ANTHOLOGY LAUNCHED ON INDIGENOUS PEOPLES DAY
Today is International Day of the World’s Indigenous People. The day has been observed every year since 1994.
This year’s theme is ‘The Role of Indigenous Women in the Preservation and Transmission of Traditional Knowledge.
The Indigenous Ancestral Healing Collective is a group with representatives of the Kanaka Maoli (from Hawaii), the Maaori from Aotearoa (New Zealand), and First Nations people from Australia and Turtle Island (the USA).
Today, the collective launched a compilation titled ‘Indigenous Anthology - A Healing Journey’ in an attempt to gain a better understanding of ancestral trauma and how healing can benefit everyone.
The Collective joined zoom meetings every month to share stories about celebration, hardship, trauma and healing. Many spoke about the impact of colonisation on their culture and how it has affected their people today.
Germaine Omish Lucero is from the Rincon Band of Luiseno Indian tribe and is the Special Projects Director of the Alliance of Tribal Coalitions to End Violence.
She spoke with Ngaarda Media’s Tangiora Hinaki about the significance of the book and how colonisation impacted her people who were enslaved by Spanish colonists and massacred in the late 1800s.
“In 1850 when California became a state. That’s around the same time when the gold rush happened.
“So between the colonisation and those acquisitions of switching from the Spanish rule to Mexican rule to the United States rule and then becoming one of the fifty states - and the gold rush. All of that really decimated the Indian population in California. So we went from hundreds of thousands of people living in California down to thirty thousand people.”
“When you talk about colonisation it's not just about a dominant country coming in and taking over the indigenous population, it’s what comes along with it. You have genocide. You have incarceration. You have children being taken from their families. Total assimilation. Our customs, our songs our dances our food sources, and our way of life were taken and stripped from us and our identities of who we were and in place of that were put this dominant society of how they view the world and people.”
The Indigenous Ancestral Healing Collective is a group
Ms Omish believes that the trauma from colonisation has impacted Indigenous people around the world who are living with family violence, relying on social welfare and the high numbers of incarceration in prison.
“When you look at all of that, it comes down from not knowing who we were as people originally to what was ingrained in us.”
The Indigenous Ancestral Healing Collective Group explored ways to heal and take back their language, dances, songs, food and bush medicine to encourage readers of the anthology.
Here is the QR code for the document:
