Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
Acculturation is more than just the borrowing of material goods or the acceptance of certain ideas. It
entails large-scale re-organization of a society to accommodate the presence of another cultural group.
It may affect a society on different levels. According to Hobart (1975), people’s health problems and
practices are often related to their level of acculturation. Hobart (1975) found that Inuit infant mortality
rates differed according to the parents’ acculturative levels. In larger towns where no more than 1,000
Inuit dwell, the more acculturated families had higher infant death rates. The more modern parents
provided poorer nutrition and hygiene to their children than the more traditional parents. They were
also more apt to spend money on alcohol, and the mothers were more likely to be employed and to
wean their babies early. In cultural terms, an acculturated group slowly loses its ability to remember its
cultural past. What was believed as happening in the past becomes a myth and, according to Vecsey:
“The popular Western mind to this day equates myth with falsehood, stupidly believed and foolishly
studied” (1988:8).
Moreover, since Aboriginal people in North America lost so many of their chiefs and shamans to the
epidemics (people who were repositories of cultural and historical knowledge), there was often no one
left who could remember the past and beyond. Without cultural remembering, there is no cultural
knowledge, nothing to pass on to next generations, nothing to teach young people and nothing to use
as social resources in times of crisis. Without shared cultural knowledge, there are no societies, just
groups of culturally orphaned individuals unable to create their shared future. As such, people can be
pushed into the margins of the dominant society and this is exactly what happened to the Aboriginal
people of North America. As Allen says:
No Indian can grow to any age without being informed that her people were “savages”
who interfered with the march of progress pursued by respectable, loving, civilized white
people. We are the villains of the scenario when we are mentioned at all. We are absent
from much of white history except when we are calmly, rationally, succinctly, and
systematically dehumanized (1986:49).
Finally, without cultural consensus (with society members sharing precisely the same cultural knowledge),
collective social action becomes more and more difficult to achieve, people are pushed into the marginal
social sphere and eventually a state of disintegration or social disorganization sets in. And, as Jackson
says:
[T]he more marginal a person feels, the more likely it is that he or she will be attracted
to this kind of essentializing and foundational discourse of identity, self-definition, and
transpersonal belonging. Ontological insecurity and political weakness promote a search
for an invincible category - an ur-culture [higher than], nation, parent, or cosmos - to
which one can assimilate oneself, in which one may be reborn, to which one can say
that one unequivocally belongs 1998:199).
When one is faced with a terrible crisis of meaning, what can better provide the sense of invincibility,
belonging and being reborn than a religion promising salvation, access to the Eternal and a new set of
meanings explaining what is happening in this world and what awaits one in the world beyond? A new
religion that was brought by the missionaries to the New World was to support the new social order and
define the place (or lack of it) of the Aboriginal people in a new society. In a sense, like alcohol, it was
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