Remembering Histories of Trauma: North American Genocide and the Holocaust in Public Memory

Remembering Histories of Trauma compares and links Native American, First Nation and Jewish histories of traumatic memory. Using source material from both sides of the Atlantic, it examines the differences between ancestral experiences of genocide and the representation of those histories in public sites in the United States, Canada and Europe. Challenging the ways public bodies have used those histories to frame the cultural and political identity of regions, states, and nations, it considers the effects of those representations on internal group memory, external public memory and cultural assimilation. Offering new ways to understand the Native-Jewish encounter by highlighting shared critiques of public historical representation, Mailer seeks to transcend historical tensions between Native American studies and Holocaust studies. In linking and comparing European and American contexts of historical trauma and their representation in public memory, this book brings Native American studies, Jewish studies, early American history, Holocaust studies, and museum studies into conversation with each other. In revealing similarities in the public representation of Indigenous genocide and the Holocaust it offers common ground for Jewish and Indigenous histories, and provides a new framework to better understand the divergence between traumatic histories and the ways they are memorialized.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Traumatic Memory and the Indigenous-Jewish Connection 1. Biological Determinism and the Problem of Perpetrator Intent 2. Indigenous People, Jews, and the Americanization of the Holocaust 3. Indigenous Genocide, the Holocaust, and European Public Memory 4. Public Memory and the Problem of Imperial Power 5. Traumatic Memory, Assimilation, and Cultural Renewal Conclusion

About the Author :
Gideon Mailer Associate Professor and Chair of the History Program at University of Minnesota, Duluth, USA. A contributor to the Baeumler Kaplan Holocaust Commemoration Project and other initiatives connecting American Indian Studies and Holocaust Studies, he has also helped to spearhead a new Museum Studies program with the intent to integrate Indigenous memory and Holocaust studies at his institution.

Review :
With great reflection and compassion, Gideon Mailer identifies how genocide and massacre have impacted Jews and Indigenous peoples, not only in the political, cultural and social spheres, but also in the imaginaries of these groups, their collective archives so that they retain a kinship previously unexamined. This is an ambitious, generous, and much needed book. It addresses anxieties that have made it hard to see links between the experience and representation of anti-Jewish and anti-indigenous genocides. More impressive still, it does so without overly generalizing the experiences and sensibilities of indigenous people or Jews themselves or reducing them solely to victimhood. It should foster many productive and critical discussions. I hope it will be widely read.