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 />
beliefs would have been widespread <strong>and</strong>, because of the circumstances, it would have been an easy<br />
conversion. The unrelenting death <strong>and</strong> the inability of their own shamans to stop the carnage would<br />
have prompted survivors to turn to anyone who offered comfort <strong>and</strong> a pathway home to the many lost.<br />
Kehoe has pointed out that: “Some of the parallels between Christian <strong>and</strong> American Indian religious<br />
behavior go deep into human physiology” (1989:101). The similarities in building up rhythms from<br />
fast to slow, <strong>and</strong> voice from soft to loud, in order to build up excitement, all contribute to feelings of<br />
hypnosis. “Frenzied dancing tends to induce hyperventilation <strong>and</strong> cause that mental dissociation we<br />
term trance. These basic human physiological responses are likely to have been independently discovered<br />
in many societies <strong>and</strong> also to have facilitated the borrowing of rituals from culture to culture” (Kehoe,<br />
1989:101).<br />
The dances did provide an avenue of release <strong>and</strong> were practiced by several tribes . They did not provide<br />
an enduring form of religion strong enough to revitalize the Indigenous population over the long-term<br />
or stem the tide of dysfunction that accompanied the next cultural onslaught, which arrived under the<br />
guise of education: the residential school system.<br />
A Legacy of Death <strong>and</strong> Suffering<br />
In their wake, the smallpox p<strong>and</strong>emics left an emotionally depressed people lost in a cultural <strong>and</strong><br />
spiritual wastel<strong>and</strong> (Bailes, 1985). There would have been no one to stem the tide of colonialism<br />
because so few would have been left st<strong>and</strong>ing <strong>and</strong> those who survived did not have the strength of mind<br />
or body (Dobyns, 1963). Nations, such as those of the Iroquois Confederacy, survived many attacks<br />
<strong>and</strong>, in intervening years, were able to reproduce sufficient numbers to keep their population relatively<br />
even, if not flourishing. For most tribal groups, the greatest damage was the loss of cultural <strong>and</strong> ceremonial<br />
knowledge, <strong>and</strong> socio-cultural order <strong>and</strong> expectations. Tribal knowledge lost through almost total depopulation<br />
could not be passed on to successive generations. People under constant siege would have<br />
focused on personal survival because it would easily have become a more important concern than<br />
cultural transmission of mores <strong>and</strong> cosmological beliefs. In those uncertain physical <strong>and</strong> spiritual<br />
environments, <strong>Aboriginal</strong> children would have been subjected to a constant siege mentality, living with<br />
parental survival responses to huge death tolls <strong>and</strong> cultural chaos. This area has not been fully examined<br />
when studying the lives of distant ancestors, especially by Indigenous people.<br />
Intervening disasters, such as residential school, theft of Indian children for outside adoption, posttraumatic<br />
stress disorder <strong>and</strong> rampant alcoholism, have blocked historical memory <strong>and</strong> inhibited a<br />
deeper underst<strong>and</strong>ing of higher obstacles to Indigenous cultural survival, health <strong>and</strong> well-being. Through<br />
deliberate particularization of <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people’s experiences, the “world outside” pushed Indigenous<br />
people into the margins of denial <strong>and</strong> forgetting, <strong>and</strong> into the depths of a grieving whose causes has<br />
been lost in antiquity.<br />
Death, disease, destruction <strong>and</strong> pain have become a “dark nucleus” of <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people’s memories<br />
that riveted them in spiritual <strong>and</strong> emotional positions of loss <strong>and</strong> grief for centuries. <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people<br />
feel deep pain <strong>and</strong> chronic sadness, <strong>and</strong> many have expressed this reality during their healing processes<br />
<strong>and</strong> in sharing circles. Not knowing where some of this pain is coming from must be even more<br />
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