Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 4
Further, the spiritual or psychic sensitivity that makes it possible for the Elders and the more spiritually
advanced to “know, hear and see” the ancient spiritual teachings and keep them alive, has also made
Aboriginal people more susceptible to the deep under-currents of grief that drift in the deep waters of
our collective stream of consciousness. Rose Auger notes that she works directly with the spirits that
teach her:
I work with 126 of these spirits. They are my ancestors, my people. I am still very
young, so I still have a long way to go to learn who they all are. Each year more come
to work with me and tell me that this is who I am, and that this is my duty. There’s one
grandmother who’s been coming to me called Earth Blanket Woman. She’s coming
here to tell us what we need to do for what’s coming. Through this winter, she came
and told us that we have to make special medicines and teas so that we can stay healthy
because there were going to be flu’s [sic] worse than there had ever been. That a lot of
people would end up in the hospital because of something in the atmosphere. It’s going
to be like that more and more, diseases that aren’t here yet but are coming (as cited in
Johnson and Budnick, 1994:143).
Historical records show that her understanding is not the full story, that nothing yet has ever matched
those first four hundred years of disease and destruction. However, the knowledge of what happened in
the early contact period, for the most part, was left silenced in the past, as other more immediate trauma
manifested.
This study’s theory contemplates the idea that if “traditional” people could pick up the vibrations of
coming epidemics in their minds, they and other inter-connected Indigenous people could pick up the
vibrations of grief that would also be freely floating in the universe from earlier times. This means that
Aboriginal people would be reading, hearing or feeling their own stream of consciousness. The stream
would be uniquely Aboriginal in experience and transmitted through a genetic marker or code, as
Haney suggested. Memory of the past would also become a matter of interpretation as time went by.
Although, as noted earlier, there was no place on the continent where Aboriginal people were able to
deal with their shock and grief in the moments and years of the most terrible events happening, as
everything had to be set aside for the sake of survival of the few.
Perhaps now it is time for a descent into the deeper depths of historic despair where Indigenous people
can make their way back through memories, oral traditions, written words and deeper sorrows. Then,
Indigenous people can collectively create newer understandings and go willingly through the painful
memories, once again, in order to resolve and release the historic trauma and free themselves from its
tyranny.
This is strongly stated by Elder Jeannette Henry who noted in 1970 that:
One of the most important elements to be found in the history of this nation, as well as
in the history of the Native races of this country, is that of conflict between the Europeans
and the Indians from the time of first contact, through the ages and until the end of the
19 th century. Nearly four hundred years of such conflict occurred, perhaps the longest
period of war and near-war in human history. While it is perfectly true that blood has
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