We Were Once Indigenous
Indigenous people are those who are the original or First Peoples to live within an area. Commonly known as those who live in remote parts of the world or in lands that have been colonised, its less widely known that there were once indigenous people living in Britain too. Over the course of human history, people have travelled, migrated and invaded extensively and this has created the incredibly diverse gene pool of the modern world. Yet for all of us, wherever our distant ancestors once lived, they were indigenous. As the Black Lives Matter movement is firmly within the public eye, after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, it feels appropriate to discuss prevailing attitudes towards indigenous people and how they continue to be marginalised and persecuted throughout the world today. Although it might seem strange to claim we were once all indigenous, it is important to bring awareness of our shared history. We are all one people, with many faces and many cultural differences, but we are one people nonetheless.
Viewing the “Other”
The history of indigenous people everywhere involves migrating or invading people forcibly taking power and land away from them and forcing them to live differently. Each case is different but what appears to be true for all is an embedded racism from the people ruling over and the people living side by side with them. Indigenous peoples are the most marginalised people of the world, regularly losing their rights to others, often within the public eye. For instance, as the Brazilian president Jair Bolsanaro permits the ferocious logging of the Amazon rainforest, he is also permitting the persecution of indigenous people living within the forest, driven by Bolsanaro’s explicit racism. Indigenous people in Brazil are at the frontline of a world raging against itself. As they fight to protect both their communities and the forests, indigenous people in Brazil are fighting a battle to protect our species and our planet.
To make parallels between us and indigenous people may seem strange. However I would suggest that view derives from centuries of polarising perceptions of “us” and the “other”; we have been conditioned to view other people along a hierarchical structure of value and worth, whether that be according to gender, class or ethnicity. Whilst we, as people, are all incredibly different, instead of valuing and respecting that difference we have learnt over time to fear it and we have become hostile towards each-other, placing value on some people over others. This conditioning is so deep, the racism towards others is so deep that fascism has become acceptable at times as a ruling ideology; the idea that violence towards the “other” should be acceptable.
Unless we, as a society and as a people, properly and completely deal with our inherent racism towards others, we will never be rid of fascism. Fascism can be turned towards any people at any time as its root is fear and hostility towards others. Anyone can be an “other”. In order to properly deal with our inherent racism as a people we need to understand our history and our ancestry, we need to understand our cultural conditioning. Only with a proper understanding of who we are can we begin to grieve what we have become and begin the process of healing the huge wound we as a people have. For racism and fascism are symptoms of this wound. The wound that has come because we forgot that we were once indigenous.
History of Trauma
In order to understand cultural conditioning and the long history of trauma that may run within a person’s ancestral line, I turn now to the history of England, in order to illustrate what the ancestors of a person with English ancestry might have lived through. This is not because this story is in any way unique or different to other countries in the world or better or worse than other stories. It’s simply because I live in England and this story is what I see reflected around me every day. Whilst ancestral heritage is of course a mixture for many people in England, the story is not about ethnicity. Instead it offers an illustration of the kinds of ancestral memory which can linger in the DNA of a person with English descent. Some people may only have elements of this history within their family line and not others and yet they would have similar stories from other places also embedded within their ancestry. This is because, unfortunately, the history of trauma can be seen throughout the history of the world.
The history of England is a history of violence and trauma, colonisation and subjugation. My contention is that this history is deeply embedded within the ancestral memory or the DNA of a person whose family might have lived through elements of this history. It’s not so outlandish a statement. There have been many recent scientific studies which have found evidence of genetic changes within the descendants of people who have suffered trauma. As the scientific community begin to understand the impact of this, it is something that many people have been aware of for some time. It’s something I regularly see and work with in my shamanic practice. Our ancestral history is hard-wired within our physical make up and trauma is a big component of this as our collective history is so incredibly violent. All of us have ancestors who experienced trauma, some fairly recently and some thousands of years ago. Some of our ancestors inflicted trauma upon others. So lets look at the history of England in brief to illustrate what I mean.
The earliest ancestor to have walked on the land of England after it became an island was in the Mesolthic, about 6100BC, which is 8,000 years ago. At this time people would have lived in a world of deep connection to the land and to their communities of inter-connected tribes, living as hunters and fishers and gatherers on a seasonal round throughout the land. There would have been shamans and elders who passed down their knowledge and wisdom to the young around the fires in the evenings. These were people who learned to live around wolves and lynx and bears and they lived well, as food was plentiful in the vast forests that covered the land and in the oceans all around. As time passed, around 6,000 years ago, there were invasions of people who had tamed animals and plants, who cleared land and built settlements. During this time, of the Neolithic, the culture changed dramatically and you can see and feel the tension and despair within the hunter-gatherer communities, from the archaeological remains they left behind, as their land was taken away from them and they were no longer able to live as they had. Everywhere they travelled these new farmers were taking over, bringing with them a new religion which people were converting to, like a wave that had travelled across Western Europe. England was one of the last outposts of the Mesolithic way of life in Western Europe and there were few places for the people to travel to and nowhere easily, so they assimilated, slowly and with resistance, into the culture which had taken over the land.
It took time for the Mesolithic culture to end but once it did, soon after people began to accept the rhythms of the new way of life, there were yet more invasions, around 2300BC. The invasions were perhaps brutal in their impact on the people of England; recent evidence shows that 90% of the genetic pool in England was replaced by incoming people from Europe during the Bronze Age. These people brought a new way of life, a new culture and belief system. Their society was hierarchical, people were settling into villages and the old egalitarian way of life was long forgotten as some people began to gain wealth at the expense of others. Around 800BC, almost 3,000 years ago, there were yet more people who came and settled into the land of England, at the beginning of the Iron Age. Perhaps they too invaded or perhaps they were welcome. It’s hard to tell and much debated archaeologically. What’s clear is by this time the natural resources of England were well known and sought after in continental Europe. Over time successive waves of settlers clamoured over these resources and the power to control their trade. By the Iron Age warfare had become a way of life as a people who had become used to fighting for what they believed in became warriors, a world where the greatest warrior was accorded the highest status. At the same time the old religion had developed into the Druid religion, accordingly also stratified and holding much power. In the Iron Age people lived in highly defended hill forts where raiding for cattle or for people to be sold as slaves was common. This way of life only ended, brutally, with yet another invasion, this time from the Roman Empire. Although they only conquered some of the tribes in the UK their brutality is still felt in the cultural memory of the people of Britain.
After the Romans left England, the tribes tried to come together once more before the new religion of Christianity enslaved the people, with the force and brutality of yet another invasion, as through Christianity the Roman Empire continued to hold its force. At the same time there were waves of invasions of Saxons and Angles, Jutes and Vikings. Each invasion was brutal with unbelievable violence inflicted on men, women and children, young and old. Then finally there was the Norman invasion in 1066, just under 1000 years ago. As people adjusted to successive waves of invaders taking power and control and fighting amongst themselves for Kingship, the Normans won the ultimate battle for leadership over the lands of England. Those who live in England today live with the legacy of the Norman invasion; the royal family, many of the upper classes and many who sit in parliament are their direct descendants. The Norman invasion was the final invasion in this land. Since this time, life in England has been highly stratified with injustice and inequality a facet of everyday life. The history of war and invasion continued after 1066, with the invasion of other countries by the British; firstly Ireland and continuing throughout the world. With the building of the British Empire directly corresponding to the history of colonialism and slavery, modern day England was built on the lives of the oppressed throughout the world and within the land of England. Oppression IS the English way. However much we seek to deny it, that is our history.
Ancestral Healing
An average English person has a lot of trauma in their ancestral DNA even if their ancestors experienced only a small portion of the violence that occurred on English soil. As one person tried to heal their personal family’s trauma, there was yet another invasion and more violence. The problem with English history is that the invasions were relentless, people never really had the time to heal. With each new invasion, the trauma turned to anger and frequently manifested throughout the ages as violence towards others. This violence became acceptable within society, either directly or indirectly as people ignored its presence for instance in Victorian factories or in the slave ports of Bristol or Liverpool. Trauma is hard to shake off unless it is faced and healed. The Victorian upper classes knew this when they sent their children away to boarding schools, where they often experienced horrific punishments for stepping out of line and where they developed the English reserve, or the inability to care. These people went on to become generals in the colonial wars of the time. Wars of absolute cold brutality and horrific violence towards other people as the British conquered other countries with all the violence that they had once experienced themselves. Trauma and violence is deeply embedded within the English DNA.
