Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
Soon after contact with the colonizers, in the period termed the “cultural transition,” Aboriginal people
were stripped of their social power and cultural authority. Once they realized that they could neither
control nor escape catastrophic events, they began to exhibit helpless “giving up” behavioural patterns.
Many, by choice, withdrew socially, thereby lessening their social and psychological investment in
communal and societal relationships. They reduced their cultural and spiritual activities and became
engaged in displaced re-enactments of conflict that, in turn, led to disruptive behaviour, social alienation
and profound psychological problems, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence and sexual
abuse. These maladaptive behaviours, acquired early in the cultural transition period and magnified
later during the residential school period, left a legacy of cyclical dysfunction and disruptive behavioural
patterns that can be directly related to upset cultural identity formation. Coupled with increasing
external and internal abuses is the loss of story-telling as a traditional deterrent because of spiritual and
government suppression of cultural activities and mores.
As mentioned earlier, Medieval Europe also experienced social, moral and spiritual breakdowns from
the trauma of the Black Death of 1349 to 1351 and successive pandemics that raged across the continent
until at least 1720. Medieval Europe experienced subsequent reconstruction of social order and people
were able to re-populate in the 30 to 40 years between major plagues. Aboriginal people were not able
to reconstruct or re-populate because epidemics hit every 7 to 14 years, leaving insufficient time frames
in between.
Some Indigenous people hung on to some semblance of their socio-cultural structures through 400
years of epidemics. Some, like the Yahi Indians of northern California, became extinct. The Yahi case,
as described by Kroeber (1961), an anthropologist who worked with the last surviving Yahi during the
1910s, provides a tragic example of what may happen when two populations encounter each other with
one dominating the other.
About 400 Yahi once lived near the Sacramento River. During the gold rush of the 1840s, non-
Aboriginal miners and settlers moved into the region. Hostile ranchers cut off the Yahi from their
hunting and gathering territory. The settlers’ livestock over-grazed the vegetation. The chemicals from
the mines polluted the streams. The Yahi’s access to food sources diminished and they began raiding
the settlers’ farms. In retaliation, the ranchers raided Yahi villages, shooting and hanging people, killing
children, kidnapping and enslaving women. Those who survived the raids soon died from infectious
diseases. By 1870, only twelve Yahi remained alive. They hid in the hills but failed to reproduce. By
1894, only five Yahi remained alive. When, in 1909, the settlers discovered the Yahi camp, there were
just four of them left. One woman and an old man drowned while trying to escape. From the two
remaining Yahi, an old woman and her son, the settlers took all their food, clothes, tools and utensils,
but left them alive. The woman died soon after and the man lived alone in the hills for two years. In
1911, he was found near the town of Oroville. He was starved and exhausted and had burns on his
head: a sign of mourning. The man, known today as Ishi (“man” in Yahi language) was taken to San
Francisco where he lived in the anthropology museum at the University of California until his death
from tuberculosis in 1916 (Kroeber, 1961).
The physical changes that Aboriginal people experienced in the early period of colonization (cultural
transition) as a result of contact with the outsiders can be analyzed into four major categories of variables:
epidemiological, demographic, nutritional and health resources. In terms of the epidemiological system
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