Tell Me Your Family History

Where the dark ghosts of the past hide

1966.  The year I graduated from college, 365,000 American troops and 60,000 sailors were stationed in Viet Nam.  The anti-war movement was growing, and long-haired young men were suspected of being anti-patriotic and disloyal to democracy.  When one day I brought home one of those long-haired hippies, my parents were alarmed, though to their credit they managed to smile and shake his hand and not lecture me on the evils of protesting that war, which I confess, I did with a very small voice.  

The war confused me with its propaganda about the threat of communism and a Red takeover.  It was hard to think of the Vietnamese as an evil threat to the world order, but what did I know?  The Cuban missile crisis and the threat of nuclear war shaped my time at college.  I was a sociology major and hadn’t studied much history, but even if I had, I am certain I would not have been taught the mind-bending things I heard this week in a lecture on the Doctrine of Discovery by Dwayne Tomah at Hannaford Hall at the University of Southern Maine, USM.

As I said, it was 1966 and success back then was measured not by what job you were headed for or what graduate school you’d been accepted to, but by whether you had a ring on your finger.  And I did not and would not for seven more years, a lifetime.

With no ring on my finger and no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, I followed my good friend in college (who did have a ring on her finger!) to graduate school in Social Work. 

There and in post-graduate studies I was trained to track ways in which old beliefs, fears, traumas, family stories shape one’s unconscious.  My job was to make conscious what had been repressed, for without this examination the past will repeat itself and people will continue to make decisions that put their well-being and others in jeopardy. 

I never could have imagined in 1966 that 58 years later I would be trying to figure out all the ways I went wrong, we went wrong, or that I would dare to have a small voice in that conversation about  what we need to do at this juncture in history when we must at lightning speed make changes to every system we interact with because the resilience and stability of the planet that supports all this life is in grave jeopardy.

Yes, we need to feel our deep connection to nature, yes we need to see it as sacred and in need of our care, yes we need to understand ecology as practiced for at least 11,000 years here in this land also known as Turtle Island, yes we need to pay attention to the scientists, yes we need to have a Carbon Tax and elect responsible government leaders, yes we need to call out the Fossil Fuel companies and the Big Bad Banks and industrial agriculture and the fast fashion industry and the plastics industry and yes we need to put heat pumps in our walls and insulate our homes and eat more plants and rewild our lawns and yes we need to get better at marketing socially responsible behavior.

But I believe that we also need to look into ourselves, into our psyches, for there is a deeper story to be unearthed before we can make real progress towards righting our relationship to the planet and to each other.

“Tell me your family history.”  With those words I invited the person sitting in the chair across from me to dig into the psychic roots of their problems.  Using language and images, we would peer into the past and find buried in those crevices all manner of unconscious assumptions about self and other, assumptions about an idealized family member or a spurned family member, assumptions based on adaptations to traumatic losses never grieved or shame hidden deep in the basement and growing like dark mold.

As I listened to Dwayne talk and watched the movie he screened, The Doctrine of Discovery, Unmasking the Domination Code, I had to ask myself: what is the family story of America?  How does this story about the founding of America shape me, shape all of us, both the beneficiaries and the victims of The Doctrine of Discovery or what Dwayne called, the Doctrine of Domination.

The movie is a startling documentation of the institution of “systems of Christian domination and dehumanization” which fueled European expansion. It recounts early Papal Bulls, or Encyclicals, which authorize the kings of Spain and Portugal to “by means of war, invade, capture, vanquish and subdue the enemies of Christ” and “reduce enemies of Christ to perpetual slavery and take away all possessions and property of pagans, Saracens and other non-Christians.”   

Invade, capture, vanquish and subdue: these are words from the Doctrine of Discovery, the doctrine that spurred “explorers” across the Atlantic Ocean with permission from God to engage in unlimited plunder and genocide.  The doctrine that underlies parts of our legal system today.

I introduce you, Ladies and Gentlemen, to America’s great grandfather, Christopher Columbus, esteemed “discoverer” of this country, slaver, sex trafficker; Christopher Columbus for whom the organization, the Knights of Columbus, is named, the organization my father, good Irish Catholic that he was, helped found in the town on Long Island where I grew up. 

According to the historian, James Loewen, as reported in the superb book by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, All the Real Indians Died Off, Columbus is thought to have enslaved 5,000 indigenous peoples throughout his voyaging career.  In his frantic search for gold, Columbus enslaved Native American miners and cut off their hands when they did not find enough gold.  Christopher Columbus, a man whose name my father invoked to prove his patriotism, his worthiness as a Christian, his identity as an American. 

Oh, but you argue, your dad didn’t know about the evil Columbus perpetrated. That’s right, he didn’t know, and until only recently none of us knew.  But this is where the dark ghosts of ourselves are buried. Our psyches know not the story itself, but its imprint: the entitlement, the need to dominate, the recourse to violence in the face of opposition, the capacity to dehumanize, the capacity to dissociate the violence we commit in the name of progress and success and justice.

Did my father do that? Did his belief in our goodness make it easier for him to dissociate himself from any guilt he may have felt about his very intimate role as Captain in the Army Air Corp in WW2 in the dropping of the atomic bomb?  Did this same belief make him an unquestioning supporter of our invasion of Vietnam? And what about the times he put me over his knee for “talking back?”    

