Our exclusive interview with Elaine Enns, the author of Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization (2021).
Radical Discipleship: Elaine, I cannot believe it has been five years since you published Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization. I continue to hear from friends and comrades who rave about your book. Just last week, in one of the men’s groups that I facilitate, one brother recommended it to the rest of the crew! For folks who might be unfamiliar, could you give us a brief synopsis of the book? Also why did you write it and who did you write it for?
Elaine Enns: Tommy, thank you for this opportunity to be in conversation with you. I continue to be humbled and gratified by all the folks using and promoting Healing Haunted Histories.
A synopsis: Most of us white settlers believe that colonization is something that happened in a distant past that doesn’t concern us; has nothing to do with our own family or history; and/or is too complicated for regular people like us to understand. The truth is that colonization has a politics, economics, culture and a spirituality that runs right through each one of us who reside on Turtle Island. Healing Haunted Histories is about developing a sense of “response-ability” (an intentional double entendre) to an ongoing historical project that we are socialized to keep at arm’s length, or worse, to dismiss.
Ched and I developed a “landlines-bloodlines-songlines” framework that instructs and empowers us to examine—compassionately but critically—how our family benefited from, has been implicated in, and harmed by colonization.
Landlines looks at how, from the beginning of our ancestral migrant journeys, our people were pushed and pulled by macro forces of boom and bust (such as war, economics, famine, or racial politics), and how different people came (or were forcibly brought) under vastly different circumstances. We encourage readers to research where and how their ancestors arrived in North America; what privileges or entitlement they experienced (or not); and what impacts their settlement had on Indigenous peoples. We also need to reckon with our own resettlements across the landscape, whether in pursuit of adventure, education or jobs. How do these movements essentially reproduce unconsciously colonial entitlement to “help ourselves” (in both meanings of that phrase) without relationship or permission, while remaining ignorant of the history, culture and present situation of Indigenous peoples we continue to displace.
Bloodlines work is about:
- How we were shaped by the loss or distortion of our ethnic identities through assimilation into whiteness, and how we internalize attitudes of white supremacy while holding onto myths of settler innocence and nobility;
- Looking at intergenerational patterns of privilege, moral injury and trauma that we have inherited and by which we’ve been shaped and misshaped;
- And the narratives and myths into which we have been socialized by family, community, and dominant culture, which tell only part of the story while distorting or silencing problematic aspects.
And Songlines are the liberatory traditions of faith, courage, service, neighborliness and mutual aid that also inhabit parts of our ancestral story. These help animate and support our own commitments to restorative solidarity and justice.
While our focus is how this work interfaces with the original inhabitants of this land, the same work is required concerning legacies of enslavement and systemic racism that have similarly impacted both self and society. We have facilitated many workshops where white settlers use this process to address enslavement in their ancestral history and where BIPOC participants use the framework and adapt it to their context. The book concludes by focusing on practices of a decolonizing discipleship, illustrated by examples of individual, congregational, denominational and political efforts that experiment with relationship building, solidarity, reparations and repatriation.
I started researching this project in 2010 because I wanted to understand the impact of intergenerational trauma in my community and how it was hampering our ability to see and respond to the historical and current realities of our Indigenous neighbors in the prairies. Ched and I wrote this book primarily for white settlers, but many different groups are experimenting with the model, taking what is helpful and adapting it to their contexts and questions. We have been workshopping this material for ten years, and it has been a transforming journey of deepening and broadening our discipleship.
RD: Elaine, I’d love to hear some of your own testimony. How has this ancestral work healed and liberated you?
EE: Over the last dozen years, I have taken a deep dive into how the ancestral stories we carry influence and shape us. I am particularly interested in how—for those of us who are descendants of white settlers—the narratives, myths and half-truths with which we grew up and the impact of intergenerational moral injury, form and de-form us. The work of Healing Haunted Histories is to examine these compassionately yet critically, in order to become more “response-able” to the work of reparative justice.
The seeds of my involvement in this ancestral work were planted by my experience of three teenage girls.
i. Over a century ago, in December 1918, my maternal grandmother endured a home invasion in Osterwick, Ukraine during the Russian Revolution, when anarchist soldiers commandeered her house for two weeks over Christmas. She was fourteen when, with her sister and girl cousins, she was hidden up in the attic, while her mother (my great-grandmother) fed, clothed and bandaged the wounds of the hostile soldiers. This was just one episode in a continuous climate of violence during this period.
ii. When I was thirteen, I knew something horrible had happened to my grandparents, and wanting to know more, I interviewed this grandmother. She began by speaking about the beauty and abundance growing up in Ukraine, but as her account approached her teenage years, she began to weep and could not continue. Because I knew her only as a joyful person who was full of laughter, seeing her cry left an indelible impression on me. I later came to understand such symptoms of unresolved trauma, which has been intergenerational for my family and many others in our Russian Mennonite community.
iii. Third, in my final year of college in Winnipeg, MB, I volunteered with the Big Sisters/Little Sisters program. I was paired with a thirteen-year-old Cree girl who had just been released from juvenile detention after three years. Her “crimes” had been sniffing glue, stealing food and clothes, and getting into fights. Though I had no race or economic analysis at the time, she helped me see that the Criminal Justice System was unable to address the impacts of injustices on this Indigenous child. This experience was my first tutorial in the hard truths of colonization, and began to raise deep questions about how her ancestors had been displaced by mine on the Canadian prairies. This compelled me to begin exploring restorative justice, first in the criminal justice field, and later as a response to historical violations.
