KILLING BEAUTY IN North America

Killing beauty in north America

Dr. Constance Buck

Introduction

We live in a time that requires a connection to heart. To approach these difficult times with intellect without heart disregards the talent and offerings of millions of people, including ourselves. Our history, as white Europeans, entailed slaughter and a disregard of the original inhabitants. My great grandfather, General Anson Mills, was part of this history. I have come to peace with my ancestry and wish to leave behind a legacy of re-membering, so that those that come after me, our children, include Other as valuable contributors to a saner world. May it be so.

Black Elk, a Oglala Sioux, wrote the following: 

“When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I was them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there, there in the bloody snow. It was a beautiful dream.” (Black Elk in Neihardt, 1972, p. 276). 

The same can be said of us, my white European ancestors. In 2001I earned my doctorate degree in Clinical Psychology from Pacifica Graduate institute. I view humans through psyche, or Soul. Psyche includes that which we are aware of (conscious), and that which we are not (unconscious). Hurting in soul leaves us bereft of vision, feeling harmed and more willing to harm others. We tend to elect leaders that express our own unconscious as a collective.

Soul will express herself, with or without our conscious awareness. It is my hope, with this writing, that we become as aware (conscious) as possible and approach our predicament with as much heart as possible.

We created this country in a field of genocide. Not becoming aware or admitting this does not change anything. As long as we remain in denial, genocide will influence our thinking and choices as long as we continue to deny our historical reality. 

On September 9, 2000, Kevin Grover, the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, apologized to 300 tribal leaders for “the legacy of racism and inhumanity” perpetrated against indigenous peoples:

Grover recited a litany of wrongs the BIA had inflicted on Indians since its creation as the Indian Office of the War Department. Estimates vary widely but the agency is believed responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Indians. ‘This agency participated in the ethnic cleansing that befell the Western  tribes,’ Grover said. ‘It must be acknowledged that the deliberate spread of disease, the decimation of the mighty bison herds, the use of the poison alcohol to destroy mind and body,  and the cowardly killing of women and children,  made for tragedy on a scale so ghastly that it cannot be dismissed as merely the inevitable consequence of the clash of competing ways of life.’

Gover, an Indian, made this announcement as he was leaving his term in office. It was the first official apology by an agency in the United States Government to Native Americans.

However strongly we collectively hold onto rationalizations of inevitability cited by Gover, we would do well to remember that there were an estimated 10 million Native Americans on the  continent when Europeans first arrived. Three centuries later, 9 million human beings, 90% of the population, had been exterminated by warfare, disease, and famine caused by Euro- Americans (Nettle and Romaine, 2000).

It was not just Europeans who arrived. An entire ecosystem from European soil expanded into North America. Animals and grains came with the Europeans in a wholesale attempt to divert the environment into an extension of their own. The number of sheep and goats in Mexico rose from zero to 8 million in the period between 1500 and 1620, during which time the number of indigenous inhabitants fell by 90 percent (Nettle & Romaine,  2000, p. 117).

European cattle and other livestock replaced an entire ecosystem that supported the wild bison on the Great Plains. Old world species of plants and animals replaced those that traditional societies depended upon. Infection disease spread to those with no immunity. Massacres, forced relocations, and attempts to eradicate Indian languages and cultures are only a portion of the untold and ignominious history that festers in the darkest of Euro-American soil and soul.

Our history has often cited other peoples and other parts of the world for ethnic cleansing while denying or ignoring a genocide alive in the heart and soul of this country. Such genocide had never been officially acknowledged as part of our own history until September 9, 2000. Sadistic aggression and fallacious invention was and remains the basis of our relationship to Indians and other people of color. The attempted extermination of native people included policies intentionally enacted to annihilate the traditions, languages and history of entire tribes over hundreds of years. The violence perpetrated against Native Americans began when Europeans first set foot on this continent, bringing with them a long history of sad and savage encounters with cultures considered uncivilized and outside the Judeo-Christian domain.

I propose that unconscious images of genocide permeate Euro-American culture. I explore this issue from grief and passionate curiosity, a grief that is beyond guilt, a grieving that expresses something more important than guilt. How can we make sense of our desire to eradicate Beauty? It is the primitive within each of us that desires reconciliation.

In the mid to late 1800’s, the western Plain Indians, including the Cheyenne, Arapaho and Lakota Sioux, were the last tribes to be placed on reservations or murdered. An unprecedented cruelty culminated during this era. Genocide and violence, initially directed toward indigenous peoples who live on this land and who form the ground of being in our culture, continue to be perpetrated on indigenous peoples. While refusing to acknowledge our own role in genocide, we take other societies to task for similar behavior. 

