Charles Trimble: The Indian Holocaust is over, or it should be

Opinion

Monday, June 14, 2010

Following publication of a column I wrote two years ago titled “Let go the Chains of Victimhood,” I received many e-mails agreeing with my comments and others disagreeing with me. The disagreements were mostly related to the issue of intergenerational trauma (IGT).

Some compared the trauma of Indian people to IGT reportedly suffered among descendents of Jewish victims or survivors of the Holocaust. “Shoah” in Hebrew, the Holocaust generally refers to that genocidal campaign Adolph Hitler devised to rid Europe of Jews, whom he blamed for all the ills that were sweeping the continent at that time.

Accordingly, terms like holocaust, Diaspora, and even pogrom are being used to describe modern Native American history and justify the IGT theories.

I have expressed my disagreement with theories that IGT is the root cause of most of Indian Country’s social pathologies of today – alcoholism, drugs, gangs, and the disarray in American Indian families. To promoters of IGT theory, most of the problems in Indian communities are attributable to the federal and Christian boarding school experience shared by many people of tribes all across the country.

In the “Chains” piece, I used the Jewish experience as a model for dealing with societal trauma, suggesting that although they swear to never forget the past, they accept it as experience gained and lessons learned so that a new Holocaust will not be repeated. They don’t let it drag them down, or Hitler would finally have won.

In my column, I recalled one survivor of Nazi death camps – a man named Matthew Ies Spetter who was a mentor at a summer workshop I attended in New York City in 1956. I found one of his books titled “Man. The Reluctant Brother,” in which he writes of some of his experiences, including this passage:

“When the Russian armies were approaching the camp in which I was held in 1945, the executioners dragged their prey from Auschwitz to Buchenwald.
“After more than ten days in subzero weather, packed in open coal tenders, seventy five to eighty percent of the human cargo froze to death. My closest friend, a physician, and I had kept a child alive by warming it with our bodies. We had neither food nor drink to offer but we still had our fading life impulses to shelter this child.
“I think that because of this my hope has not died.”

I also read some of the works of Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor who has authored several books on the subject, the best known of which is “Night,” a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Both of these books, although they described inhumanity at its worst, also give encouragement to persist, heal, and get on with life.

Two other books I found deal with the same problems I have tried to address on the subject of intergenerational trauma, although neither author uses that term. One is a seminal work titled “The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes,” by Avraham Burg. The following excerpt from the Introduction gives the gist of his views:

“If the loud demonstrations in Jerusalem against German reparations and diplomatic relations, even the well-publicized Eichmann trial, entered our homes, they did so only faintly. I do not remember a single conversation on these matters. The Shoah (Holocaust) industry that would develop in Israel in later years would be foreign to me. I am not a psychologist and do not know whether my parents successfully repressed the atrocities they experienced in their youths, the horrors that erased their happy childhoods. Perhaps they built a new reality of their own and created a new world. Either way, as a child I was never exposed, emotionally or practically, to “Shoahization,” though this cultural movement has become second nature to us Israelis.”

Another book I read is “The Holocaust Industry,” by Norman G. Finkelstein. This author is more direct than Burg, accusing the purveyors of victimhood of exploiting and benefiting from the Holocaust. In the introduction, Finkelstein has this to say:

“Apart from (its) phantom presence, I do not remember the Nazi holocaust ever intruding on my childhood. The main reason was that no one outside my family seemed to care about what happened. My childhood circle of friends read widely, and passionately debated the events of the day. Yet I honestly do not recall a single friend (or parent of a friend) asking a single question about what my mother and father endured. This was not a respectful silence. It was simply indifference. In this light, one cannot but be skeptical of the outpouring of anguish in later decades, after the Holocaust industry was firmly established.”

The same could be said about the relatively recent outpouring of anguish over the Indian boarding school experience. According to one columnist, the latent trauma carried over several generations is tormenting Native youth and driving some even to suicide. As do the authors quoted above, the question must be asked: “What happened differently to the thousands of boarding school survivors and generations of their offspring that did not suffer great trauma, or feel compelled to kill themselves?” What about the hundreds of young Oglala and Sicangu descendants of Indian boarding schools that are in tribal, state and private colleges preparing for a promising life? Shouldn’t they be suffering the torments of IGT? If not, should we point out this discrepancy to them?

The boarding school cycle began at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879, and was followed by many others, both on Indian reservations and in distant locations far from home. Many of the greatest Indian scholars of the beginning of the 20th Century were graduates – survivors, if you will – of Carlisle and other boarding schools. Many Lakota political leaders of the 20th Century were Carlisle alumni.

I do not mean to absolve Indian boarding schools, we must admit painful facts about their purpose and their means of carrying out their mission. And we must condemn those that are proven. But they are historical fact, and it is impossible to change history to make it better or less painful. What I mostly resent is the exploitation of our often-tragic history as a panaceatic symptom that will give answers to all societal ills of Indian country. This just detracts from the real challenges posed by real problems we could be doing something about – problems that many of our people know but cannot, will not, and do not have the determination to address and resolve.

Most unfortunately, the life dreams of youth get crushed by our telling them that only by guilt-tripping the government, churches, and whites in general into empty apologies and, hopefully, financial reparation, can their problems be resolved. Our youth are smart enough to know that this is not going to happen, or not going to help even if it does. But when we can’t respond to their needs with anything other than excuses such as IGT, then they lose all hope. Without hope, life isn’t worth living, and suicide seems justified.

Charles “Chuck” Trimble, Oglala Lakota, was principal founder of the American Indian Press Association in 1970, and served as Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians from 1972-78. He may be reached at cchuktrim@aol.com. His website is iktomisweb.com.