Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Introduction
[A] healing ritual changes a person from an isolated (diseased) state to one of
incorporation (health) … In the transformation from one state to another, the prior
state or condition must cease to exist. It must die (Allen, 1986:80).
We have been witnessing a revival of Aboriginal strength and determination across Canada in recent
decades. The impetus behind this revival takes many forms:
• the restoration of traditional systems of belief and practice;
• the resurgence and reclamation of languages;
• the growth of an Aboriginal sense of national identity; and
• the reconstruction and deconstruction of Indigenous people’s history.
There are many factors contributing to the renaissance of traditional Aboriginal values and mores and
the growing conviction that Aboriginal people are much more than victims of non-Aboriginal invasion
and colonization. At least one of those factors can be traced to declining pressure within the last fifty
years of active and aggressive colonization processes. Within the last several decades, Aboriginal people
have been able to create enough cultural space and freedom to analyze and integrate concepts of “loss”
and “impermanence” on their terms. They have taken opportunities that have been presented to inscribe
a new relationship between themselves and the dominant culture, and to create new and renewed links
between themselves and their immediate world. This has the effect of bringing Aboriginal people
together to work on issues that have long been dormant and hidden, even from their own view, and
allows them to confront other issues that have run rampant in their social structures for far too long.
The growing, self-directed shift in Aboriginal communities from social and cultural disintegration to
healing and community well-being provided the impetus for this research.
The telling of this story can best be regarded as an effort to remind people that Indigenous social and
cultural devastation in the present is the result of unremitting personal and collective trauma due to
demographic collapse, resulting from early influenza and smallpox epidemics and other infectious diseases,
conquest, warfare, slavery, colonization, proselytization, famine and starvation, the 1892 to the late1960s
residential school period and forced assimilation. These experiences have left Indigenous cultural identities
reeling with what can be regarded as an endemic and complex form of post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). This concept is not new to Aboriginal people. The following quote by Luther Standing Bear,
in reference to the residential school experience shared by Aboriginal people in Canada and the United
States, articulates an understanding and recognition of this type of disorder and highlights a question of
what Aboriginal people have been left with: “By and large the procedure was successful, although the
legacy of damaged minds and crippled souls it left in its wake is as yet untold. Psychic numbing, Post
Traumatic Stress Syndrome, battered wife syndrome, suicide, alcoholism, ennui - are there any names
for psychecide?” (cited in Allen, 1994:112).
1