantee. For anything.