Relations Silenced by Coercion
With great care, and from my position as a white person in the Global North, I want to touch on a raw and uncomfortable tension about how colonial wounds, although deeply asymmetrical, are stitched together by the same historical thread of domination. The ongoing genocide (and ecocide) of indigenous populations in so many invaded territories is still a living reality. The “Residential Schools for Indians” (1), where attempts were made to erase indigenous culture, language, spirituality, and bodies from childhood, were (and still are) instruments of a civilizing logic of annihilating the other. This is not an old chapter; it is present, continuing to erode our collective empathy in a hostile manner. These are bodies that are still alive, entire communities that reclaim their ceremonies and songs despite torment and erasure.
Here, our listening, as Europeans, can only begin with radical humility and a refusal to make comparisons, because there is no possible symmetry between colonizers and colonized, between those who held power and those who were its targets.
But in this same historical thread, without alleviating any responsibility, it is also necessary to see how Europe first rehearsed within itself the mechanisms of domestication and violence that it later exported. Before colonizing the world, Europe colonized its own bodies and cosmologies, generation after generation. I remember the Beguines, in the 13th century, women who dared to live in community, in freedom, and through spiritual and economic practices outside male tutelage. They were persecuted and violently silenced. Like so many others before and after, in the inquisitions that took property away from women and tried to extinguish their local wisdom, annihilating peasant women, midwives, and mystics. And the Beguines embraced the “civilizing faith,” Christianity, similar to the Cathars in southern France (also annihilated by power), or Afonso Henriques (1st Portuguese king), who massacred the Mozarabic Christians and their bishop during the Reconquista that founded Portugal in 1147 (2)—for the aim was always conquering territory, resources and unifying the Christian faith to Roman rites.
Denying structural violence with phrases such as “that’s how it was done back then” (3) is a classic colonial deflection that empties responsibility, erases real suffering, and perpetuates the toxic idea that the historical normalization of an act makes it legitimate, just, or rational.
We cannot continue to dissociate ourselves from the violent force of subjugation and colonization since the formation of the kingdom of Portugal (and even much earlier, but that is for another article). Long before the omnicidal overseas missions, all royal dynasties placed their highest value on the conquest of more and more territory, always to feed the European royal houses, leaving the locals miserable and without resources. Violence upon violence, trauma upon trauma, in a narrative that glorifies the conquering hero. Over and over again. And trauma becomes culture.
This internal violence does not erase or redeem the external violence. Still, it reveals a profound logic of generational trauma of coercion and domination, which radically cuts off the possibility of living in kinship, listening, and co-responsibility. A trauma that became state policy, empire, mission, instruction, and evangelization. To look at this is to recognize that the wound of the split between life in relationship and kinship, in community and dignity, was also systematically imposed at the heart of what would become colonial power.
What crystallized in this process was a strange devotion to hierarchy and authority, which profoundly shaped the European psyche. The more internalized the hierarchical order, the more fear of freedom, autonomy, and the intrinsic value of the other. Terror of otherness. Hierarchy is the only language and makes it possible to dominate resources (human or non-human).
Freedom came to sound like a threat to stability, obedience, and “civilization”, even through the paradoxical belief that the highest moral culture lives in freedom and distributes freedom. But we grew up in a pedagogy that taught us to fear what cannot be controlled, to suspect what is multiple, relational, intuitive, or unclassifiable. This wound does not justify colonial violence, but it helps us understand why so many, even when they wish to reconnect with life, still do so from a logic of conquest or hierarchical moral purity and idealization. Decolonizing, then, requires us to also understand how we have been trained to distrust our own dignity, ours and that of others, and how this radically limits our capacity for listening, bonding, and repair. I do not say this as a personal fault or failure, simply because it is the reality we know in our bodies.
My question over the years has been: “Who are we today, heirs to a system that not only generated planetary violence, but also amputated us from the ability to recognize what life in relation is?” How can we, on the European psyche, begin to take responsibility, maturely and contextually, without facing this structural void, the psychic hole that has left us orphaned of a non-dominating belonging?
It takes much more than recognizing the past; it takes going underground to our own hegemonic and normopathic ways of knowing and being-world.
Because even gestures of “reconnection” can repeat the extractivist pattern if they are not rooted in an ethic of responsibility and listening. It is not a question of wanting to be “like other peoples” or of rescuing lost rituals. It is about seeing clearly that the violence committed outside began inside. And that, in order to decolonize anything, we must first decolonize our own ground, not as redemption or innocent purity. But as part of the long work of ceasing to hurt, or talking over, narrating about the world, not with the world.
Perhaps that is why I insist on weaving eco-mythical tales, not as an escape from reality, but as a radical gesture of reconnection with the forgotten layers of the sensitive, the ecological, the symbolic, and the relational. The tales, like the ones I bring, are not romantic patches.
