Remembering Histories of Trauma

North American Genocide and the Holocaust in Public Memory

Gideon Mailer

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350240643
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: Holocaust History

Remembering Histories of Trauma compares and links Native American, First Nation and Jewish histories of traumatic memory. Using source material from both sides of the Atlantic, it examines the differences between ancestral experiences of genocide and the representation of those histories in public sites in the United States, Canada and Europe. Challenging the ways public bodies have used those histories to frame the cultural and political identity of regions, states, and nations, it considers the effects of those representations on internal group memory, external public memory and cultural assimilation. Offering new ways to understand the Native-Jewish encounter by highlighting shared critiques of public historical representation, Mailer seeks to transcend historical tensions between Native American studies and Holocaust studies. In linking and comparing European and American contexts of historical trauma and their representation in public memory, this book brings Native American studies, Jewish studies, early American history, Holocaust studies, and museum studies into conversation with each other. In revealing similarities in the public representation of Indigenous genocide and the Holocaust it offers common ground for Jewish and Indigenous histories, and provides a new framework to better understand the divergence between traumatic histories and the ways they are memorialized.

PART ONE

Theory

CHAPTER ONE

“Humanitarian feelings … crystallized in formulae of international law.”

Biological Determinism and the Problem of Perpetrator Intent

In the commemoration and representation of their traumatic histories, Indigenous people and Jews share much in common as they try to balance the will to survive against the totality of loss. But these commonalities have been obscured by an unfortunate set of conflicts over the definition of genocide in relation to the intent to destroy groups. This chapter interrogates those conflicts, which relate to the representation of biological determinism and disease by scholars of the Holocaust and scholars of Indigenous population loss. It considers how the post-World War II legal definition of genocide has influenced the power imbalances that some Indigenous commentators have detected in the normative use of Holocaust memory to represent other histories of genocide.¹

But this chapter also explores new ways that Indigenous people, Jews, and allied scholars can compare the Holocaust and North American genocide without requiring one case to provide a normative benchmark for the other. By integrating hitherto separate methodological literatures from Holocaust Studies, First Nations Studies, and Native American Studies, as well as related insights from scholarship on settler-colonialism in regions such as Australia and New Zealand, it identifies simple, pertinent, and unexplored comparisons between aspects of Indigenous history and Holocaust history. Those comparisons are helpful to transcend competitive strains over the nature of mortality statistics or the relative merit of strict versus loose or structural definitions of genocidal intent.² They clarify rather than obscure the separate histories of Indigenous population loss and the Holocaust, including as they are represented in public spaces. As what Michael Rothberg has described as “lines of historical insight,” they illuminate the powerful role of societal interventions in the destruction of populations and in the prevention of their demographic recovery. They provide a useful conceptual vocabulary to critique abstract or universalistic depictions of causation such as those that employ the notions of innate biological immunity or generalized human intolerance. They offer necessary grounding for the chapters that follow, which consider structural similarities in the dissonance between Indigenous and Jewish memories of trauma and their public representation.³

Biological determinism and the breakdown of the Indigenous–Jewish alliance

Until surprisingly recently, civic memorials and public education efforts in the United States, Canada, and many European nations have often followed mainstream scholarship in claiming that Native Americans in a “virgin land” were unable to cope with the pathogens inadvertently introduced by Europeans after the arrival of Christopher Columbus. The high death rate among post-contact communities has been invoked to support the notion that invisible biological agents, rather than the activities and choices of colonial settlers, contributed to demographic collapse. Indigenous death has thus been linked to immediate pandemics rather than gradual societal collapse in the context of colonization. Only a disease pandemic, according to this emphasis, could have been so deadly and efficient in the pre-industrial era: Europeans inadvertently introduced diseases, which their populations apparently survived due to their superior inherited or innate immunity.⁴

Over the last few decades, however, scholarship of global infectious disease has shown that societies have often been able to recover demographically from near collapse following massive outbreaks, usually in around 150 years. Disturbances such as epidemics have tended to result in only short-term demographic decline, with populations returning to pre-disease levels of growth, decline, or stability. The history of European disease pandemics, and the possibility for recovery in a few generations, underscores the facile nature of any suggestion that disease determines demographic outcomes irrespective of context or human interventions. Even massive population losses are recoverable, provided contextual circumstances improve. Though they often relate to Eurasian historical contexts, these insights refocus our understanding on the ways in which human interventions exacerbate demographic decline in the face of disease; whether in terms of reduced immunity before infection, reduced ability to fight pathogenic invasion, or compromised health among subsequent generations of survivors in affected populations.⁵

