Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 1
debilitating. Not fully knowing and, therefore, not being able to actively acknowledge what lies buried
deep within their collective psyche because it has silently been carried forward generationally from the
distant past, may stand in the way of any true healing that will be necessary to repair their collective self.
It is important that Aboriginal people understand that conquest of the Americas did not come only by
sword or through battle, as depicted in a plethora of early westerns on television, paperback and school
text books; it came silently and unbidden, with a stealth unlikely to be found in any man. In the form
of a bacillus (virus), it attacked, killed and seared the souls of Indigenous people right across the entire
continent, from Latin America to the Arctic Circle. Viruses virtually ensured Aboriginal defeat by
conquest and colonialism, as surely as Spanish conquistadors ensured their death by sword and slavery.
Slavery seared skin off their backs, chopped hands from their wrists, dragged babies from their arms and
tore many lives from this world; but it was four hundred years of unrelenting loss and death from
rampant disease that left a deeply imbedded impression on the minds, hearts and cultures of Indigenous
people (Cook, 1998). It was the horrific impact of those 400 years that planted an endemic sense of
loss and grief into the psyche of Indigenous people across the continent and left an entire population
grappling with a form of complex post-traumatic stress disorder that is only now beginning to be
acknowledged. In Canada and the United States, the residential school experience, following right on
the heels of four hundred years of epidemics, further served to ensure a sense of hopelessness and defeat.
Indigenous people continuously suffered right into modern times; not only from recurring epidemics,
starvation and forced removal, but eventually from a myriad of stress disorders that ultimately became
endemic to their cultural experience. This trauma is only now beginning to come to the surface of
Indigenous culture as Aboriginal people across this continent participate in a massive healing movement.
The healing process is still far from complete, because even though infectious diseases have been brought
under control, the damage they rendered to the Indigenous culture has raged on, deeply embedding
itself within the very fabric of Aboriginal identity. It is a different form of disease, a type of dis-ease or
cultural uneasiness, engendered by unresolved pain from repeated and multiple assaults turning themselves
inward. Endemic stress disorder in the Aboriginal population has been repeatedly illustrated through
rampant sexual abuse and incest, apathy, physical and emotional infirmities, spousal assault, alcoholism
and drug addiction. Each of these maladies is indicative of a shattered and fragmented Aboriginal
socio-cultural experience.
Death is Always Death
It may be considered somewhat ironic that the very source of the pain and loss on this continent,
European contact, can now shed light on the societal breakdown and dysfunction that is the Aboriginal
legacy of the arrival of Europeans into the “New World.” Books and articles that have been compiled
from European letters and journals tell a shocking tale of psychological and social collapse following the
aftermath of each plague and, in particular, the Black Death. European and Aboriginal cultures were
left with a profound sense of loss and helplessness, spiritual crisis, psychological and moral breakdown.
They both had to grapple with inadequate medical care, economic failure and experienced widespread
(debilitating) famine. There is a continuing anthropological debate about the number of lives lost
during the 400 years of disease pandemics on this continent. Few discussions have been generated
about the effects of the shock of rapid de-population or individual mortality from the perspective of
Indigenous people. Unfortunately, most Indigenous people did not write letters, keep diaries or write
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