Letter to the Future: Lateral Healing
Dear Ones,
“I don’t understand why democracy is the wrong frame. I don’t understand why knowing the names of the mountains and lakes matters, or understanding why learning the original names matters to a moral imagination.”
The comment above was shared with me by an organizer who was hosting a gathering to save democracy— a necessary effort these days, unfortunately. Still, I responded by insisting that my people have been here longer, surviving genocide and cultural eradication. Suggesting that God’s vision of history is longer than 250 years old.
I shared with this organizer that we had committed to years of intentional story circles, centering healing, remaining faithful to God’s time, and operating on what I call ancestor time. Healing, especially from generational trauma, requires a deeper response than a one-time gathering that continues to dismiss the violence my community experienced. We require a healing response that honors a longer history and a clear understanding of the theological assumptions that are driving current divisions.
I just came home from one of Auburn’s story circles in Alaska, where we both learned from and took part in a healing circle. After dancing, singing, and sharing stories at the SHI Celebration, we were all reminded that we are still here. I am still here, still singing, still moving, in the old ways and the new. Even though our songs, language, and culture were outlawed, and our children stolen away and sent to boarding schools, people are still singing, recovering language, and celebrating culture. A culture that knew and taught the names of the land and sea. From babies to elders, practices were shared with kin and guests alike.
Celebration is its own form of testimony. It says that the breath God gave us is still in us, and we are still using it to praise. It reminded me so much of what we do back home in our community; recovering our languages, practices, and traditions.
Part of the purpose of this trip, and of our storytelling work more broadly, was to seek a deeper narrative than the one many people were celebrating this year as the nation marked 250 years since the colonies declared their independence. We have been listening with Indigenous communities to ask what healing looks like in the aftermath of genocide and epistemicide, especially where that violence was enacted or supported by the church.
In our story circle, and in the quieter work of telling the truth to one another, we spoke about the church’s violence against our communities. We named the generational harm that follows, the way colonial violence spreads like a disease. One speaker named it lateral violence.
Lateral violence.
Lateral violence names what happens when harm done to a people turns inward and sideways, when those carrying the weight of oppression begin to press that same weight onto those beside them. Paulo Freire called this dynamic the sub-oppressor. The oppressed, having known the logic of domination, can begin to host that logic in their own bodies and aim it at peers. The colonized hand reaches for the colonizer’s tools and uses them on kin. I have seen it in movement organizations, congregations, families, and myself. It is one of the cruelest inheritances, because it convinces a wounded people that those whom we should be in solidarity with are somehow a threat.
I left Alaska carrying a question, and I want to set it down here where the future can hold it.
What if we practiced lateral healing?
Extending friendship that crosses the very line drawn to decide who counts as your people. Listening to stories. Making space in our hearts and souls for those we might count as family.
If violence can move sideways, so can love. I am curious what it would mean to build this on purpose, not as sentiment but as practice. To turn toward one another with the same attention we have been taught to turn outward in vigilance. To see the person beside us, and the stranger across the road, as the neighbor God keeps asking us to recognize. A place where repair begins, rather than the easiest place to pass on our pain.
For that organizer I mentioned at the beginning, it is in fact a necessity for you to learn the languages, names, and practices that existed on this land before contact in order for us to heal in meaningful ways. It is an act of repair to lay a better foundation for a democracy that is worth saving.
Healing, in an age of genocide and division, can feel impossible. But I can sense its outline in a story circle where people choose honesty and gentleness at the same time. I can feel it when someone says, I am hurting, and is met with, we are still here. Lateral healing looks like elders and leaders refusing to compete for the same narrow scrap of recognition. It looks like communities under the weight of historic oppression, the dispossessed and the displaced, deciding that scarcity is a story told about us, not a truth we must perform on one another.
What world do you get to live in because we chose lateral healing? If we practiced healing with the stranger, what did it build? Did the sideways wound begin to close? Did the next generation inherit something other than suspicion or pain?
I am writing toward a world where the answer is yes. Where the SHI Celebration in Alaska was not an exception to our grief, but a glimpse of our ordinary life. Where we remembered, together, that we were never meant to be each other’s oppressors.
We were meant to be each other’s friend. We were meant to be each other’s medicine.
With hope and with the songs still in my ears,
Rev. Patrick B. Reyes, Ph.D.
Executive Vice President and Dean