Generational trauma and knowing who your real enemy is, it's all about the blood

I wrote this only days before the horrific attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 49 people, children, adults, elders, were murdered in a terrorist attack, after the ongoing attack of Ilhan Omar because of words she named about the state of Israel. What I am writing about here is real. It is real in the way of leading to violence in its most physical form. I hold my prayers for those killed in Christchurch and for those murdered, generation after generation, because of what is written here. This is not just a history lesson. ----- There is a line that keeps running through my head. It’s from the Hunger Games, when Finnick tells Katniss, who feels the chaos of not knowing who to trust, of not knowing who started what kind of violence and how she can feel safe, “Katniss”, Finnick says, “remember who the real enemy is.”
I was angry - and confused - for a lot of years about who my real enemy was. What happens when the people who love you, who are there to take care of you and protect you from when you are very small, don’t do that? What do you do with the chaos when the kin who are supposed to be in it with you actually cause even more harm? I picked leaving home, moving far away from my people, calling them out from a distance while creating new stories about why things turned out the way they did. I chose a whole bunch of space and time to figure out how to make sense of the chaos so that I could come home again. And after a time, the real enemy started to become clear. There is a lot of chaos and call-out happening over Representative Ilhan Omar’s critique of the state of Israel. The responses to Representative Omar, and the responses to the responses, carry deep pain and anger. Reactions and then the reactions to the reactions are emotional, some are overly rational and many are dangerous, using the weapons of Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, indigenous disappearance and anti-Semitism with some misogyny and sexism thrown in to build a case. This level of reactivity, of intense response, means that this moment is not about the present moment. It is not about an act of physical violence, of flesh harming flesh. These reactions are to words. The intensity of these reactions are a demonstration of the impact of generational trauma.

Somewhere, there is an original wound. When violence and other forms of held trauma do not have the space to heal and integrate, then they are passed forward. Somewhere is the shape of violent disregard so intense that, generation after generation, it has moved forward as culture, as protection, as surveillance, as pain. Within the cycle of violence, all players evolve protections in order to survive. We develop protections around how we have been harmed and how we have caused harm. And then over time those protections become culture or community practice and their origins become invisible.
Chaos theory says that if we stand back far enough, there is always a pattern to emerge. Chaos is rarely chaos; we’re just in the middle of too much information without a sense of how it’s all connected to each other. Chaos is how systems of supremacy unsettle resistance. When you combine chaos with the triggering of deep fears about your ability to be ok, to survive, to be safe, then it becomes almost impossible to step away from the pattern and see clearly. Healing from deeply held trauma needs space and enough safety for the body to move through something vulnerable. State violence and surveillance and internalized violence and surveillance prevent this space and safety from emerging.
Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, indigenous disappearance and anti-Black racism would not exist if it weren’t for the violence that, over generations, emerged as the twinning of Christian supremacy and capitalism. White supremacy wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the twinning of Christian supremacy and capitalism, two belief systems that evolved at the same time.

In the 4th century, Emperor Constantine* converted to Christianity, turning the machinations of the Roman empire into a tool for two things: grabbing land and other wealth AND converting everyone in its path to Christianity. As part of this, in 318 Constantine brought a whole bunch of Christian bishops to a meeting to create the rules of Christianity (called the Nicene Creed). Before this, Christianity was a mixed bag of belief systems including both highly patriarchal structures and highly matriarchal structures, including communities that resembled Buddhist monasteries, communities that believed in sexual pleasure as an expression of God’s divine love, communities that were still predominantly Jewish with a few changes in tradition, and more. The Nicene Creed named Christianity as the single true belief system. Over a period of generations, the pre-Christian beliefs of Rome were wiped out, sometimes violently and sometimes by conversion.  

Anti-Semitism grew in shape and practice along with the growth of the Christian church, its violence waxing and waning, shifting shape and practice, but never disappearing for all of Christianity’s 2000 plus years**.  

