The Trauma Experience of Mennonites and First Nations Compared

The Trauma Experience of Mennonites and First Nations Compared

In the last 30 yrs or so we in Canada have heard a lot from our First Nations neighbours about the abuse many of them and their ancestors experienced in residential schools. We have also learned how the intragenerational transmission of that has affected so many more. The First Nations are looking for support from their fellow Canadians in addressing this issue. There is also discussion of a broader atmosphere of racism towards First Nations in so many areas that they are also bringing up.

Many Mennonites themselves or whose ancestors came from The Ukraine and Russia after 1914 have also reported sometimes horrific traumatization experiences. However, most of these people have done much better in this country as a group then their First Nations neighbors. That makes some of them suggest, even if not explicitly so, that there is something intrinsically deficient with the First Nations peoples in that they can't, to use a much maligned, appropriately so, phrase, "get over it" and move on the way the Mennonites seem to have done for the most part.

Perhaps a detailed analysis of the experiences of these 2 peoples will help point to why the Mennonites generally have done better than their aboriginal counterparts in this country. Let me say at the outset that this essay at this point is simply going to be a reiteration of knowledge that most students of First Nations and Mennonite history will know. It is not going to be a footnoted thesis. Nor is it meant to be exhaustively comprehensive in terms of details. This may need to change. It is really an attempt to begin an exploration of this area, as much as it may need looking at. I do it being entirely open to correction on facts and opinions stated, omitted, misunderstood, downplayed or perhaps exaggerated. I should also say that I will somewhat indiscriminately use  the terms First Nations, aboriginal, indigenous, native and Indian, as they have all been used in serious discourse at one time or another.

As one of the European Mennonites by descent, even though my ancestors came here well before 1914, I am still more familiar with the story of my Anabaptist brothers and sisters in some ways so identify with them, then I am with my indigenous neighbors. Therefore, I will start with a review of what they experienced. I hope my Europeanness does not carry with it such a strong bias in site of my upbringing and self-concept that it shows through. Please forgive me if it does. I am addressing this to Mennonites, realizing that what I am saying to my co-religionists applies equally well to many others in Canada.

We could start the story in the Netherlands, perhaps even in Switzerland and surrounding nations in the South. Our Mennonite forebears were severely persecuted by the Holy Roman Catholic Church as well as the Reformed Church And Lutheran Church. This persecution included significant torture and killing of many individuals, male and female, young and old. As a result, the Mennonites from the southern area mentioned above by and large moved to The United States Of America. Those from the north moved eastwards, ending up in Prussia. They experienced some difficulties there but essentially became quite established, successful and prosperous. Their farming prowess in particular attracted the attention of Catherine the Great, the monarch of Russia at the time. She invited them to come and help populate and develop the lands that Russia had recently freed from the grip of the roving Tatars.

So, on the one hand, here the Mennonites were already moving into the area that had been home to another group of people who were no longer that welcome there. By and large, they were also moving into an area where it appears that many of the folks dwelling there at the time were technologically and culturally inferior. This included both those with some of these more Asian roots such as the Tatars as well as some of the Ukrainians who were the real residents of that area which is now part of the Ukraine. I'm referring to the area north of the Crimea and Black Sea, which is where my ancestors settled.

These dynamics did play a significant role in the negative experiences Mennonites suffered during the Russian Revolution and all the way through to World War II and beyond. Some of it was opposition from the state that had become communist and did not want anything religious going on. However, initially, before the new Bolshevik state really gained control of the area, a good deal of the atrocities perpetuated against my people had a somewhat revengeful motive. There was an element of retaliation against those who had moved into this land that had not been theirs. There was also an element of simply taking from those who had been more successful now that the control of the czars was gone and the communists had no yet firmly established their rule. In some cases, we know there was even an element of payback as those who had worked for and perhaps suffered harshly at the hands of Mennonite employers sought revenge.

All of this took a great emotional and even spiritual toll. However, it never became as demoralizing as what happened to the First Nations in the Americas. Why? I think part of the answer is that, in a way, the Mennonites were moving in an area that was still part of Europe, of which they had always been members. They were also those who had the advantage in terms of economics and education. You could say that they were privileged. They kept up ties with the rest of Europe and as they settled and prospered, they introduced many of the more cultured and progressive aspects of life in Western Europe into their communities.

Let us compare this then with what happened to First Nations peoples in this regard. They were living in what we could grant them was their land, it not having been populated by anyone else in known historical memory. Then the Europeans came. Because they were different in terms of the First Nations in some technological ways that they saw as mechanistically superior, they considered themselves to be on a higher plane. They also believed that, as Christians, whatever one might want to say about type of Christian they were, they were also in that area above the people they found on these continents and islands. It really does not appear that the settlers really ever give credence to the fact that this land was not theirs for the taking, and that they were moving into unfamiliar territory that did not belong to them. For reasons including the couple mentioned above, they simply claimed these lands for their overseas monarchs. To begin with, they regarded the First Nations people they met simply as races to be brought up to speed with respect to civilization including religion. There was some, perhaps unspoken for the most part, acknowledgment to begin with that they needed these peoples help to learn how to survive and make sense of living in this land, learning what it had to offer. However, it was not long before the European newcomers were in the driver’s seat and dictating what happened as they advanced ever westward in larger and larger numbers. Those early beginnings, and perhaps some of the more noble ideals that still inhabited the minds of some of the individuals at that time, had seen the signing of a number of treaties between the settlers and their representatives from there governing bodies and First Nations leadership. However, for the most part, right from the beginning, these treaties simply became means of the invaders getting what they wanted without experiencing a lot of resistance and hostility.

