Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 4
been spilled on both sides, even the most biased of historians must admit that ours has
been enormously the greatest loss … especially when considering the facts of genocide,
foreign diseases, the destruction of our culture and the loss of our country. The whole
story of conflict has still not been told … Today, our posture is that of a defeated people,
yes. But a people who did not bend, and had to be broken. And even when broken, we
are a people who arose again and again to fight once more. Today, in a different arena
and with tools of policy, strategy, and legal negotiation, we are fighting still. We often
read about Indian “terror, wars, resistance to progress.” Nowhere has there been told the
full story of courageous Indian resistance to the onslaught of the European, or the open
and brutal attacks upon the Native by the white invaders (Henry in Indian Voices,
1970:111).
Today’s Elders know that, although some aspects of the Aboriginal social self were deeply hurt and
damaged, there is yet another side of the Aboriginal psyche: the Aboriginal spiritual self that is full of
positive energy, waiting to be revealed and used in the right way. The Elders see the effects of colonization
and the subsequent collapse of Aboriginal social structures as central to the cause of the disintegration
of Aboriginal communities, traditions and, in turn, individuals. One Elder states:
In the early days, when our families and communities were ripped apart by colonialism,
when our communities were disintegrating and you had kids taken away from the parents,
the children removed and put into residential schools or missions, then you had parents
who were already into alcoholism, you had grandparents of that same generation that
were stripped from the practice of their ceremonies, their spirituality (Elder cited in
Ellerby and Ellerby, 1998:x).
Another Elder further states:
Our dignity was taken away … and a lot of people don’t realize that. They don’t really
understand about how our dignity was taken away from us, how we were taught to be
ashamed to be Natives. Then our self-respect was gone. Once you lose your self-respect,
how can you respect someone else? Then you take your frustrations out on other people
(Elder cited in Ellerby and Ellerby, 1998:ix-x).
Battiste, a member of the Mi’kmaq Nation and a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, says in
the introduction to Aboriginal Education: Fulfilling the Promise that, in order for the “new Aboriginal
story” to unfold, people’s fully actualized selves must be:
[R]ecognized as the foundation for their future. But we are not whole yet, having been
diminished by our past, and we do not know who will articulate that future, that new
story. Aboriginal government? Aboriginal politicians? Elders? Educators? The
responsibility ultimately rests with Aboriginal people themselves in a continuing journey
of collaboration and negotiation, healing and rebuilding, creating and experimenting,
and visioning and celebrating (2000:ix).
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