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