Killing beauty in North America

Buck, C. (2001). Killing beauty in North America (Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2001). UMI No. 3043120

The first recorded battle after the Battle of the Little Big Horn between Plains Indians and the United States Army occurred in September of 1876. My great grandfather led an assault against the Plains Indians and acquired war trophies from the Northern Cheyenne Indians. These objects, held by my family for 122 years, were returned to traditional society members In the summer of 1998.

This paper is a heuristic and hermeneutic interpretation, amplification and reflection of the consequences of 500 years of denied genocide, a depth psychological analysis of cultural trauma, primitive mental states, Coyote the Trickster, and group functioning.

Our historical shadow includes our participation in the attempted genocide of Native Americans. Revisionism—the cunning assertion that memory is a deliberate lie—is hatred's ultimate obscenity (Bertman, 2000, p. 62). Our schools have traditionally taught both Indian and Euro-American children a revisionist view of our heroic conquest of the American West that denies that the Holocaust ever happened. Past and current local and international political policies support this delusion. Eigen (1993) writes that the intensity of belief attached to delusions indicates that the individual is trying to hold fast to a terrifyingly important dimension of his own story (p. 10). Our nation's tendency to idealize itself is a perversion resulting in unrealistic and unattainable attitudes that are related to our Society's affinity for killing Beauty. Collectively we continue to both idealize and denigrate Native Americans, perpetrating the same perversion on ourselves.

The destructiveness of idealization is expressed through primitive mental states that no one fully outgrows. Primitive intrapsychic affect is linked to primitive expressions in the larger collective. Our lack of collective awareness of history and our ongoing attempts at cultural genocide are affecting us through a process of denial that splits us off from the violence of our past that is being expressed by our youth. Individual or collective perversion results in losses of human vitality and creativity that insult the nature of Soul.