Originating in European Christianity, antisemitism is the form of ideological oppression that targets Jews. In Europe and the United States, it has functioned to protect the prevailing economic system and the almost exclusively Christian ruling class by diverting blame for hardship onto Jews. Like all oppressions, it has deep historical roots and uses exploitation, marginalization, discrimination and violence as its tools. Like all oppressions, the ideology contains elements of dehumanization and degradation via lies and stereotypes about Jews, as well as a mythology. The myth changes and adapts to different times and places, but fundamentally it says that Jews are to blame for society’s problems. From Understanding Anti-Semitism.  

The political growth of the Catholic church has depended on the tools of anti-Semitism to grow its own wealth.  The history of anti-Semitism is the history of Christianity evolving an idea of “pure blood” and dangerous blood, of good and bad as essential qualities of a person rather than a type of behavior. These ideologies of dangerous and pure blood could then justify actions that otherwise go deeply against Christian values of life and forgiveness, of community and radical love; go against those values while seeming to stay in alignment with the same values. This ideology evolved along with the Christian idea that being closer to God means transcending or leaving the body. The body becomes a site of control and good bodies go to heaven while bad bodies are dangerous and must be controlled. Histories of blood sacrifice and transcendence as a part of spiritual life are almost universal, with traditions found on every continent. The development of the political Christian church used these practices as a tool for justifying the accumulation of resources through the destruction of other people, cultures and communities. This is not the only time that this has happened. This is what happened that led to our present moment.

In the middle ages, the Roman Catholic Church employed soldiers through the Crusades or what was called the Holy wars.  The Crusades especially targeted those lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, where Islam was a growing spiritual and political force. For reasons of religious conversion, in order to bring alliance among different Christian factions, and for wealth accumulation, the Crusades strengthened the idea of the Pope as the head of the Catholic church and normalized militarism as a part of religious practice. Jewish communities, “heretical” Christian communities, pagan communities and Islamic communities were attacked or often destroyed. The boundaries of the political-religious western Christian world were defined as a result of the Crusades and the political wealth of the Christian church was strengthened. Orientalism, as named by Edward Said, was the justification narrative that allowed this stage of western colonization to expand while, again, maintaining Christian Europe’s sense of living in alignment with its own values.  

The sense of Islam as a threatening Other - with Muslims depicted as fanatical, violent, lustful, irrational - develops during the colonial period in what I called Orientalism. The study of the Other has a lot to do with the control and dominance of Europe and the West generally in the Islamic world. And it has persisted because it's based very, very deeply in religious roots, where Islam is seen as a kind of competitor of Christianity. Edward Said in Orientalism. 

Christian supremacy continued to grow, changing shape and practice depending on the country and historical moment. When the British government began to colonize the lands of the Americas, joining other European countries in the use of the institution of slavery and indigenous destruction as the primary policies of wealth accumulation, it grafted the idea of pure and dangerous blood on to the bodies of those it was targeting. This same strategy of justifying some bodies as bad and some bodies as good enabled the British and then later US governments to continue to build wealth off the bodies and lands of indigenous and Black people while still believing it lived its Christian values.  The invention of the one drop rule meant that one drop of "Black blood" made you Black and therefore controllable by white supremacy whereas Blood quantum meant that you had to have a specific amount of "indigenous blood" in order to count as Native and therefore be recognized by signed treaties. Blood rules helped define strategies of surveillance used in times of war to contain the bodies of those who resisted: reservations, prisons, and then, over time, the cultural practices of educational systems, healthcare systems, and all other methods for disseminating culture.  At the same time, religious practice became increasingly focused on transcendent practices, a sense of leaving the body to find relationship with God, of becoming pure Spirit, a sanctified dissociation that also supported those causing harm to not feel, in that most physical of senses, the impact of their actions.  

