Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 3
of traumatic memories and the formation of associations between new traumas and the memories of
past traumas already stored in the long-term collective memory of Aboriginal people. This process of
elaboration served to integrate the incoming information into a coherent (although sad and tragic)
network of cultural thoughts and cultural ideas. Today, researchers agree that the recall of memories is
progressively enhanced by the number of elaborations generated by new items (Craik and Tulving,
1975; Reder and Ross, 1983). Along these lines, it is safe to hypothesize that every subsequent trauma
experienced by Aboriginal people facilitated recall of memories of previous loss.
Every new traumatic experience had a profound effect of what was already stored in collective memories
of people until it became converted into collective imagery of loss; something akin to eidetic imagery
described by Haber and Haber (1964). They reported several cases involving young children who
could store a duplicate picture of a visual stimulus in memory in photographic detail, saying that the
picture was “still in their minds.” Thus, if one agrees that the traumatic memories are still in Aboriginal
people’s minds, what happens when people find themselves in a traumatic context again? To use insights
from psychological research, it is proposed that the context itself provides retrieval cues that aid recall of
traumatic memories. For an Aboriginal teenager who lives in an isolated, marginalized and impoverished
community, the very social context in which he or she is spending all his or her life becomes a retrieval
cue for memories of dispossession and marginalization encoded by his or her parent. That parent’s own
life was a retrieval cue for traumatic memories of his or her parents, grandparents and so on. In
Kellermann’s words:
[B]acteria may be transferred from one person to another in the spreading of disease
and various physical forms of passing something over from one body to another, or
from one place to another, are parts of our daily experiences. The transmission of
sound waves in telecommunications is a commonly accepted phenomenon and may
serve as a suitable analogy that also illustrates the process of trauma transmission. Thus,
in the same way as heat, light, sound and electricity can be invisibly carried from a
transmitter to a receiver; it is possible that … experiences can also be transmitted from
parents to their children through some complex process of extra-sensory communication.
In fact, such quasi-naturalistic terminology is frequently applied when describing how
the “vibrations” within a Holocaust family “atmosphere” may affect the offspring in a
variety of indirect and subtle ways (2000:6).
Additional evidence for the hypothesis that traumatic memories can be transferred intergenerationally
comes, again, from psychological research on state-dependent memory and relates to the fact that
bodily conditions or states evoke contextual stimuli that influence retrieval of memory. If people initially
process information under specific physiological conditions (hunger, pain, etc.), they will remember
more if they recall these memories while being in a similar physiological state (Horton and Mills,
1984). Translating these findings to a social context, one may see clearly why traumatic memories of
loss and destruction may easily be recalled in times when a community finds itself in a similar situation.
For many centuries, Aboriginal people have been dispossessed, impoverished, ill and hungry; again,
their physiological state became a contextual retrieval cue for the memories of their ancestors’ loss, for
their hunger and for their trauma. Researchers agree that people can recall more negative memories and
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