We are all aboriginal inside

Question:hHow do we get counsellors to understand the importance of qualities that aboriginal culture provides?

For my undergrad, I used a lot of Canadian sources, especially First Nation.  As my mentor and only professor is a sociologist, this meant the social/information crossover, with more social and less tech--which was fine with me as tech can be a headache. (I put his picture with me at graduation on my personal page.)

Far and away some of my influential reading has been from Cynthia C. Wesley-Esquimaux and Magdalena Smolewski's  Historic trauma and aboriginal healing (2004). This was an amazingly advanced document when I read it in 2005, and remains so, but has since fallen in search engine ranking, which is unfortunate.

A recollection of this paper's influence is that some of the colonial "players" cited in it happen to have been "acting" in Europe in much the same ways they were acting in the New World. Just as I was reading it online, I happened to pull off a seemingly old text from the library shelf called the Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (Robbins,1959/1988). I saw the picture it painted of the witch-burning experience as a theme in the Da Vinci Code (Brown, 2003) novel where the inquisition was described as oppressing the herb-gathering culture with accusations of witchcraft. What this suggested to me, is that there actually are surviving aboriginal constructs in "modern man" that manifest, say, as picking berries and hiking. Along with Brown's fiction I recalled Tolkien's works describing his tribe of Hobbits as long-hair small people with furry toes who love mushrooms. I find this interesting because it seems he presaged the hippie movement, which, as far as I can tell, was/is attempting to attach itself to First Nations culture. It is almost as if Tolkien preserved historical memories, and in so doing, helped spawn a White aboriginal reconstruction.

My point here is that, if you extend this paper "objectively" in an evolutionary direction, then aboriginal can mean a universally natural thinking process that we should all have deep down because we all have aboriginal ancestors. As a product of evolution, aboriginal thinking must be fully-functional, and hence healthy. Aboriginal maladaptive behaviors would then be at least partly the result of colonial Europe's exploitation (and perhaps Asia's too in recent years). This is the point of the paper, but it stresses that the maladaptions are completely the result of colonial exploitation, especially the fur trade, and won't go away anytime soon.

Then the clue from this (and similar) writing is not to access the immature "inner child" (which might be a psychodyamic or humanistic approach) but rather the well-evolved "inner aboriginal" (which is my approach). How would I do this? For me this is easy: go for a hike, snowshoeing, XC skiing, etc. If I ever experience doubt, however, I will not hesitate to ask an elder as some live nearby and many use FaceBook.

References

Brown, D. (2003). The Da Vinci code: A novel. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Robbins, R. (1959/1981). The encyclopedia of witchcraft and demonology. New York, NY: Bonanza Books.

Wesley-Esquimaux C. C., & Smolewski, M. (2004). Historic trauma and aboriginal healing. Ottawa, ON: Aboriginal Healing Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.ahf.ca/downloads/historic-trauma.pdf