A cultural wound is caused by a cultural trauma. In the process of conversion, our ancestors had to do some mental gymnastics, which likely played out as follows: If the old ways are shameful, wrong, even evil, we won’t want to talk about them, we will be ashamed of them. If we are ashamed that our people followed an evil way, we will want to explain why they would have embraced an evil religion. An easy way to avoid the shame is to say that our ancestors were simply ignorant and stupid, and now that we are enlightened by Christianity we are freed from that ignorance. If we accept this narrative that our ancestors were stupid and ignorant, then why would we be even the least bit interested in the culture they left behind? And as a result, we accept that we have no cultural knowledge to embrace, essentially we are cultureless.

The moment someone challenges the idea that our ancestors were stupid and ignorant, that their life was a constant struggle, we start to feel the pain of shame that we are hiding, but this pain is so deeply buried by generations of cultural experience, that it manifests itself as anger. And if we find that our ancestors indeed had wonderful knowledge that was deeply important to us as a people, we start to feel shame and sadness for turning our back on this culture.

It’s like a wound that is buried and causes us to act irrationally. We have a pain that we are hiding from, but if we face that pain, if we allow ourselves to feel that pain, and work on understanding and undoing the cause of that pain, we can start to move toward healing with purpose and determination.

As a final note, I think it’s important to remember that it does no one any favors to dwell in anger over the reality that this has happened to our people(s). The goal is to acknowledge and release that pain. Then we can realize that our ancestors were intelligent people who knew their culture was worth preserving, a culture that they knew (or at least hoped) would one day be picked up and reconstructed. The job of reconstruction is our duty, and it will lead us through a process of decolonization that will help us become the people we were placed on this planet to be.