And I introduce you too to a Founding Father, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who in 1792 claimed the Doctrine of Discovery was international law which was applicable to the new United States government as well. And thus, the frontier was ours, my white family’s. Mine. We called it Manifest Destiny. How else can I read this but as a story about entitlement, that absolves all of us white Christians from any guilt or remorse or empathy for the violent consequence of our ownership and promises me limitless bounty.  The world is my oyster…or at least all the land as far as the Pacific Ocean.  Mine.  All I need is a covered wagon and a rifle.  There is nothing stopping me. Certainly not the subhuman pagans I encounter on my ride West across the frontier. Nothing.  Not ethics, not compassion, nothing. 

Do I see some hint here in what we are doing to the land now?  No limits to my needs and desires? Aren’t I wondrous and blessed by the One God for my big house, my supermarket filled with farmed fish fed by ransacking the bottom of the ocean of all its little fish, chickens bred to process food so quickly that in 47 days they can be slaughtered for my lunch?

And I introduce you too to the current law of this land, first codified in 1823 by the court of the United States and still in effect to this day.  In 1823 US jurists argued in Johnson v. M’intosh that “the superior genius of Europe” … “claimed an ascendancy over the Indigenous peoples and that the bestowal of civilization and Christianity was ample compensation to the inhabitants.” By this law, title to all Native American lands was granted to the powers that discovered them.  By this law, Native Americans still have no, none, nada rights to their ancient homeland. 

And perhaps you can read these words by two of our grandfathers, Senator James Harlan of Iowa and James R. Doolittle, Senator from Wisconsin in 1857, friend of Abraham Lincoln, graduate of Middlebury College and wonder, what spirit of this language lives inside me still? 

If they refuse to merge into and become part of the superior race they must necessarily be destroyed. It is the law of humanity. 

Where are the remnants of this entitlement, of this belief that I am part of the higher civilization leading the advanced guard of human and Christian civilization?  How does all this get mixed up with words like freedom and justice for all? 

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I have another story to tell you about the night at Hannaford Hall last week.  A story which proves the point of Dwayne’s talk and this essay: that unconscious spirits of domination and entitlement lurk inside us today and need to be examined before real change can happen.

The story begins inside USM’s cavernous concrete parking garage.  It was a dark night and very cold.  Eager to see Dwayne and others in the half hour reception before the talk was to begin, I drove into the parking garage, the only place to park on campus, hoping to find a spot close to the entrance to Hannaford Hall and quickly join the crowd I could envision milling about in the lobby, munching carrots, shaking hands, laughing, connecting. 

But within seconds the garage swallowed me up. I was very disoriented as I drove to the top floor and found a spot and got out.  Where was I?  I had come to this garage many times before for presentations at the Hall, but everything now looked different.  When I got out of the car, I had to find a stairway which led me down to a basement and still I was lost.  As I worked my way to the entrance, I told myself to remember what all these numbers on the post were and where I’d turned because I didn’t want to get lost in this cold cave on my way back several hours later.   

When I finally got to the door, I could see people lined up before a little booth inside the entryway.  “What’s this?” I asked when I got inside.  I was told it was the place to pay for your parking.  I’d never had to pay for parking before in this garage and felt a little put out at having to wait as the line was moving at a snail’s pace.  “It’s four dollars an hour and we need your license plate number,” the attendant at the booth told me when I finally got there.  My license plate number! Who knows their license plate number?  Not me. That meant I had to go back into the dungeons, find my way to my car, find my way back,  and if I didn’t get totally lost, I’d be really late connecting to all those people inside I was so eager to see.

Well, I didn’t learn my lesson about not talking back.  I gave that poor man holy hell.  ME!! You want ME to walk all the way back there to get my license, in the cold and dark.  “Yes,” he said, his face looking stony and resolved. “Can I do it on the way out?” I asked, hoping for a way to get inside the hall right away.  “Nope, you have 15 minutes to pay, or you will automatically be charged a very large fine.”  USM has cameras recording the license plates of passenger cars as they enter the garage and will use those to charge ME if I don’t pay up NOW.  Poor man.  My voice rose, I asked to see a supervisor, who eventually did come and looked as stonily at me as the ticket booth man. I am sure they thought I was deranged.  

In a sense I was deranged because that night my unconscious dark spirts were awakened and burning for justice!  I was the daughter of the founder of the Knights of Columbus in Bellmore, New York! Deranged by the family history of this country, I carried to that moment my entitlement, my righteousness, my sense of innocence and dissociation from the distress my behavior caused that poor ticket booth man who was just doing his job.  (For the record, USM is aware that their parking payment system is a bad answer to the problem of how to pay for those garages and is in the process of finding another solution.)

My point is that history isn’t dead, it lives in us now. America’s family story has dissociated its ruling class from its violent dehumanizing origins and its continued white settler domination across racial divides and international boundaries.  Until we can come to terms with, process, feel, face, talk about, write about, engage with our dark side…it is our dark side that will, I fear, obliterate, or at least greatly hinder the good we do.

Dwayne’s message from the evening, one he is profoundly good at enacting, is that we are all one and we need to form respectful, compassionate, caring relationships with each other and with Mother Earth.  The evening left me humbled, troubled by the way the doctrine of domination still lives inside me, in January 2024, at the almost age of 80.

I urge you, reader, to reflect.  Where is the doctrine of domination living inside you?