In my view present day violence in this country is part of a response to incomplete stories, secrets and lies related as objective facts of history. Since history is written by the victors, historic misrepresentations often stand unchallenged and perpetrated by our leaders. Our current president, according to his niece, Mary Trump, is a racist extraordinaire, denigrating African Americans, Jews, and I would expect, by extension, Native Americans. “We need to wake up,” she says, on the Rachael Maddow show, (16 July, 2020) and to “continue along this path, would be the end of the American Experiment.” I think the opposite is true and truth shall set us free.

Being ethnocentric is nothing new to humans. Admitting to our failures might be. 

A psychology of the unconscious would say that what we are not conscious of, aware of, in ourselves we tend to project outward onto others. If I cannot accept my own madness I will more likely tend to see it in others, while denying it in myself. Through news stories, literature, and film, tales told over centuries by explorers and ethnographers, we are taught a one-sided, biased and limited perspective of history. I believe that our unconscious relationship to the unfelt and unacknowledged blood dripping from our hands is a universal human dilemma and that remaining unconscious of this reality is a dangerous position resulting in ever-increasing violence in present-day, white, society.

I do not mean to indict any one group of our culture. I hope to awaken what we deny in ourselves so that this material is not projected, nor attributed to others.

It is known that memory fragmentation and dissociation are symptoms of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). PTS is intensified by partial revelation of stories. It seems likely that through omission of distress, a ghost land has been created that has further fragmented an already divided, or never fully formed Euro-American identity. Without memory, we remain unable to manage our humanly common destructive impulses.

“Revisionism—the cunning assertion that memory is a deliberate lie—is hatred’s ultimate obscenity” (Bertman, 2000, p.62). Our schools have traditionally taught both Indian and Euro-American children a revisionist view of history that denies that our very own Holocaust ever happened. The insistence of our heroic conquest of the American West has been the agenda fostered by European American education. Past and current local and international political policies supported this delusion. 

Elite control and domination goes back to the beginnings of our country. The concentration of wealth and power becomes legislation that increases the concentration of wealth, so fiscal power becomes legislation that only serves to increase the concentration of wealth (Noam Chomsky, 2019). It is a vicious cycle, in which the interests of the wealthy are imposed on the rest of the people. 

According to Carl Jung (1945/1964) effects of a neglected history include a pervasive sense of guilt and dissociation on a collective level. We abandon ourselves to a type of possession resulting from hundreds of years of denial, repression and omission that promotes the continued genocide of people of color. A unconscious yet pervasive, sadness permeates our culture. This grief is a possible bridge to transform our unreconciled guilt.

Because we have neglected to assess and acknowledge our history, Euro-American culture behaves with poor impulse control, as well as an extreme type of collective narcissism that emerges from primitive states of mind. We tend to elect leaders that express this unconscious position.

Moreover, we have a delusional relationship to the earth, while a body/mind split exists separating our bodies and emotions from our capacity to think and reason. Primitive fantasy has always colored our connection to Native Americans and other people of color.

In order to determine how Euro-american culture developed in this direction, it is important to examine the psychological and philosophical landscape that became the backdrop of the conquest of the Americas. Our origins of genocidal behavior began during the 16th-century Age of Discovery, a time when the whole world was claimed by any explorer (and in the name of any monarch). The explorers of the societies of western Europe bordering on the Atlantic (Spain, Portugal, England and France) knew only what they had grown top with—feudal in conception, conduct and expectation. Dominance and submission had been the template for establishing relationships between invaders and their subjects for centuries prior to the conquest of the New World.

Religious imagery familiar to Europeans arriving in the land that would become the United States were influenced by the imagination of centuries of people. Present-day violence and rage saturating our culture have deep historical roots that didn’t originate with European arrival in the United States.. As early as the 13th century, Pope Nicholas V empowered Portugal’s king to enslave the persons and seize the lands of property of all pagans, and all other enemies of Christ. Doctrines that sanctioned the expansion of European interests were widespread.

Euro-American images of Indians, whether idealistic or perverse, are deeply buried in European thought and mostly correspond to forgotten images from ancient, classical, and medieval times, extending through the Renaissance (14th through 16th C). European culture dawned when we began to enact the dream of mastering the natural world in the Ancient Near East. The peoples who struggled to climb out of their vulnerable and precarious relationship to the environment did so in a style not universal to all People. European attitudes toward the planet were that it should be controlled as a resource and valued only for its usefulness (profit). There were other cultures who approach their relationship to the planet and cosmos through ritual and ceremony.

Real men were considered rational and superior, masters who could with impunity make slaves of those deemed irrational and hopelessly ruled by passions. Real men were obliged to make slaves of their cultural inferiors, who were placed on the earth to supply physical labor. Slavery was considered ideal for inferior beings, who were expected to experience security through being ruled by their masters. This distinction included women and children who were, by nature, inferior. The stage was set long before European arrival to assign clues to other groups through a lense of subjectivity (p.46).

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Kimberlee Maresma, LPCC

505-463-4787

Embodiedspirittherapies.com