Things are not nearly so dire, for the most part, for First Nations peoples in North America between 1492 and the time of the US revolution in the early 19th century as they were in what we sometimes refer to as Latin America. The attitude of the mainly Spanish and some Portuguese explorers there was much more one of simple conquest of the natives. There was much more fighting and bloodshed from early on. To be sure, there were skirmishes and smaller battles in North America as well, but it wasn't until the US, and then Canada, really began to "open up the West" as the newcomers put it, that things became untenable for the indigenous peoples in North America as well.

The newcomers wanted land. In part, no doubt, because the indigenous people were judged as not being on par with the Europeans in terms of the technological, business and spiritual areas of life, the aboriginals were not seen as equal partners to work together with in this process. Especially in the US, where it was more overt, there was much more of an attitude of simply raiding the land of the Indians. The sought after outcome in Canada was really the same, and perhaps one can say that it was, although I believe that was really unintentional, even more malignantly carried out, because the First Nations continued to be dealt with in terms of making treaties with them so that the settlers could move on to the land without, to put it simply, getting into any fights with those who were there before them. This was quickly achieved by having the first nations leadership accept tracts of land, the infamous Reserves as we call them in Canada, where they could supposedly live in peace and carry on their livelihood as they wished under the protection of the government while the newcomers did what they wanted to with the land around them.

So, increasingly, the Indians, as they were erroneously been called, were really seen as being in the way of the progress of civilization in this, as the Europeans arrogantly called it, New World. Various schemes were carried out to hinder the Indians. Sometimes this took a turn of making them ill - the famous stories of “smallpox blankets.” At other times it took the form of actually preventing them from selling crops and making a livelihood versus the settlers about them. There was the relentless push to make their religion and cultures unacceptable and pagan or even as the church tried to Christianize of them. There were the endless controlling strictures placed on them even in terms of freedom of movement by the Department of Indian Affairs under the Indian act of 1876.

So, what was going on with the Mennonites in Russia that compares to this? I think we would need to compare the various revolutionary armies and finally the full force of the Bolshevik and Stalinist governments to the settlers in North America, and the Mennonites to the Indians. There was a lot done to destroy the Mennonites economic base, but this was mainly the uncontrolled ravage of the rebels that ran rampant during the early years of the Communist era. However, then the Communist authorities themselves moved in to take over the land and turn private property into communes. During all of this time, many Mennonites fled westward successfully, but many were also displaced eastward into Siberia and places of that nature. They were put in prison and labor camps and many did not survive. They were not allowed to practice their faith. Whereas they had generally gotten by still on German uptill then, they now had to learn Russian and use it daily.

Much of this is not that different from what Indians experienced at the hands of whites. However, although the Mennonites were moving largely from a position of privilege and superiority to one where their land and livelihoods were taken away from them, they were not so much losing the knowledge of whom they had been. Many still managed to retain their language and faith. They were still Europeans. Although they did not accept or agree, for the most part, with what was happening in Russia, they understood how European society worked and were successful in that milieu. First Nations peoples, on the other hand, were being overwhelmed by a different society, one which was very different from theirs and which they did not really understand in terms of being able to cope with it or integrate into it. As we have already mentioned, even when they might have wanted to or made an attempt to, there were obstacles placed in their way.

The whites, for the most part, to this day, do not really acknowledge or accept that the First Nations of these continents and islands had adapted reasonably well to their environments. They had their own spirituality, their own economies and interactions, which had served their purposes satisfactorily for millennia. As we have mentioned above, mainly because they were different from the Europeans in terms of the supposed superiority of the latter, if one wants to call it that, in terms of having things like the gun, the wheel, and written language, the Europeans considered the natives inferior. Unfortunately, that attitude has really not changed on the part of many Canadians, including too many Mennonites.

Then, if things weren't going badly enough for the increasingly decimated populations of indigenous peoples, the governments of the day became increasingly frustrated with what they regarded as the aboriginals' failure to adapt to European ways. This led to the idea that they had to start with the children to change the Indian, basically to a white European, in every way except perhaps appearance and skin color. Thus was born the residential school movement. It was decided that children needed to be removed from their parents and forced to learn European ways of living which included speaking only English or French, depending on the area, and becoming Christian. Much of the schooling was forced upon the First Nations. Because the natives had by this time already become so demoralized by what our governments and the settlers had done to them, they for the most part put up little resistance.

