The Rainbow Serpent...and Intergenerational Trauma

This picture. Uluru Dawn, and I see a Rainbow Serpent, Wanampi, in its ethereal, timeless beauty. I also see in my minds eye the trauma The Serpent has observed, and experienced over generations. Trauma that has been repeatedly inflicted on its people, the original inhabitants of this land. The people whose stories need to be heard, accepted, recognised, respected and used as a lesson. They must not be suppressed further, dissociated and detached conveniently for the comfort of the general public. I heard today these trauma stories from respected members from the Indigenous community. I heard about the internal Cry of the Cicada, its constant humming in the mind of the sufferer that does not allow sleep. That does not allow an ease of the pain within the head. And that threatens to fragment the self and soul into shards of disorganised insanity. This is part of the inner landscape of intergenerational trauma. I heard that the litany of abuses, ranging from shooting, poisoning water sources, handing out blankets deliberately infected with smallpox, the parent-child separation policies and even now the discrepancies in health care access and services to the indigenous, have traumatised the Heart of the Centre. The Heart bleeds profusely, colouring the landscape with a deep red that symbolises loss, death, murder on a massive scale. The blood congeals and suffocates, and the bleeding perpetuates an invididual and cultural land/mindscape that is EMPTIED OF THE DREAMING. There is no more fear, no more rage, no more anything. There is no more doubt, no more hope and no sense of time. There is but an unquantified and unquantifiable emptiness, which is worse than nightmare. Because there is NO-THING to hold onto anymore. This is the indigestible panic of The Nothingness, and is the manifestation of primordial Annihilation.

As they so evocatively weave their stories, I feel the above. I feel the pain, the nausea, the heavy heart, the fragmentation of the soul. The growing, gnawing nothingness that expands from within my core while disintegration crumbles my physical body from without. I cannot however, imagine what they have experienced, collectively, over generations. Their pain and loss remain unimaginable to the outside like myself; I can only taste a sliver of this excruciating pain, and already it threatens my very self. However, I for one have been bolstered by their message of Hope. They pleaded for us, all of us…to LISTEN, carefully, to everything. They pleaded for us to RECOGNIZE the trauma, and also to LOOK INSIDE our selves, even at Uluru, to look INSIDE. Beyond the ‘pretty pictures’ that people like me post on Facebook. When you look inside the rock, your heart and the heart of the traumatised, only then can we recreate, renew, and regenerate Kuniya within, and then we can reclaim a joint creativity, based on compassion that allows us all to work together for the betterment of the state of our indigenous at this moment in time. The Dead Heart can indeed, live again. But only with our collective action.