Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 1
A great many died from this plague, and many others died of hunger. They could not
get up to search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved
to death in their beds. Some people came down with a milder form of the disease; they
suffered less than the others and made a good recovery. But they could not escape
entirely. Their looks were ravaged, for wherever a sore broke out it gouged an ugly
pockmark in the skin (Leon-Portilla, 1962:93).
The Indians fell quickly, even before the Spanish arrived with their swords, each victim cut down
painfully by an unseen foe they were helpless to fight. As in Europe during the Black Death, those who
could, left the city and surrounding areas seeking shelter from the disease (with other people) in more
remote villages, spreading the infection as they went. The virus may have come into the Aztec city by
trade routes and with the Spanish, but it undoubtedly left in the lungs and on the bodies and clothing
of people as they fled, unsuspectingly and rapidly infecting and killing other victims wherever they
found shelter. Smallpox caused a mortality, which has been reckoned in some areas of Mexico, at more
than half the population (Wright, 1992).
It spread widely and quickly because, within Mexico’s very large population, the virus ignited like a fire
set in dry grass and there was no way to stop it. It burned through several small provinces of Mexico
before moving south at the end of 1521 to consume almost the entire Indigenous population of Vera
Cruz, and then finally reaching Guatemala in the following year where it again carried off half the
Indigenous population (Dobyns, 1963). Once the virus left the Caribbean Islands, it was introduced
into virgin populations of large Indigenous cities and towns on the continent. The virus rapidly assumed
epidemic proportions, killing millions of people as it quickly spread across the land (Dobyns, 1963). In
the epidemic that struck Meso-America on the eve of Spanish conquest in 1521, mortality was high
enough to completely cover the streets of the cities and roadways with human carnage:
The streets, the squares, the houses and the courts of Talteluco were covered with dead
bodies; we could not step without treading on them, and the stench was intolerable …
Accordingly, [the Indians] … were ordered to remove to the neighbouring towns, and
for three days and three nights all the causeways were full, from one end to the other, of
men, women, and children so weak and sickly, squalid and dirty, and pestilential that it
was a misery to behold them (Ashburn, 1947:84).
Waves of the epidemics raced back and forth across the continent, devastating the Indigenous population
as it went. In 1546, another epidemic occurred where people died in great numbers (Dobyns, 1963). It
has been estimated that in Peru alone, ultimately, a total of eight million Indigenous people perished
from infectious diseases (Fernandez, 1949).
There is one clear and well-documented account, remarkably reminiscent of the ravages and responses
to the Black Death in Europe, of an epidemic that struck the city of Arequipa in 1589:
The onset of the disease brought severe headaches and kidney pains. A few days later,
patients became stupefied, then delirious, and ran naked through the streets shouting.
Patients who broke out in a rash had a good chance to recover, reportedly, while those
who did not break out seemed to have little chance. Fetuses died in the uterus. Even
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