Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 1
From the earliest epidemics, Aboriginal people made attempts to save themselves from contracting
diseases by fleeing. In addition, they made efforts to heal sicknesses using their own medicines and
treatments. The methods of most shamans and medicine people would likely have included using
various plants and bark remedies, along with healing ceremonies and rituals, and the use of the sweat
lodge is mentioned frequently in historical texts (Wood, 1987). The following quotation raises a question
of whether treatments they were observed using in 1589 were in fact “indigenous,” even at that early
point in time. Cook (1998) indicates that French descriptions of east coast Indigenous people in
America used bloodletting and purging to treat sickness and were common in 1565. By 1589, there
were still some Indigenous people using this method, which may have caused a high mortality rate
among the Indigenous people (Dobyns, 1963).
This statement suggests it was “pre-contact” treatment that they were using to treat illnesses and this
may well have contributed to their deaths. At Sao Paulo and probably many other places, it was the
Jesuits who often “resorted to bloodletting, using feathers as lancets” (Hemming, 1978:140) in efforts
to heal people. It is possible that practicing bloodletting did, in fact, have a dire effect on the Indigenous
people’s ability to survive the epidemics, but it is also very likely that they learned to do this from the
missionaries among them. In the end, it would suggest that death from bloodletting was nothing in
comparison to the sheer horror of falling to the illness itself. The following passage attests to the
suffering of Aboriginal people, who had the grave misfortune to be infected with the smallpox virus,
and describes a condition far beyond a “normal” attack of smallpox, as most Europeans knew it:
The disease began with serious pains inside the intestines which made the liver and the
lungs rot. It then turned into pox that were so rotten and poisonous that the flesh fell
off them in pieces full of evil-smelling beasties … the skin and flesh of the sick often
remained stuck to the hands; and the smell was too strong to endure … This was a form
of smallpox or pox so loathsome and evil-smelling that none could stand the great
stench that emerged from them. For this reason many died unattended, consumed by
the worms that grew in the wounds of the pox and were engendered in their bodies in
such abundance and of such great size that they caused horror and shock to any who
saw them (Hemming, 1978:142).
The suffering and shock people experienced from this sickness would have sent anyone reeling in
horror and despair. This kind of attack is directly related to the concept of “virgin soil” epidemics
mentioned earlier. Basically, this means that a disease is introduced to a population that has never
suffered or experienced the illness and, therefore, has no immunity whatsoever.
Such diseases appear with extraordinary virulence and at times exhibit symptoms quite
unlike the ones we normally associate with them. After a period of acclimatization,
which may last three or four generations, say, eighty to one hundred years, a virgin soil
epidemic will usually settle down to a somewhat milder form with symptoms that we
are more accustomed to [today, and may even subside into a childhood disease with
little or no mortality] (Cook and Lovell, 1992:8).
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