As I considered the latter, I realized that while I heard in my family and community about the violence my grandparents’ generation experienced, I never learned about the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Saskatchewan. These three experiences laid a foundation for me to wrestle with decolonizing the narrative I inherited from my Mennonite subculture.
In my research into these issues, I came upon the critical lens that Unangax scholar Eve Tuck calls “Settler Moves to Innocence.” In our book we outline ten such strategies through which we settlers typically seek to exonerate ourselves from responsibilities for and to the past and present violence of colonization. For example, we consciously practice what Canadian scholars call “agnosia”—a kind of “aggressive unknowing” which justifies our ignorance concerning historic and continuing injustices: we neither want to know nor care that we don’t know. Thisis rooted in the pervasive ideology of ahistoric individualism (e.g. “I didn’t own any slaves”; or “my family didn’t displace anyone – they bought their land fair and square.”) We imagine that we are free-floating entities, unaccountable to what has preceded us and dissociated from patterns and systems that have benefitted us.
Another strategy is a willingness to acknowledge that violence may have occurred, but was never intended, so there is no need to take responsibility or make amends. Anti-racist educator Robin DiAngelo says that such distinctions between intent and impact is the “foundation of white fragility.”Nor are folks in progressive communities immune; for example, we think by adopting the right talking points and critical consciousness we have exonerated ourselves from doing the hard work of making things right.
In the final chapters of Healing Haunted Histories we outline four practices of restorative solidarity that can nurture our healing and liberation:
- Re-schooling the colonial legacy and identity we have inherited through building literacy, critical analysis and moral imagination;
- Relationship-building with Indigenous communities (especially our neighbors), to de-abstract the issues;
- Restorative actions that support work for Indigenous Justice; and
- Reparative experiments—both personal and political—with resources we own or influence.
I have experienced how such practices of a settler discipleship of decolonization can contribute to healing of our haunted histories and to the liberation of our hostage future. I have become far more attentive to:
- how the land holds stories in both my homeland of Saskatchewan and my adopted land of California (my landlines work);
- my own ethnic community’s costly assimilations, blind spots and moral injury (my bloodlines); and
- all the ways our faith traditions can animate us to heal parts of us that have been deformed by colonization—from scripture to song and from pilgrimage to protest—which give us courage to take concrete steps towards reparative justice (my songlines).
RD: As you know, most people read books like Healing Haunted Histories individually. Tell us why reading your book together can be so transformational – and how your new group study resource (Throughlines) can help with this.
EE: It is both countercultural and counterintuitive to do this work because we white North Americans have been socialized to deny past injustices, and to shrug off responsibility for present inequities. Though each of our stories has different particularities, all of us have grown up in a world impacted by the history and continuing structures of colonialism. But we are intimidated to take this on, because it is so deep and wide in its implications. Working the LBS process collectively allows group participants to name the resistances that arise within and among us, share and probe what we are learning by comparing notes, and encourage one another’s steps deeper into decolonizing discipleship. This reduces our sense of being overwhelmed in our implication and isolated in tackling such big and taboo subjects.
We believe that doing decolonization work in community functions to deprivatize our anxieties (since we are all facing different types of hauntings, moral injury and/or trauma); and communitize our imaginations concerning how to do genealogical work (approaching our families and facing difficult narratives) and how to take next steps in each of the four restorative solidarity practices outlined in the book (see above). Groups can become a safe container of encouragement and empathy as well as challenge and accountability. Some participants decide on restorative solidarity practices to do together, and some continue to meet to accompany one another deeper into reparative praxis.
For a decade we’ve workshopped HHH with in-person and online groups small and large. This led us to create the newly releasedThroughlines companion, a ten-session guide that resources processes of study and practice. It includes:
- a 49-page Facilitator’s Guide (PDF), step-by-step instructions to lead a group through difficult but animating conversations and commitments;
- a 27-page Participant Workbook (PDF), offering mapping exercises and worksheets to help participants learn the Landlines of their settlement, decode family myths and find Songlines that inspire and sustain resistance and solidarity; and
- Nine Key Concept Videos: Links to downloadable files for 15- to 30-minute illustrated summaries, narrated by author Elaine Enns.
Steve Taylor, United Methodist Church Home Missioner and Director of Antiracist Discipleship and Beloved Community for his denomination in North Carolina, recently facilitated an HHH group using Throughlines, and offered these reflections:
It was a shared journey of discovery, truth-telling, and transformation. Together we engaged the stories that shape us: the lands we inhabit; the peoples our ancestors encountered, displaced, or benefited from; and the systems of colonization and white supremacy that continue to de-form our lives and communities today. We learned that decolonization and healing are not solitary accomplishments, but practices we learn and live into alongside one another as we move beyond abstraction and into embodiment. We listened deeply, spoke honestly, and learned to be accountable to one another as we discerned and continue to discern faithful steps toward reparative action.
So on this fifth anniversary of HHH’s publication, we encourage RadicalDiscipleship.net readers to consider forming a group using Throughlines to deepen their own decolonizing discipleship. Here are two discount codes to facilitate this:
- a 40% discount code for Throughlines: RDSAVE40 (for a group of nine sharing the cost it would be just $20 per participant) order here;
- a 40% discount for Healing Haunted Histories: order directly from Wipf & Stock and enter HHHGRP26 at check-out.
Radical Discipleship 