Inherited Guilt

For many years I have struggled with a strong feeling of guilt. A guilt that has never made sense and a guilt that I can find no real reason to have. Taking drugs did not remove it, drinking alcohol did not drown it out of me nor did faith in Christ or for that matter God. This guilt comes over me on occasion and reminds me of depression, actually, come to think of it, this guilt had been interpreted as depression for most of my life - by me and by therapists and loved ones alike.

This guilt drives me to take actions that I later regret yet continue to do. This guilt drives me to the brink of sanity and to the edge of life. Sometimes I really do not know what to do, to make it go away. For years I have thought that the guilt was from my behavior, whether that behavior was good or not, I always reacted to the guilt as if I was a very bad person - no matter what.

Recently I have been teaching a portion of American History in a social studies classes that I teach online to Chinese students. In those classes we have a section that teaches a version of the westward migration of the European settlers that began to move out of the thirteen colonies into the Great Plains and beyond. I teach that the white man took the native lands from those humans that had existed there for untold years without impunity or even a tiny bit of regret. I teach that the white man would decide that what the native, indigenous humans possessed was actually the "promised land" as if it were theirs in the first place and that they had now come to retrieve what was rightfully theirs. I teach that the settlers from Europe and elsewhere were selfish, arrogant people that did not even see the indigenous people as human, therefore they could shoot them, run them off, enslave them or do just about whatever came to their minds. There was no hope for these gentle indigenous people from the moment the first settlers landed on the shores of the "New World” and began to preach the Gospel to what they considered to be an uneducated, savage and crude specimen of humanity.

As I am discovering additional facts to share with each new telling of the inhuman behavior taken against these original people, I get an overwhelming sense of guilt - guilt that I, a white descendent of the early settlers from Europe that took what they wanted and claimed it as their own to hand down to their children and to their children and so forth, should do something to make amends. Here we are in the 21st century yet this taking continues. Treaty after treaty has been written and forced upon the descendants of the original people and subsequently each of these treaties have been modified, changed and ultimately broken - to the benefit of the white man - regardless of the consequences that came the way of these original inhabitants of this vast land.

Now, the white men are aiming to take even more of the land without seeming to care that another series of treaties with several different nations are soon to be broken/modified once again. My guilt feels stronger every time I read about the latest atrocity and the negative results had by the native people.

Why does this greedy taking have to continue? Why do we continue to take and take and take? These people - from multiple indigenous areas of this North American continent - have been forcibly removed to areas of the land that white people did and do not consider inhabitable and now there is a push to take even more of the land because it appears that there are millions of dollars’ worth of natural resources that are within those current tribal lands. 

For me and my unabated guilt - I can only offer an apology for the rude behavior and forceful acts of others of my race - and pray that it ends soon.