In the early 20th century, independence movements in lands colonized by western Europe began to surge forward and an increasing western need for oil merged together. The same essentializing idea of pure and dangerous were now directed towards Islam, justifying Western war mentality by calling the Islamic world and Arab countries barbarous, cultures in need of ‘civilizing.’ The Western cultural practice of orientalism created fertile ground for the violence of Islamophobia. This became heightened as a result of 9-11 and once again, trauma repeated itself. Christian fear swelled and the need to offset that terror on a clear enemy turned into the rapidly evolving practices of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.  

Anti-Semitism, anti-Black racism, indigenous disappearance, and Islamophobia are all manifestations of the same early trauma and override: the desire for wealth accumulation, the violent taking of lands and resources and bodies to accumulate that wealth, and a need to feel in alignment with deeply held Christian values. They all depend on this idea that some blood/people are dangerous and not quite human while others are pure and that it is possible to do great violence and still be a good Christian. Andrea Smith powerfully names this history in her piece, Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy.  

Christianity also evolved in European owning class communities to support a dissociation from the physical body and an essentializing of bodies that are “different” as needing to be controlled or dismissed. When Constantine paid for the construction of a singular unforgiving Christian doctrine that was then used to justify the expansion of Empire, he took a grassroots belief system that centered the ending of poverty and radical love and turned it into a tool of violence. Western Europe used that legacy for the development and then expansion of market capitalism. You could not have capitalism without Christianity and you could not have the spread of Christianity without capitalism.  

Systems of belief have protective survival responses. They are held in the nervous systems of all of those who have  been raised within those systems of belief, both the perpetrators and those who are harmed. In moments like this, I see multigenerational systems as having a kind of energetic form, their hands holding the marionette strings and making us dance. We lost a lot in the scientific world when we stopped talking about evil spirits. Sometimes I think it’s the only way to make visual the way these multigenerational patterns live through us, forcing so many of us to be agents of their harm even as we seek to destroy them.   

What is happening right now is painful. And it carries with it a whole range of individual and collective experiences that have taken place since the expansion of the Roman empire and probably before. Without transformation, the cycle of violence always moves forward and those who have been harmed, too often, become those who carry the harm forward. Shifting the complex paths of pain that are twisting so tightly in the conversations and reactions swirling around Representative Omar’s comments is about more than remembering history. But remembering history is deeply important. This mess started somewhere.  

All of my family lines are Catholic with the majority of them being Catholic as far back as can be remembered and with some of us Catholic through forced conversion within recent generations. Some of my ancestral lines represent the people who were also first colonized by the Roman Empire and who then became the ones to benefit from and move forward that wheel of violence. I assume and sometimes know that somewhere in my histories are people who supported or benefitted from anti-Semitism, the Crusades, the stealing of land, and the enslavement of free bodies. As is true with all empires, most of my people were living their lives, using their Church as the place to support their grief and family transitions. They were not thinking about strategies for wealth accumulation and that wealth rarely trickled down to their families and kin. And as is true with all empires, each and every one of us is still, in some responsible for the repair. It’s about time that energy and pain that is wound around and between those hurt by and raging against Representative Omar turn around and direct that energy towards us. Sometimes you have to look far enough back across the space of history to begin to see a pattern in the tangled mess of the present moment. Sometimes you have to look far enough back to understand why those who seem to be causing you harm are, themselves, stuck with you in a pattern of pain. In my own family, this meant looking for enough back to find the common thread that causes some of us to turn to our own kin and hoist our hurt on each other’s bodies rather than come together to fight against the violence that has become woven through our lineage.  

In the midst of chaos and generations of pain, it’s important to know who your real enemy is, your original enemy, the one who continues to benefit, especially when those who were first hurt are overwhelmed with chaos and striking against each other rather than turning to the ones who first set the violence in motion.

