Book Review: An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's, An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States, confronts the reality of settler-colonialism and genocide as foundational to the United States. It reconstructs and reframes the consensual narrative from the Native Indian perspective while exposing indoctrinated myths and stereotypes. This masterful and riveting journey provides truth and paths towards the future progress for all peoples. It is a must read and belongs in every classroom, home, library, and canon of genocide studies.

Collective Healing to Address Legacies of Transatlantic Slavery: Opportunities and Challenges

In this article, we show how pathways to justice and reconciliation pertaining to the transatlantic slavery should begin with collective healing processes. To illustrate this conclusion, we first employ a four-fold conceptual framework for understanding collective healing that consists in: (1) acknowledging historical dehumanizing acts; (2) addressing the harmful effects of dehumanisation; (3) embracing relational rapprochement; and (4) co-imagining and co-creating conditions for systemic justice. Based on this framework, we then examine existing collective healing practices in different contexts that are aimed at addressing legacies of transatlantic slavery. In doing so, we further identify challenges and pose critical questions concerning such practices. While globally there are, and have been, many different kinds of racism and slavery, and even though transatlantic slavery has many features specific to it, nevertheless, we hope that this exploration of collective healing will be illuminating for other situations where acts of brutality have served to demean and dehumanize.

Arts & Literature: Making Art Out of History’s Tragedies—An Interview with Grzegorz Kwiatkowski

Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a Polish poet and musician. Here he reflects on the violence perpetrated in Poland during the Second World War, and the dualities of the Polish experience. Is it possible for art to reckon with the darkness, free of melodrama and kitsch?

Arts & Literature: A Review of the Poetry Book unBuried-unMarked—The unTold Namibian Story of the Genocide of 1904–1908: Pieces and Pains of the Struggle for Justice

Between 1904 and 1908, about eighty per cent of the Herero and fifty per cent of the Nama perished in what is today known as the first genocide of the twentieth century that took place in today’s Namibia under German colonial rule. Over decades, the German government has not officially recognized the genocide as such. Jephta U. Nguherimo is one of the descendants of survivors of this genocide and today lives in the United States. In his poetry book unBuried-unMarked–The unTold Namibian story of the Genocide of 1904-1908: Pieces and Pains of the Struggle for Justice that he has self-published in 2019, J. Nguherimo gives insights into long-lasting impacts of the Herero and Nama genocide, into ways of dealing with painful memories, and into processes of healing in post-genocidal contexts. This art review gives an overview of the book and discusses main features of this artistic piece: the way the poems are linked to pictures, the use of different languages, the presence of nature or the importance of intergenerational bonds. It reflects on the author’s leitmotiv: dialogue, empathy and compassion, and on the impact these could have had or could have on negotiations between Germany and Namibia on the recognition and reparation of the genocide.

Legacies of Slavery and their Enduring Harms

This article provides a much needed inquiry into the legacy of slavery from an interdisciplinary perspective, including the historical, socioeconomic, political, and the epistemic. It makes an important distinction between the legacy of slavery and its persisting damages. By investigating this legacy’s effects on peoples, communities, and societies, it highlights the imperative of situating the pains and sufferings of historical traumas within contemporary structural oppression and institutional discrimination that have perpetuated these harms. The article consists of four sections: it first outlines the legacy of slavery, comprised in instrumentalizing black bodies for economic gains, employing political aggression to colonize both lands and minds, applying racialized discourse to demean and dehumanize, and oppressing people of African descent through structural violence. It then discusses the legacy’s injuries as transgenerational and cultural traumas, and how these wounds are experienced by the relevant communities. The third section focuses on racism as a significant harm, analyzing different forms of racism (internalized, interpersonal, and institutional) as interconnected and mutually reinforcing. To conclude, this article considers challenges in addressing the legacy of slavery and puts forward tentative ideas for collective healing.

Ongoing Genocides and the Need for Healing: The Cases of Native and African Americans

The elimination of Native peoples and the enslavement of Africans in the U.S. more than qualify as acts of historical state sponsored genocide. A feature of both genocides is that they ended as institutional practices but have continued culturally and psychologically. The primary contemporary legacy of these genocides is racism which reinforces historical trauma and grief. Suggestions are made for how healing for Native and African Americans can begin despite ongoing racism. This includes psychological counseling for White Americans with beliefs in White supremacy. Suggestions are also made for how reconciliation can begin at the county-level between descendants of slave owners and enslaved Africans as well as between descendants of settlers and Native Americans.

Collective Healing: Towards a Conceptual Framework

To understand what kind of collective healing practices might be most effective following mass atrocity, we need to comprehend better what counts as collective healing, and in what ways group healing processes differ from individual ones. We need clear and well-argued answers to these conceptual questions as a basis for deriving the criteria by which we might evaluate various practices in different contexts. Because means are valuable only in relation to ends, judging their effectiveness requires a definition of the ends in question and what is good about them. So, what counts as a good collective healing process? This conceptual paper proposes that the concept of healing requires that of being wounded, which in turn requires the idea that some agent performed dehumanizing actions. It identifies dehumanization as a serious form of harm, and characterizes the nature of healing processes based on this analysis. It then describes the group nature of mass atrocities. These four points enable us to separate different kinds of healing processes that are normally conflated and begin to provide a framework for evaluating diverse collective healing processes.