Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 1
their lives. Not everyone, however, was grateful to survive. Those who managed to recover found they
no longer wished to live. According to Adair (1966), the effects of these diseases on people’s minds and
bodies also took their toll and many Indigenous people who survived measles or smallpox chose to end
their lives rather than live with the shame of horrible disfigurement: “some shot themselves, others cut
their throats, some stabbed themselves with knives, and others with sharp pointed canes; many threw
themselves with sullen madness into the fire, and there slowly expired, as if they had been utterly
divested of the native power of feeling pain” (Adair, 1966:245).
Resorting to suicide (Duffy, 1951) is mentioned in several texts that discuss the responses of Indigenous
people to the indignity of severe smallpox scarring in the aftermath of the epidemics (Thornton, 1987).
They regarded smallpox disfigurement the same way they would an untenable birth deformity: as a
death sentence. According to various contemporaries, it was impossible to keep victims from scratching
themselves and this behaviour left them with “monstrous ugliness in faces and bodies” (Cook, 1998:128).
However, once it is understood what they went through, it is no wonder that those who survived the
disease fell into deep depression. They were dealing with huge death tolls, horrible disfigurement,
displacement from their homes and deep despair at a world that seemingly turned against them. “Terror
was universal. The contagion increased as autumn advanced; and when the winter came, its ravages
were appalling. The season of the Huron festivity was turned to a season of mourning; and such was the
despondency and dismay, that suicides became frequent” (Cook, 1998:166).
Suicide was not peculiar to this continent in these circumstances. As noted in the history of Medieval
Europe, people took similar measures in the aftermath of plagues that devastated their families, cultures
and societies, with many people choosing to kill themselves rather than suffer a prolonged death of
sickness and potential starvation. From the following quote, it is clear that the sense of dejection and
despair was a common response to what happened in Europe as well:
By far the most terrible feature in the malady was the dejection which ensued when any
one felt himself sickening, for the despair into which they instantly fell took away their
power of resistance, and left them a much easier prey to the disorder; besides which,
there was the awful spectacle of men dying like sheep, through having caught the infection
in nursing each other. This caused the greatest mortality (Deaux, 1969:18).
Comparing similar responses from one continent to another confirms that it is critical for sociopsychological
effects be examined, along with physical effects, if one is to fully understand the implications
and impacts of European diseases on people of newly contacted lands (Bailes, 1985). As in Europe,
when plagues devastated medieval populations in 1348, terrible and unknown diseases ravaging the
Aboriginal population left more than disease mortality in their wake. So many fell ill to infection that
there was virtually no one left to feed and nurse those who survived and those who were trying to
recuperate from initial onslaughts. Countless people fled to avoid the contagion: parents left their
children, children their parents, husbands their wives. “Many died from it, but many died only of
hunger. There were deaths from starvation, for they had no one left to care for them. No one cared
about anybody else” (Sahagún, 1992:791 as cited in Cook, 1998: 66). Certainly, panic and flight were
all too common reactions to unrelenting death and disease during plague and smallpox pandemics on
either continent (Duffy, 1951). For those that managed to survive, the guilt of leaving their loved ones
would have been equally overwhelming and would have exacerbated their susceptibility.
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