Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 1
also more than likely that Midewiwin spiritualism developed in response to a forced imposition of
Christianity and by the eventual adoption of Christian practices. The Midewiwin Society or Lodge is
still active and going through a process of rejuvenation today.
Shamans regularly adopted various Christian practices, as demonstrated by the adept use of baptism in
Huron healing ceremonies when a smallpox epidemic devastated Huronia in 1636:
[T]he suspicious act of baptism caused the death of their relatives and loved ones. Yet
enough did recover after baptism so that by the time of the 1636-37 Huron epidemic,
one aspiring shaman used for a cure ‘a mysterious water with which he sprinkled the
sick’ (Cook 1998:195).
In spite of attempts to heal themselves and keep sicknesses from their people, shamans and medicine
people were not successful. The English knew what measures could be put in place to save them and
might have helped to quarantine the sick. They did not do so, not because they were afraid, but because
they “unabashedly welcomed the providential removal of the original inhabitants of the land” (Cook,
1998:200). Within two generations, smallpox had completely destroyed one-third to one-half of the
Indigenous population of the American continent. It is alarming that this death toll appears to have
been persistent for at least one hundred years after the first epidemic had begun. In 1587, in Sante Fe
de Bogota, there were ninety out of a hundred Aboriginal people killed by a smallpox epidemic (Dobyns,
1963). It is noteworthy that this reference mentions only ninety out of one hundred, rather than the
thousands that were being referred to not long before.
At least until 1918, various epidemics devastated the lives of Indigenous people across the continent,
some reaching as far north as Alaska and west to British Columbia. Dobyns (1983) suggests that 90 to
95 per cent of the Indigenous population was wiped out by epidemic disease, warfare, slavery, starvation
and complete and utter despair, with most dying within one hundred years of contact (Cook, 1973).
Martin (1987) suggests that high smallpox mortality continued among North American Indians of the
northern Plains and Upper Great Lakes in 1781 to 1782, with perhaps as much as 60 per cent of some
groups still succumbing to the disease.
There is general agreement that the Native population must have been large enough to enable smallpox
and other infectious diseases to continue to spread for so long and so far from their origins on the
southern extremes of this continent and the Caribbean Islands. Cook (1998) notes that other diseases
were being spread at the same time: measles, influenza, typhoid, typhus, as well as a number of diseases
endemic to the Indigenous population. However, none seemed to create as much havoc as the smallpox
virus. Epidemics were able to ignite in different parts of the continent approximately every dozen years
and continued to kill susceptible people. Epidemics hitting every 7 to 14 years meant that the existing
population had no time to reproduce a fully immune generation or even to barely reproduce (Thornton,
1987). New babies born to survivors regularly died in subsequent epidemics and, in this way, population
levels were kept severely depressed for centuries (Cook, 1998). Suicide, infanticide and a deep despair
would have further suppressed a desire to procreate. These would have contributed to declining or low
Indigenous population levels (Cook and Lovell, 1992). Cook refers to the “extremely adverse reaction
to foreign invasion” (1973:497) that was the response of many Aboriginal women who simply chose
not to give birth because of fear and resentment.
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