At the heart of a person with British DNA however is a thread which goes all the way back to the Mesolithic, to a people who were hunters and fishers and gatherers, who were shamans and lived in relative peace compared to later people. These people were indigenous people, like the people around the world today who continue to be persecuted and marginalised and forced into assimilation into the cultures surrounding them. What indigenous peoples around the world today are experiencing, we have all experienced through our ancestral lineage as we all come from indigenous people. Whatever mix of ancestry we have, our roots go back to the First People living on the land. It is time to acknowledge our roots. It is time to acknowledge the deep pain and trauma we have been through, time to grieve and accept and start the long process of healing, as a culture and as a people. If we can heal our own trauma, perhaps we can stop inflicting trauma on others, however inadvertently.
It is not possible to turn back the clock and go back to a life we once lived perhaps thousands of years ago. But we can recognise the journey taken by our ancestors. Each of us most likely has ancestors from many different countries around the world. Perhaps, through this recognition, we can start to appreciate difference and recognise it within ourselves and our family. For many of us, our ancestors undoubtedly inflicted trauma upon others and experienced trauma themselves. We have a shared history and we need to heal in order to bring peace to our peoples. Many of us are the living embodiment of ancestral trauma; the trauma our ancestors inflicted upon each other. This history of trauma has created the modern world, where fear and violence are one side of the same coin which is traded everywhere throughout the world.
Re-claiming our past
We were once indigenous. We once had ties to the land and to each other and we knew how to live sustainably on the Earth. We knew how to look after ourselves and each other, we knew how to look after the spirits of the land, the animals, the birds and the fish. We made many mistakes and we learnt, through these mistakes, how to leave an area after it had been hunted too much or over fished. We learned how to prevent forest fires and how to regenerate an area of plants. We knew which plants treated human illness and we learned the best places to forage and the places to avoid. We knew how to work with the land. We knew which areas were sacred and those to be avoided. We knew how to survive and thrive. These memories are still there, embedded in our DNA. To access these memories is possible, when you learn how to fish or forage or how to connect with spirit. These skills are old skills and therefore accessible to all; like old hands going over ancient tools, our hands know what to do. We may be rusty but with practice it comes back and, when it comes, it does so with a deep knowing and understanding and a longing to return to what was once so lived and known. It is possible to connect to our own indigeny.
Indigenous people today
Throughout the world today the remaining indigenous people tend to be those who live on the margins, on the land that was less appealing to invading people in the past. Today the land they live on has become appealing to a new generation of invading people; to the companies prospecting for oil and gas and timber and mines. Indigenous people today are, of course, part of the modern world and there are few, if any, intact cultures left as people adapt to a globalised world. However in many places, indigenous cultural traditions hold on, traditions which revolve around living in a sustainable way on the planet, both ecologically and socially. It is really important not to romanticise indigenous people, whatever we may feel about how they have been treated. We are all human, we are all one. However, in the spirit of connection, I like to see many indigenous elders as planetary wisdom keepers, as the knowledge many groups retain around how to live sustainably on the planet is precious to us as a species.
Many indigenous people have their own traumatic history, a history of abuse from colonialism, a history which is recent and yet no less brutal for that. Their children and young people are growing up on the frontlines, between a way of life that is sustainable and ancient to a way of life based on economic materialism, separatism and destruction. To retain the old way of life is to embark on a fight and one which is, in many cases, impossible to win as land and resources have been taken away. What power do indigenous people have to continue their ancient traditions should they wish to do so? As the elders of communities die and take their knowledge and wisdom with them, some may choose to leave their communities and forge a different way through life. When they do that, it is possible that we all lose out. For in the old way lies the keys to our future, to a life living sustainably on the planet. If we cannot learn to live sustainably on the planet our species will die out, alongside many others besides us. Its already happening, this 6th extinction. But there is another way.
A better future
By working with indigenous people today, giving them autonomy to decide their own fate free of white influence, by empowering communities to inspire the young to follow the lead of their elders, by giving them political power within a global stage, to enable them to teach us how to live sustainably on the planet, to enable us to remember our shared roots and humanity, we might just come together again, come together with a new way to live on this beautiful planet we call home. It is a dream perhaps but, as the world has changed so much in 2020, with the economic wheel of life finally stopping, I have renewed hope.
Samara
8th June 2020