Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 1
In addition, once the Indigenous population on Hispaniola, the surrounding islands, South America
and Mexico became too depleted of healthy Indians to keep up with Spanish demand for slaves, the
Spaniards began to import black people from Africa (Newman, 1976). Various outbreaks of epidemics
and pestilence can also be traced through historical records to black people being brought from the
African continent into the area as slaves and left on Cape Verde and other Caribbean Islands. Spanish
attribution of epidemics to black slaves brought from the Cape Verde Island via Panama is contained in
their own records and provides strong evidence that at least one epidemic, which spread southward
from Cartagena, was in fact introduced this way (Dobyns, 1963).
The Jesuit provincial reports of May 20, 1590 indicate that the epidemics eventually reached Chile.
Immediately after their arrival, the epidemics wrought total havoc, not only among the hostile Araucanian
Indians, but also among the Spanish. Local episodes of epidemics continued into 1591 and many
people died on the Peruvian coast south of Lima. Smallpox mortality among these Indians has been
placed at fully three-quarters of their population (Dobyns, 1963). In the spring of 1619, epidemic
smallpox broke out again in Chile, causing an additional death toll in the neighbourhood of 50,000
individuals. This contagion reappeared once more in the autumn of 1620, again causing huge mortality
and overwhelming fear among the Natives (Dobyns, 1963).
Until 1720, recurrent measles and smallpox epidemics struck approximately every seven to eleven years
in these regions, until almost the entire Indigenous population was wiped out. Reports in the Archdiocese
of Lima in 1720 indicated Indian mortality alone reached 72,800 people; and, for many years thereafter,
the epidemic of 1720 was Peru’s most terrible plague that the country had suffered (Dobyns, 1963).
When questioned if there were any survivors, one Indian group simply tossed a fistful of sand into the
air.
The disease spread across the mainland with the Spanish, consuming Puerto Rico early in 1519 before
it moved into Mexico in 1520, where it created devastating mortality among the Indigenous people and
played a critical role in breaking the Aztec military resistance to the Spanish conquest (Dobyns, 1963).
The smallpox virus, along with measles, are described in the medical literature as “crowd type” diseases
because they require a minimum population of 500,000 people to support widespread transmission.
This would suggest that Aztec populations were substantial enough to sustain the virus as it moved
rapidly among them (Newman, 1976). There is speculation that several viruses may have already been
at work prior to Spanish arrival among the Aztec, having travelled along established Aboriginal trade
routes throughout the empire and weakening any kind of resistance they possibly had; but the Spanish
most certainly brought it with them as well. The disease severely weakened Aztec defenses and allowed
the Spanish to defeat them with little or no resistance. The Aztec were a literate people and the following
account gives their own graphic description of the suffering they experienced from a smallpox epidemic.
This particular epidemic is recorded as having raged among them for 70 days. The entire empire was
struck down and rendered completely immobile by the disease, which killed thousands of their people:
Sores erupted on our faces, our breasts, our bellies; we were covered with agonizing
sores from head to foot. The illness was so dreadful that no one could walk or move.
The sick were so utterly helpless that they could only lie on their beds like corpses,
unable to move their limbs or even their heads. They could not lie [sic] face down or
roll from one side to the other. If they did move their bodies they screamed with pain.
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