* Violence begets violence. So why start with Constantine when there must have been a before? Did Constantine’s class/mixed upbringing, his witness of the Great Persecution in which state policy was to destroy all Christians, a literal genocide, before Constantine came to power and shifted state policy to use Christianity as a means to an end? And then what was the before for that? ** The political Church is not always the same as what regular folks do on the day to day. While there have always been people who have used the political Church to further their own ends and to cause harm to others, many people truly seek to be faithful and to follow the values they believe in.

Dealing with the original wounds

This is not a trigger warning, but it is an invitation that you pay attention to yourself. I am going to talk about the violence that is the foundation of the creation of the United States. It is easy to read history and turn it into information: something that a person “knows” and “understands.” Please don’t do that. Everything written here is about real people; people like you and your kin. What is written here might be about your kin or your people might be the kin who were committing the violence. Either way, notice yourself as you read. Listen deeply, listen to how your ancestors might whisper to you through your DNA, through your spirit. Read this as a prayer, not a school lesson. And then breathe.

I just finished taking a walk along the Mississippi River. The leaves are mostly fallen, the sumac is bright red, and the ancient cottonwoods loom large along the riverside. I usually walk near Coldwater Spring, a sacred Dakota site that has been taken over and domesticated by the park service, and along the river just north of Fort Snelling. I never go there without remembering where I am and what happened at that place. I never go there without remembering that eight generations ago, there was no Fort and this was only Dakota land. I never go there without remembering the 1600 Dakota families who were interred at the Fort after and during the Dakota war, only six generations ago. I go there and remember the expulsion of the Dakota people from their homelands, still six generations ago, all of these actions taken by President Lincoln within months of his signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

As a bodyworker who studies craniosacral therapy and learns from other modalities, I know that if you can identify the original wound, the first significant hurt, and if you can support that original wound to get what it needs to transform, then many of the things that happened afterwards will transform at the same time. I have seen that kind of unwinding, this moment of deep healing, within the cells and tissues of people who invite me to be with them. Held trauma is a moment of unfinished history. Life wants to come back to the present moment, to feeling connected to other life. This means that held trauma will find a way to resurface again and again until it is finished. This is why a person seems to get involved with the same kind of person, the same boss and situation at work, the same feeling of isolation and sadness. Until we can heal or shift the original conditioning or experiences, we will get tangled up in the same tangles.

The same is true of what happens to the collective body. I believe that for those of us who live on this land, there are two significant original wounds. These wounds overlay a whole range of histories that we have separately brought as people coming from many different places but when we settle here, on these lands, then we settle in relationship to the original wounds.

The first wound is the attempted genocide of those people indigenous to this land. For over 500, 5000, some peoples say 50,000 generations there were people who lived on these lands. They moved and migrated like people do, from one ocean to the other, from the south to the north and the north to the south. Real people who did all of the glorious and absurd things that real people do, who had wars and who got sick and died and who lived contented lives, real people who never lost their relationship to the land. Real people who understood - and understand - that we are the land and the land is us. The first wound happened when Europeans brought their wounds to this land and planted them. Those wounds were the wounds of disconnection from land and the idea of land ownership. Their wounds included the idea of profit, something that is not possible without inequality. They included rigid and specific gender assumptions that subjugated anything seen as feminine and they included a patriarchal and transcendent God who expected harsh discipline and service from his followers. These were the wounds that had evolved in western Europe for thousands of years. In their European homelands, people were (and are still) fighting for a connected life that does not depend on violent inequality at its base. Many of those who first crossed the ocean to come to this land came because they wanted to find a place where they could live more spiritually grounded simple lives. But even those who came seeking heaven on earth came bringing their own original wounds, this deep disconnection from life, and they carried it like a virus as they built their farms and towns and expanded across the land. This is the first original wound: the attempted and unceasing disappearance of the original people of this land through murder, forced assimilation, land theft, and cultural policing and minimization.

