Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
For many decades, researchers debated why Aboriginal people got involved in the fur trade at all.
Perhaps Washburn (1967) was best able to explain it from an Aboriginal perspective. For the Indigenous
people, the fur trade embodied traditional principles of gift giving. The trade became a source of major
prestige items and a forum for social and ceremonial gratification. Rich (1960) makes a similar point in
that the Aboriginal groups involved in the trade were unresponsive to artificial incentives for increasing
the volume of pelts exchanged. If the price was raised by the Hudson Bay Company, the Aboriginal
would surrender fewer beaver skins with a limited supply of pelts being exchanged for a predictable
number of Western necessities. The English wanted the beaver for the fur to be made into hats in
England, which was a symbol of high status and a fashion trend that lasted almost 300 years. As the
beaver population declined rapidly in the eastern part of North America, the trade moved to the west.
The hunters, who were already decimated by infectious diseases and had lost their tribal identities,
largely became incorporated into other groups. Some groups completely changed their modes of
production, such as the use of guns, to acquire goods that could be exchanged for European products.
As the economic differentiation in those egalitarian societies became marked, people began competing
for hunting territories and warfare increased. The English and the French used this as an opportunity
to manipulate Aboriginal people and to recruit some as military allies. Internal conflicts in Aboriginal
groups deepened. People began to lose the sense of communal belonging, communal solidarity and
loyalty, and they began to lose themselves, as social and cultural beings, in the midst of massive capitalist
intrusion.
In addition, new forms of exchange brought new products and new foods that began to intrude on the
indigenous diet, such as table salt and refined sugar. It is an obvious proposition that a people’s diet is
a product of environment and tradition. Traditional foods were always (and still are) symbols of ethnic
identity and a type of diet can be highly resistant to change that, in itself, can also be very adaptive.
“Traditional” foods in the Americas (as anywhere else in the world) have been subject to cultural and
natural selection over a period of time. Today, nutritionists agree that any change is more likely to be
deleterious. The shift from a diet consisting mostly of animal protein to dependence on introduced
high-carbohydrate foods lowered disease resistance. It contributed directly to certain diseases such as
diabetes and kidney disease. When a meat diet is changed to a diet high in sugar and flour, the change
produces dental caries and a narrow dental arch with crowded, crooked teeth (Price, 1939). A diet rich
in sodium contributes to hypertension; non-iodized salt in a diet causes endemic goiter: enlarged thyroid
glands and iodine deficiency lead to multiple neurological disorders (Buchbinder, 1977). The Western
diet, high in refined starch, sugar and fat, but low in fibre, has been implicated in many diseases of
cholesterol metabolism, such as obesity, arteriosclerosis, coronary heart disease and gall bladder disease.
According to Burkitt (1973), diseases related to a diet lacking in fibre, such as diseases of the large
bowel, vein problems and haemorrhoids, were seldom reported from hunter-gatherers.
These nutritional stressors interacted synergistically with other stresses: epidemics, loss of cultural
identity, dispossession and the loss of a social self. At one point, the pressures became so excessive and
so prolonged, that the people’s social and cultural defenses were exhausted. The effort to survive,
generation after generation in the face of authentic, physical danger, contributed to maladaptive
psychological adjustments and social pathologies, such as suicide, violence, drug and alcohol abuse,
that we observe in contemporary Aboriginal societies. Survival of mind and body, both in an individual
and social sense under conditions of excessive and abnormal pressures and deprivations, requires optimal
adaptive responses. As studies of U.S. prisoners of war in Korea show, many people under siege cannot
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