Healing the wounds of history

Warren Bolon

"History" makes it sound ancient and remote. It's neither. The abuse of whole cultures and peoples is, sadly, solidly in the category of current events, even if it's seldom treated as breaking news. While some indigenous groups do still suffer incidents of violence and land-grabbing, today's oppression is more commonly found as stereotyping, ignorance, neglect, exploitation. What about the history of abuse, though?

In many cases the motives were maliciously or ignorantly rooted in a belief of racial superiority. Migrating settlers encountered native populations and set out to marginalize or eliminate (or in a few cases coexist with) what were believed to be inferior or subhuman beings—the Australian Aborigines, Native Americans from Alaska to the Andes, the Bushman in southern Africa.

In some cases the new settlers' aims could be described as assimilation. Their means and methods were, in essence, some form of governmentor church-sponsored tyranny. Such policies as compulsory boarding school for the Navajos and many other tribes, and similar policies in Australia regarding the Aborigines, were as tyrannical in their effects on native cultures as the deadly impact of invading armies' superior weapons were on native populations in their paths. And as Beverly Goldsmith's commentary on the film Rabbit-Proof Fence explains (page 20), these policies continued well into the 20th century.

And today? Take, for example, recent stories of pharmaceutical companies and other research organizations engaging in what's been called "bioprospecting"—or by some, "biopiracy." Researchers seek to convert indigenous peoples' knowledge of plant species and medicines, even their human DNA samples, into new drugs and therapies—for the cause of cure and/or profit, but with little of either returning to the cultures from which they came.

Are healing and reconciliation going on? Yes, and in this issue you'll find modest evidence of the courage, inspiration, intuition, and spiritual grit that are making a difference for the good of the human family. As a poet has said, "God is working His purpose out."

Warren Bolon
Senior Writer

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