Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing
by Cynthia C. Wesley-Esquimaux, Ph.D. and Magdalena Smolewski, Ph.D.
by Cynthia C. Wesley-Esquimaux, Ph.D. and Magdalena Smolewski, Ph.D.
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Introduction<br />
[A] healing ritual changes a person from an isolated (diseased) state to one of<br />
incorporation (health) … In the transformation from one state to another, the prior<br />
state or condition must cease to exist. It must die (Allen, 1986:80).<br />
We have been witnessing a revival of <strong>Aboriginal</strong> strength <strong>and</strong> determination across Canada in recent<br />
decades. The impetus behind this revival takes many forms:<br />
• the restoration of traditional systems of belief <strong>and</strong> practice;<br />
• the resurgence <strong>and</strong> reclamation of languages;<br />
• the growth of an <strong>Aboriginal</strong> sense of national identity; <strong>and</strong><br />
• the reconstruction <strong>and</strong> deconstruction of Indigenous people’s history.<br />
There are many factors contributing to the renaissance of traditional <strong>Aboriginal</strong> values <strong>and</strong> mores <strong>and</strong><br />
the growing conviction that <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people are much more than victims of non-<strong>Aboriginal</strong> invasion<br />
<strong>and</strong> colonization. At least one of those factors can be traced to declining pressure within the last fifty<br />
years of active <strong>and</strong> aggressive colonization processes. Within the last several decades, <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people<br />
have been able to create enough cultural space <strong>and</strong> freedom to analyze <strong>and</strong> integrate concepts of “loss”<br />
<strong>and</strong> “impermanence” on their terms. They have taken opportunities that have been presented to inscribe<br />
a new relationship between themselves <strong>and</strong> the dominant culture, <strong>and</strong> to create new <strong>and</strong> renewed links<br />
between themselves <strong>and</strong> their immediate world. This has the effect of bringing <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people<br />
together to work on issues that have long been dormant <strong>and</strong> hidden, even from their own view, <strong>and</strong><br />
allows them to confront other issues that have run rampant in their social structures for far too long.<br />
The growing, self-directed shift in <strong>Aboriginal</strong> communities from social <strong>and</strong> cultural disintegration to<br />
healing <strong>and</strong> community well-being provided the impetus for this research.<br />
The telling of this story can best be regarded as an effort to remind people that Indigenous social <strong>and</strong><br />
cultural devastation in the present is the result of unremitting personal <strong>and</strong> collective trauma due to<br />
demographic collapse, resulting from early influenza <strong>and</strong> smallpox epidemics <strong>and</strong> other infectious diseases,<br />
conquest, warfare, slavery, colonization, proselytization, famine <strong>and</strong> starvation, the 1892 to the late1960s<br />
residential school period <strong>and</strong> forced assimilation. These experiences have left Indigenous cultural identities<br />
reeling with what can be regarded as an endemic <strong>and</strong> complex form of post-traumatic stress disorder<br />
(PTSD). This concept is not new to <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people. The following quote by Luther St<strong>and</strong>ing Bear,<br />
in reference to the residential school experience shared by <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people in Canada <strong>and</strong> the United<br />
States, articulates an underst<strong>and</strong>ing <strong>and</strong> recognition of this type of disorder <strong>and</strong> highlights a question of<br />
what <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people have been left with: “By <strong>and</strong> large the procedure was successful, although the<br />
legacy of damaged minds <strong>and</strong> crippled souls it left in its wake is as yet untold. Psychic numbing, Post<br />
<strong>Trauma</strong>tic Stress Syndrome, battered wife syndrome, suicide, alcoholism, ennui - are there any names<br />
for psychecide?” (cited in Allen, 1994:112).<br />
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