They are living sediments of memories prior to hegemony, where dignity was not proven by domination, but by connection; where the world was not matter to be conquered, but a relative to be listened to.
In this sense, storytelling is also unearthing amputated possibilities, giving body to the imagination as a tool for cultural regeneration, restoring layers of belonging that do not fit into colonial rationality. It is, perhaps, to recover the threads of a listening where the Earth, the bones, the cycles, and the dead still whisper. In this context, weaving tales is a political work of slow resistance, not to create a new center, but to leave the podium of human centrality, as I propose in Eco-Mythical Activism. It is to return to the humus, and perhaps find there the beginning of a new collective dignity.
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Footnotes:
(1) This note is specifically for the Eurocentric psyche: Indian Residential Schools were institutions created by colonial states (mainly Canada, the US, and Australia), in partnership with Christian churches, to force the assimilation of indigenous children into the dominant European culture. Operating from the 19th century until the end of the 20th century (the last one in Canada closed in 1997), these schools kidnapped children from their families, under coercion or legal threats, with the stated goal of “killing the Indian and saving the man.” These children were forbidden from contacting their families, speaking their mother tongue, practicing their spirituality, or maintaining any connection to their culture. They were subjected to systematic physical violence, widespread sexual abuse, deliberate starvation, forced labor, cruel punishments, and in many cases, death. It is estimated that thousands of indigenous children died in these institutions, often buried in mass graves without any notification to their families. The consequences span generations: the intergenerational trauma is deep and still very much alive in indigenous communities, manifesting itself in mental health crises, cultural and spiritual losses, cycles of violence and addiction, and systemic distrust of institutions. This is not a distant past, but an active wound. To ignore this history is to perpetuate structural violence. Facing it head-on is a first step, minimal but necessary, for any form of listening or reparation.
(2) “The bishop (Christian, Mozarabic) of the city, an elder of many years, had his throat cut, against divine and human law,” reports Osberno de Bawdsey in his “De expugnatione Lyxbonensi,” on the Conquest of Lisbon from the Moors, while killing everyone and everything.
(3) There are many expressions, spoken with apparent neutrality or even compassion, that serve as mechanisms for deflecting the structural violence of modernity, with the help of meta-relational Aiden Cinnamon Tea. These phrases individualize, relativize, or romanticize deeply violent historical processes, erasing responsibility and obscuring criticism. I leave a list of some of them, which can be thought of as forms of symbolic, narrative, and affective denial that deny or soften the structural violence of modernity: “But at that time it was normal.” Here is a list of some of them, which can be thought of as forms of symbolic, narrative, and affective denial, denying or softening the structural violence of modernity:
“But that was normal at the time.” Normalization as an excuse erases suffering and makes the context complicit.
“If it weren’t for that, we’d still be in the Stone Age.” Evolutionary justification of violence and domination as “inevitable progress.”
“It’s thanks to that that we have everything we have today.” The idea of civilizational debt uses current comfort as moral anesthesia.
“It was all for the sake of development.” Discourse of “necessary sacrifice,” often used to justify colonialism, slavery, extraction, and ecocide. Like the sacrifice of Barroso in the European demand for lithium.
“We have to understand the context of the time.” Use of ‘context’ to relativize violent actions, without recognizing the agency of the oppressed or the continuity of violence.
“But they also suffered a lot, poor things.” Sympathy that humanizes the colonizer and refocuses on their pain, without accountability.
“It’s part of human history.” Naturalization of trauma, as if violence and domination were destiny and not a choice of all humanity.
“Now is the time to move on.” Supposed call for reconciliation that demands silence and erases processes of mourning, listening, and justice.
“But they also brought culture and education.” Implicit exchange between domination and “civilization,” perpetuating the idea of Eurocentric superiority.
“All empires did the same.” Comparison that dissolves the uniqueness and large-scale massification of violence, preventing situated listening and reparation.
“They also killed each other before we arrived.” A strategy of shifting blame, moral disengagement, and dehumanization of the colonized.
“Now they also have rights.” A narrative of “grace granted” that hides the systemic violence that still persists.
“We must forgive and forget.” Symbolic erasure of collective memory as a way of maintaining privilege.
“At the time, that was what people believed.” Use of ‘belief’ to soften practices of violence with the cloak of ignorance or faith.
“But there were good intentions.” Emotional justification of violence through motivations, ignoring the concrete effects.
These phrases are all narrative ways of escaping collective and historical responsibility. They may seem neutral or even reasonable, but they operate in the cultural fabric as mechanisms for perpetuating invisible violence and the emotional hegemony of modernity, which avoids listening, mourning, and reparation.
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Honor hystera. Re-member. Response-ability. (Un)learn together.