Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
groups that most likely had contact with European fishers and sailors. Differences in settlement patterns
also affected the nature of epidemics within each group. Epidemics caused higher death rates among
nations that lived in settlements with large populations than among the nomadic people that dwelt in
smaller groups. This corresponded to the route of transmission for these diseases. In the case of measles,
for example, relatively large micro-organisms spread over very short distances on droplets produced by
talking, coughing or sneezing (Brachman, 1985; Evans, 1982). Salisbury (1982) proposes that in the
more dense population centers, particularly of the Iroquois in the northeast, were repeatedly affected by
smallpox epidemics from 1616 onwards. The more nomadic tribes, were not affected by these outbreaks
until years later.
Successive waves of introduced infectious diseases also circulated in the 1630s and 1640s among groups
known to Jesuit missionaries: Iroquois and Algonkian people; the Montagnais near the St. Lawrence,
the Algonkian near the Ottawa River and Lake Nipissing; the Huron, Neutral and Petun in the area
between Lake Huron, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario; and the Iroquois south and east of Lake Ontario
(Johnston, 1987). The Huron had at least three epidemics (probably measles, smallpox and influenza)
in seven years, during which entire villages were decimated. In some groups, mortality reached 100 per
cent. As Johnston states:
Not only did the usual cures not work, they made matters worse. The well, processing
through longhouses, mingled with the sick (for whom they were processing), and both
were present while dancing, singing, and drumming went on all night. The noise, the
activity, the shock of the temperature extremes associated with the sweat bath cure, and
the blood-letting performed by the French (which had killed many in Europe during
smallpox epidemics) weakened the patients, and undoubtedly killed many (1987:17).
Famine often accompanied the disease. Since no one was left to hunt, gather food and prepare it, food
supplies decreased dramatically. Already ill people with a dramatically compromised immune system
did not have strength to survive hunger. Johnston quotes from the Jesuits’ chronicles that give terrifying
snapshots of what had happened:
[A] very ill Huron being regarded as though already dead and therefore virtually ignored;
a man, being ill for months and very poorly nourished; a little girl convulsing almost all
night; an old grandmother, coping with three sick grandchildren (the mother having
died), losing her sight and strength, and becoming too ill to grind corn or get firewood;
a sick woman convulsing all alone in her cabin; a pregnant woman delivering her
premature baby in the hot sun and then dying; an abandoned baby dying out in a field;
and a very ill girl without a mat to lie on or a fire to keep her warm, and without
sufficient covering (1987:17).
It is well documented that when an entire population experiences such debilitating losses and if a
balanced epidemiological, nutritional and reproductive system is not immediately restored, it is outside
the limits of a population’s tolerance: the cumulative effect of multiple stressors over a short period of
time threatens a group, as it may become extinct or no longer existing as a culturally distinct unit.
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