Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
repetition of traumatic events more likely; people who are not able to represent to
themselves a traumatic event find themselves acting it out or suffering from automatic
memories - flashbacks - in some excessive, symptomatic way (1999:1-2).
Aboriginal people are beginning to understand that many of their social problems they deal with everyday
have roots in the extensive historic trauma experienced and was never properly represented. The metanarrative
of the Western world simply did not include the entire Aboriginal story of loss and
impermanence. Collectively, one may refer to Aboriginal people as “the bereaved:” those who have
been deprived of something dear - their cultural identity and their social self. Bereavement is always
associated with grief. If one perceives loss as separating oneself from a part of life to which one was
emotionally attached, Aboriginal grief may be understood as an attempt to restore equilibrium to their
social system. It involves all of the emotional, cognitive and perceptual reactions that accompany such
loss. Ideally, it should be followed by a recovery that involves survivors restructuring their lives.
According to Spikes (1980), grieving has three broad stages. In the first stage, called denial and anger,
the bereaved feels angry and frustrated by their loss. The second stage, depression, is characterized by
apathy and disorganized behaviour. Finally, in the third stage, called acceptance and readjustment, the
bereaved reorganize their lives.
For Aboriginal people, loss of their cultural identity was not an abrupt event, but continued in one form
or another through centuries of intense pain and suffering, and they were never able to reach the
recovery stage. In a sense, they are still grieving their losses with only limited outside social resources to
help them in the process.
An Aboriginal discourse of loss was always treated as marginal to a Western narrowly-defined historical
memory. Researchers, anthropologists, social workers and mental health practitioners working with
Aboriginal people consistently failed to identify focal issues in Aboriginal history of dispossession and
oppression. They failed to integrate Aboriginal people’s narratives into the history of colonization that,
for the invaders, always included themes of power and hierarchy; never of relationships between them
and the rightful owners of the lands they came to occupy. Even if the history of oppression was critically
analyzed, the analysis always followed rules of linear causality, and denying the importance of the interdependence
of historical facts that influenced Aboriginal people’s lives.
Since the issue of repetitive and circular historical trauma never truly entered into Western perception,
as it was never properly analyzed and never understood, no healing modality was designed to assist
Aboriginal people to prepare for, or respond to, the demands associated with such a profound social
crisis and cultural loss. The crisis victims were never, in any sense, assisted in understanding the
development stages through which the trauma has passed or will pass, in recognizing the specific problems
resulting from that crisis, in re-organizing their lives and, particularly, in identifying and applying
viable problem-resolution strategies or in what Slaikeu (1984) describes as “working through the crisis.”
Instead of working through the trauma, people became caught up at the second stage of grieving;
somewhere between anger and depression, apathy and disorganization. They began practicing social
disengagement that, according to social theorists, can be a consequence of several factors. One of the
most prominent of these is role loss as the individual’s position in society changes. With an increasing
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