Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 3
psychiatric diagnosis other than PTSD was relatively, but not significantly, associated with higher cortisol
levels. Offspring with both parental PTSD and lifetime PTSD had the lowest cortisol levels of all study
groups. Yehuda and others conclude that:
[P]arental PTSD, a putative risk factor for PTSD, appears to be associated with low
cortisol levels in offspring, even in the absence of lifetime PTSD in the offspring. The
findings suggest that low cortisol levels in PTSD may constitute a vulnerability marker
related to parental PTSD as well as a state-related characteristic associated with acute or
chronic PTSD symptoms (2000:1252 as cited in Kellermann, 2000:13).
Although there is no clinical research on the further transgenerational transmission of the PTSD
predisposition, it is safe to hypothesize that the effect may replicate itself in future generations in a
similar manner. Having purposefully avoided the word “unconsciousness” in this analysis, it is proposed
that the sense of loss and grief reported by many Aboriginal people in the present may be a direct legacy
of the genetically coded trauma that manifests itself in the not-fully-remembered memories of past
suffering (however controversial this theory may seem). This area of study certainly requires further
research.
This is not to say that Aboriginal people have been programmed and doomed by their heredity. It has
been well-documented in psychology literature that the development of collective memory is influenced
by both heredity and environment in such a way that the two factors are inseparable (Gottlieb, 1983).
It is more productive to think of the Aboriginal people’s traumatic endowment as setting certain limits
on their interaction with their social environment, mainly causing cultural discontinuities and creating
a cultural cohort effect (a cohort here is a group of people who share similar socio-cultural experiences).
Today’s Aboriginal people’s narrative of grief and their present reality confirm the past narrative of loss.
In a sense, today’s generations and their ancestors who lived centuries ago are the same cultural cohorts,
connected by the nexus of past loss and present grief. Collective memories of the trauma encoded by
Aboriginal people centuries ago have been stored in cultural memory repositories (stories, narratives
and myths that also serve as memory cues) and, today, are being retrieved and reclaimed.
The process of traumatic memory transmission may be even better understood by employing standard
psychological terms. According to Tulving (1985), there are three types of information stored in longterm
memory. The first relates to specific events in one’s life and functions as a sort of autobiographical
reserve. This type of memory is called episodic memory. A second type of information stored in the
long-term memory is concerned with general knowledge and is referred to as semantic memory. Along
with episodic and semantic memory, there is also a separate information system called procedural memory
that involves the formation and retention of habits.
Tulving (1983) also proposed that events retrieved from episodic memory are recalled with much greater
conviction than semantic memory items. In this study’s proposed model, once the traumatic memories
became encoded in the episodic memory of Aboriginal people, they became deeply embedded in the
social psyche of Aboriginal people because of elaborate rehearsal. Aboriginal people were exposed to
unrelenting waves of trauma (colonialism, settlement, displacement, starvation, fur trade, economic
disorganization, religious persecution and, eventually, residential schools) and they had no time to stop
and deal with what was happening to them. Centuries of destruction facilitated this elaborate rehearsal
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