A later generation of scholars, activists, and public memorial specialists have therefore modified the claim that Native American, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities were decimated after European contact because their immunity was distinct from populations in the “Old World.” These newer and more accurate perspectives are necessarily grounded in Indigenous understandings of ancestral loss and are verified by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholarship in the fields of biology and epidemiology. They caution against assuming certain communities are more prone to syndromes and infectious diseases, whether due to genetic differences or a comparative lack of exposure to specific pathogens. The biological determinism of many Euro-American accounts, they point out, rests on several problematic assumptions from the perspective of biological science and epidemiology. Indigenous communities and Europeans may have retained different immunities during the period of contact. But suggesting that many Indigenous nations in North America were predisposed to near-total demographic collapse solely due to their relative lack of immunity overlooks the disruption of their health by contingencies of colonization. The notion of a “biological exchange” of infectious disease incorporates an overly deterministic account of health outcomes, eschewing the unsettling role of human interventions either in exacerbating Native American susceptibility to infectious disease and/or metabolic syndromes, or even as a primary factor in their increasing mortality and declining fertility after European contact.⁶

Structural forces—sometimes described as “structural intent”—made diseases likely to proliferate, reduced the ability to maintain sound immunity, and impeded the recovery of communities during subsequent decades. Without these forces, the mere presence of new microbes would not have translated to the final population nadir among Indigenous sub-groups during the nineteenth century. For example, interventions that altered the living circumstances necessary to avoid disease, or the nutrient-density and metabolic profile necessary for optimal immune function, often took place at just the point when disease epidemics became more likely due to the arrival of Europeans. During the seventeenth century, indeed, epidemics tended to follow decades-long delays after first European contact. This relatively new insight from the historiography of Indigenous demographic collapse further demonstrates the importance of societal disruption in the ensuing years, rather than immutable biological differences—a key point that ought to influence public memorials for Indigenous death without raising anxiety among Holocaust scholars and museum professionals.⁷

Yet these recent developments have sometimes also accompanied tensions between Holocaust scholars and those concerned with the representation of the history of Indigenous population loss and Indigenous genocide. Those tensions have most often been stimulated by the definitive trajectory of the concept of “genocide” as it has moved from legal terminology to public discourse. As Christian Gerlach has shown, the term originated as “a normative, action-oriented concept that has historically and essentially been created for the political struggle, not for scholarly analysis, … a politischer Kampfbegriff [political rallying cry].” Having entered the scholarly realm, however, the term has often carried the same political energy, encouraging competition among different groups for public recognition of historical suffering and linking the ostensibly sober academic sphere to highly charged political questions about structural inequality, power imbalances, and the necessity of reparations from states and institutions.⁸

During the 1990s and early 2000s, for example, several scholars in Holocaust Studies and Jewish Studies exhibited a strong reaction to representations of Native American and First Nation population loss that incorporated references to the Holocaust, or which used terminology that had hitherto been reserved for discussions of the destruction of Jews by the Nazis. Several of those representations were indeed polemical in tone. Others sought instead to draw attention to the ways that public memorials and educational texts have failed to portray the role of perpetrator intent and the scale of destruction in the decimation of several Native American nations. Whatever the nature or intent of these scholarly interventions, which differed in degree, a few Holocaust researchers categorized all of them as mischievous attempts to dilute, relativize, or even replace the Jewish aspect of Holocaust memory. Such a perception may have been understandable considering the broader polemical context for the representation of Holocaust memory, which became more apparent outside the Indigenous world during the same period. Scholars may continue to find merit in Stephen Katz’s suggestion that the Nazi Holocaust was “phenomenologically” unique due to the “merciless, exceptionless, biocentric intentionality of Hitler’s ‘war against the Jews.’ ” But unfortunately, Katz and several others have sometimes minimized the massive human contribution to Indigenous population loss by employing models of disease mortality that stressed the biologically deterministic role of differing immunity.⁹ In response, the understandable indignation of several Indigenous and allied scholars and commentators has led them to describe the “exclusivism” of Holocaust scholarship with a far broader brush, including the problematic claim that Jewish interest groups maintain an outsized control over public historical commemoration in the United States.¹⁰

Such tensions have prevented members of both groups from acknowledging the similar ways their separate histories of trauma have often been misrepresented in public spaces. The impasse in Indigenous–Jewish discussions of genocide and civic memory can be reduced by comparing instances of strict, loose, and structural genocidal intent in Holocaust history and Indigenous history. These fresh comparisons are helpful to illuminate how the histories of Indigenous population loss and the Holocaust have been appropriated, universalized, or misrepresented in similar ways.

The ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• PREFACE
• Introduction: Indigenous and Jewish Worlds of Trauma
• PART ONE Theory
• 1 “Humanitarian feelings … crystallized in formulae of international law.”
• 2 “Metaphysical Jew Hatred” and the “Metaphysics of Indian-hating.”
• PART TWO North America
• 3 “We are waiting for the construction of our museum.”
• 4 “The shrines of the soul of a nation.”
• PART THREE Europe
• 5 “A permanent statement of our values.”
• 6 “The void has made itself apparent as such.”
• Conclusion
• NOTES
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright