Page 39 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

In addition to the assaults on our bodies and our nervous systems, the renaming or misnaming of what

we know to be true makes us crazy. Whether we call it ‘spin,’ or marketing or rewritten history, the

result is the same. Our felt experience is the cornerstone of identity and meaning; when we are told

that what happened didn’t happen, that we aren’t who we know ourselves to be, that our voices do

not count – that corporations are people – our sense of reality crumbles. Remember that, in addition

to stealing and renaming the land that was kin, one of the key strategies in the genocide of indigenous

North American culture was to forcibly remove children from their families and send them to

residential schools where they were given western names and forbidden to speak their own languages.

Like each of us as individuals, collective global culture arises from the history that formed it. The

sedimentary layers of ancestral anguish have been sealed and fossilized, but are clearly visible when

we drill down or when a disaster exposes a cross-­‐section of its layers. Like us, it seeks to cope as

individuals and families do, repressing painful memories, self-­‐medicating, lashing out at the slightest

provocation or seeking to ‘soldier through’ by focusing on routine or revenge. Perhaps the collective

trauma we are carrying dates from the ascendancy of the church and feudal kings (likely already

traumatized themselves) and their desire to amass ‘power over’ rather than ‘power with’, pointedly

expressed in unrelenting attacks on nature, women and indigenous ways.

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