So, children were literally in many cases pulled from their parents’ arms at a young age and placed in the hands of people whom they could not even communicate with. They were forced to dress differently, wear their hair differently, often forced to have no communication with home or even siblings in the same school and eat different food. Their whole lifestyle was changed. As we have learned, to facilitate this happening, the staff these schools too frequently exhibited extreme measures of discipline against their charges. There were untold cases of physical and sexual abuse, let alone emotional abuse. To make matters worse, governments being what they are, increasingly underfunded these institutions so that many students, and sometimes even staff, were nutritionally deprived. We have recently learned that this even went beyond that in terms of studies done to see what might be the effects of nutritional deprivation. Thousands of children died. Too many parents were not notified. Too many graves are unmarked.

These children were sometimes only allowed to go home during holidays and even that was sometimes brief. As a result they became increasingly alienated from their families and communities, partly because of the actual brainwashing that was taking place in the schools. The divergence between what they were learning and how they had been brought up previously deepened this sense of confusion and loss of identity. Being robbed of their children, their sense of their future, lead to despair for many of their parents who became depressed and turned to alcohol and sometimes suicide. As a result, when the children finished these years of schooling and went home, there was often no supportive family structure or community for them to fit back into or carry on in. There certainly was no attempt made to incorporate them into the white society into which these systems had tried to fit them by this education. Thus, they were really in limbo. As a result, many of them also became depressed and turned to things like alcohol and suicide. They had not grown up with parents and siblings and so had not learned how to be members of the family or parent. Therefore, when they did form family units and procreate, their children often suffered exactly as their parents had suffered in the residential schools. When one is so demoralized, when one is made to feel ashamed of everything one had stood for and been and when the society around us does not really care, there is no avenue to express what one is experiencing or what one feels is happening. As a result, these patterns continued for generations without being brought to light.

Where the Mennonites experiencing similar things back in Russia? Families were frequently broken up, but most often by removal of the fathers. Thus, there was still the mother to raise the children. As has already been expressed in an essay by Sherry Sawatzky Dyck ( http://www.ccpa-accp.ca/Conference2013/ Presentations/ Sawatzky_B19B.pdf), there was still an element of struggle to continue on with their faith, community and language. However, this is different than what happened in North America. Here, the Indians in some way had all of this taken out from under them, but were not given any place in the new society. The Mennonites who were left in their communities knew from where they had come and kept that alive. For the most part, they were still living with their families, such as they were, and such as the circumstances were. They were, albeit probably forcibly, given positions in the new society, as everyone in communism was supposed to have a role. So, at least there was some purpose, meaning and financial reward to their day. Even many in “Siberia” struggled mightily to retain their faith and identity. There was very little of this for most Indians, as we have seen. They were really left adrift.

Those Mennonites who did make it to North America, Mexico, Paraguay and later Bolivia, succeeded because they still knew who they were. They still had a sense of community. They still had their language and faith. As Sherry Sawatzky-Dyck has also pointed out, it may have also been because there were others in their larger community who were looking out for them and wanting to help them. Mennonites as a larger community prayed for them and worked for their relief and escape; they sent them aid.  Ms Dyck talks of the role of the Mennonite Central Committee in this. As we have just seen, the first nations we had none of this. They had nowhere to turn.

When you think about it, it is really almost miraculous of that some of them, I think in the 1980s, finally came forward with what had happened to them and were heard. There were those in our country who were willing to hear and acknowledge this and give it exposure. All of this has led to what we can hope is the beginning of a turnaround in First Nations fortunes. Far from being eradicated, their numbers are rapidly increasing. They are becoming more educated. They are becoming involved in business and running their own lives. However, there are still too many who have been affected by the residential school legacy. There are still too many of us settlers who still do not see the whole picture and still discriminate against First Nations people, even though we live on their land, and, one could say, without their permission.

To me it is also somewhat amazing and telling that it is the First Nations People who are reaching out to the rest of us to make this right with their efforts to correct it and reconcile with the rest of us for all that has been done to them. I think there are comparisons to the uprising of the blacks in the mid-20th century America. It was the victims, such as Martin Luther King, who gave us the inspiration to help end segregation, not those who had brought it about. It is similar to the end of apartheid in South Africa. Again, it is the victims, such as Nelson Mandela, who showed the better way and helped begin to change things.

Let me say one more thing that relates to spirituality and our faith. If we as Christians look at our legacy and what our God has said to us in so many ways over history, we are to pay special attention to the alien, the orphan, the widow and the broken. We are to let Justice roll like mighty waters. We are to love everyone as our neighbor. If we do not do this as a church, and I'm speaking more broadly than just Mennonites here, God can never bless the church in North America as much as he might want to.

We as European settlers, colonizers, and imperialists, for we are all of that, must forget our notions of superiority and look at our First Nations neighbors as equals. We need to accept them, listen to them and learn from them. There are things we can learn from them. That is something the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and particularly Reconciliation Canada is trying to do. We need to move forward together.