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