Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Introduction
Many historical facts from the Aboriginal past have been veiled by official discourses and sometimes by
Aboriginal people themselves, because, as Neal says: “There is a tendency for the older generations to
avoid talking about [the] experiences that were painful, while many members of the younger generations
have little interest in [the] events that are now frozen in the past” (1998:x). Only by revealing what
remains hidden and only by reconnecting people with their memories, one may achieve the interconnectedness,
interdependence and balance with the past that is so much needed for Aboriginal
communities to heal at a deeper level. Once this balance of truth is achieved and all the painful
elements properly connected, Aboriginal people will be able to transcend the pain and grief that has
become embedded in their identity and in their social and cultural egos.
Nwachuku and Ivey (1991) propose that the healing process in Aboriginal communities must begin
with the exploration of people’s natural helping styles. In McCormick’s (1995/1996) study, First Nation
people utilized several healing modalities to heal their communities and themselves. These included:
exercise and the expression of emotion to restore balance; establishing social connections to create interconnectedness;
and addressing spirits to achieve transcendence. All these modalities had one thing in
common: they were intended to place an individual in the context of the community and were evolved
around this concept:
Throughout the history of First Nations people, the definition of health evolved around
the whole being of each person - the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects of
a person being in balance and harmony with each other as well with the environment
and other beings. This has clashed with the western medical model which, until very
recently, has perpetuated the concept of health as being “the absence of disease” (Favel-
King, 1993:125).
There is no doubt that restoring balance is of the utmost importance to Aboriginal people. What effect
is one to expect if this balance is destroyed; not only shattered, not merely damaged, but almost entirely
decimated by the multiple effects of death and destruction from the early epidemics, the early mass depopulation
and the wanton and vicious killing that went on, especially under Spanish occupation.
As Waldram, Herring and Kue Young say in their study on Aboriginal health in Canada:
Epidemics were not simply medical events but had far-reaching consequences for
Aboriginal societies … In some cases, whole communities were decimated … epidemics
spurred on community break-up and migration … among the survivors, the loss of a
significant number of community members altered leadership roles and disrupted the
existing social structures … Still, relatively little is known about the health and disease
histories of particular communities or reserves, so that the picture of health and disease
up to the Second World War can be drawn in only the broadest of strokes” (1995:260).
In this study, an attempt is made to draw in more subtle strokes in order to find, at least, some answers
to the burning questions of why the process of healing in Aboriginal communities seems to be slowed
down by apparently powerful forces that, to this day, keep people imprisoned in their troubled memories.
9