The second original wound came soon after first contact with these lands. This was the wound that enabled those who settled to increase their profits and to feel justified in doing so. First the land was turned into an object to be sold and used for personal purpose and second, human beings were turned into objects to be sold and used for personal purpose. The second wound is the institution of slavery, the economic system that depended on the creation of race as a way to organize the complexity of life. The European system of slavery or the owning of people has its roots in European feudalism, anti-Semitism and the colonizing mix of the Catholic inquisition and crusades. The way the institution of slavery developed in the Americas is born of these histories with each colonizing country putting the pieces together slightly differently. This second original wound is entwined with the first; both together creating the foundation of the creation of the United States: indigenous disappearance and the violent policing of anti-Black racism. The institution of slavery had already been started in the islands and lands to the south of us. This means that as Europeans first started coming north to settle and colonize, they brought with them enslaved Africans. The first settler’s legal code, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, legalized slavery in the colonies. After the Bacon Rebellion, a shared fight by Black slaves and Black and white indentured servants only two generations after the first large scale settlement in the East, race rather than class became the tool for social control.

When you attend to an original wound, are not distracted by all of those things which show up at the same time, you increase the potential for transformation.

There are many other wounds that exist here on these lands: gender oppression and classism and ableism and religious persecution and anti-immigrant hatred and all kinds of phobias. But they are not the original wounds of this land. Most flavors of US-based class and gender oppression have European roots, not indigenous or the many different kinds of Asian or African cultural roots. Forms of gender and class based oppression might well exist in those lands, but upon settling here, in the United States, those other homegrown inequalities merged with the European form of cultural divide.

The one thing all of us share who are living on this land that is now called the United States is the experience of being raced. This is true whether we are new immigrants or our people have been here since first contact. This is also true for those who are indigenous to this land but it doesn’t quite work the same way. Being native to this land exists before race and so identities like Lakota or Ojibwe or Cree are cultural experiences that exist before they were raced. Being raced means having the complexity of your history, your culture, and your understanding of yourself and your kin aligned with a category that you have no power to shift. The only people who get to experience life without the awareness of being raced are white people.

White supremacy, I believe, is a system of coddling European-descended people so that they don’t have to feel the impact of the wounds they brought with them over the ocean and then transplanted directly and indirectly into this land and into people’s bodies. White supremacy is a system set up to maintain these original wounds so that they are raw and bleeding, never able to heal and then transform into something new. White supremacy exists so that European-descended people don’t have to experience the profound contradiction between the life they are leading and the values they claim to hold.

To me, healing justice is about directly addressing these original wounds. Period. This means healing justice seeks to stop the violence of these histories as they show up in the present day, including in how newer immigrants are defined through the lens of anti-Black racism and anti-indigeneity or with the added layers that are defined in relationship to US global economic interests.

As healers and healing practitioners, we work most of the time with individual bodies. Life shows up in healing spaces in very local ways: as an experience of pain, of emotion, of disconnection, of compromised movement or energy. We are there in response to how the truth of someone’s life shows up in any given moment.  This is healing. What makes it healing justice is how we hold the truth of the present moment within the larger context of the original wound. How we do this is part of what I will keep reflecting on in this blog.

I want to be clear about one more thing: paying attention to the original wound does not mean ignoring the real pain of gender and class and all other forms of oppression and violence. But it does mean still and always paying attention to the original wound. There is no gender or class liberation possible on this land without attending to the original wounds. Without attending to and healing the origins, other fights will eventually become aligned one way or another with white supremacy. It matters deeply that profound class divisions, sexual violence and rigid gender binaries did not exist on this land prior to colonization. They are not native to this land. They were brought here and transplanted, just like a Monsanto seed, fighting its way into the reproductive cells of native seeds as they are transformed against their will.

Beneath all of what I wrote here is the foundational hurt: the one that these histories made possible and maintain. Beneath all of this is our separation from the life that sustains us. This land, right here, below our feet. The kin who are within arm's and heart's reach. How we experience the connection of all things, spirit, life.  And the ancientness of our selves, our ancestors joining hands along our DNA. Notice your breath. Right now.