Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 1
beliefs would have been widespread and, because of the circumstances, it would have been an easy
conversion. The unrelenting death and the inability of their own shamans to stop the carnage would
have prompted survivors to turn to anyone who offered comfort and a pathway home to the many lost.
Kehoe has pointed out that: “Some of the parallels between Christian and American Indian religious
behavior go deep into human physiology” (1989:101). The similarities in building up rhythms from
fast to slow, and voice from soft to loud, in order to build up excitement, all contribute to feelings of
hypnosis. “Frenzied dancing tends to induce hyperventilation and cause that mental dissociation we
term trance. These basic human physiological responses are likely to have been independently discovered
in many societies and also to have facilitated the borrowing of rituals from culture to culture” (Kehoe,
1989:101).
The dances did provide an avenue of release and were practiced by several tribes . They did not provide
an enduring form of religion strong enough to revitalize the Indigenous population over the long-term
or stem the tide of dysfunction that accompanied the next cultural onslaught, which arrived under the
guise of education: the residential school system.
A Legacy of Death and Suffering
In their wake, the smallpox pandemics left an emotionally depressed people lost in a cultural and
spiritual wasteland (Bailes, 1985). There would have been no one to stem the tide of colonialism
because so few would have been left standing and those who survived did not have the strength of mind
or body (Dobyns, 1963). Nations, such as those of the Iroquois Confederacy, survived many attacks
and, in intervening years, were able to reproduce sufficient numbers to keep their population relatively
even, if not flourishing. For most tribal groups, the greatest damage was the loss of cultural and ceremonial
knowledge, and socio-cultural order and expectations. Tribal knowledge lost through almost total depopulation
could not be passed on to successive generations. People under constant siege would have
focused on personal survival because it would easily have become a more important concern than
cultural transmission of mores and cosmological beliefs. In those uncertain physical and spiritual
environments, Aboriginal children would have been subjected to a constant siege mentality, living with
parental survival responses to huge death tolls and cultural chaos. This area has not been fully examined
when studying the lives of distant ancestors, especially by Indigenous people.
Intervening disasters, such as residential school, theft of Indian children for outside adoption, posttraumatic
stress disorder and rampant alcoholism, have blocked historical memory and inhibited a
deeper understanding of higher obstacles to Indigenous cultural survival, health and well-being. Through
deliberate particularization of Aboriginal people’s experiences, the “world outside” pushed Indigenous
people into the margins of denial and forgetting, and into the depths of a grieving whose causes has
been lost in antiquity.
Death, disease, destruction and pain have become a “dark nucleus” of Aboriginal people’s memories
that riveted them in spiritual and emotional positions of loss and grief for centuries. Aboriginal people
feel deep pain and chronic sadness, and many have expressed this reality during their healing processes
and in sharing circles. Not knowing where some of this pain is coming from must be even more
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