Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
to provide Aboriginal people an escape from reality. In the new beliefs of an after-life or the coming of
the Messiah, disempowered Aboriginal people who lived in harsh and deprived circumstances could
create an illusion of hope.
Before contact, Aboriginal people had their own system of meanings that was able to integrate most
routine and extraordinary events into an understandable and meaningful pattern. As Allen explains:
Traditional American Indian systems depended on basic concepts … including
cooperation … harmony … balance, kinship, and respect … They did not rely on
external social institutions such as schools, court, and prisons, kings, or other political
rulers, but rather on internal institutions such as spirit-messengers, guides, teachers, or
mentors; on tradition, ritual, dream and vision (1986:206).
When the entire Aboriginal population in North America went through a series of traumatic experiences
that could not be explained by the existing social meaning system, these experiences also appeared to
contradict important aspects in a social and cultural sense. Aboriginal people were experiencing a crisis
of meaning. As Wright says: “The Indians own religious values had been corroding from the day they
begun to hunt for foreign exchange instead of sustenance” (1992:233). What the missionaries had to
offer to the disillusioned Aborigines were so-called “theodicies” (Weber, 1963) or religious explanations
that provided meaning for meaning-threatening experiences. Theodicies told by the missionaries were
to assure Aboriginal people that the disasters and deaths they experienced were not meaningless; rather,
these were part of a larger system of order; something along the lines of a Grand Design for which God
has a reason for one’s suffering. For people who lost hope and direction, it is often just knowing that an
order exists behind traumatic events that is far more important than knowing what that order is.
However, contrary to the missionaries’ beliefs, Aboriginal people have a soul. The Ojibway believe that:
“Man and Nature were conceived of as tripartite beings: each has body, soul and shadow. The soul was
the seat of being, the life principle. Should it ever become lost (in sleep or unconsciousness) or stolen
(by a malevolent conjurer), the individual would be accounted dead, even though his life signs might
show him alive and healthy” (Martin, 1978:72). When sociological terms, such as “disorganization” or
“disintegration” are used, it is in reference to a stolen soul. The missionaries had many means to steal
Aboriginal souls. As Trigger writes:
By 1640 the Jesuits had realized that their most stable and useful converts were older
men who played a prominent role in the fur trade. These men, especially the chiefs,
were influential in Huron society and once they were converted, the other members of
their families were likely to seek baptism so that their souls would be reunited after
death (1985:252).
Also, the Jesuits soon realized that “the Huron’s had a complex set of religious beliefs that had to be
destroyed or discredited before genuine conversion was possible” (Trigger, 1985:254). Among ingenuous
tactics employed by the missionaries to achieve genuine conversion, were tricks such as converting
married and prominent men, giving prospective converts gifts, treating them with honour and selling
guns only to baptized Indians: “In 1643 the Jesuits informed the readers of their Relations that God
had obviously sanctioned the selling of firearms as a way of making Christianity acceptable among the
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