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 3<br />
Implications for <strong>Healing</strong>: Recovery of Awareness<br />
In order for <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people to devise culturally appropriate healing modalities that will help them<br />
overcome social disorders resulting from the historic trauma they experienced, a people-centred <strong>and</strong> a<br />
people-directed approach has to be adopted. The first step to initiate a meaningful healing process is to<br />
identify a focal problem that lies at the bottom of contemporary social difficulties in <strong>Aboriginal</strong><br />
communities. By identifying several different areas of impact affected by powerful historical forces that<br />
operated through three major stages of colonization, <strong>and</strong> the death <strong>and</strong> destruction of the epidemics on<br />
this continent, this study contributes to an underst<strong>and</strong>ing of the inter-connections between the historical<br />
<strong>and</strong> the social, the social <strong>and</strong> the cultural, the cultural <strong>and</strong> the psychological, as they continually affect<br />
<strong>Aboriginal</strong> people’s lives. Based on this research, a recommendation that assessment methods to<br />
specifically target concrete social disease clusters (such as PTSD, dissociative diseases <strong>and</strong> learned<br />
helplessness) <strong>and</strong> their manifested symptoms be devised. On a smaller scale, a similar initiative was<br />
undertaken to initiate a grief resolution process for a group of forty-five Lakota human service providers.<br />
The methodology included assessment at three intervals, using a Lakota grief experience questionnaire<br />
<strong>and</strong> the semantic differential, as well as a self-reported evaluation instrument <strong>and</strong> a follow-up questionnaire<br />
(Yellow Horse Brave Heart, 1998). Based on this assessment, an experimental curriculum intervention<br />
has been delivered to a group of ten Lakota parents <strong>and</strong> two Lakota parent facilitators on a Lakota<br />
reservation (Yellow Horse Brave Heart, 1999).<br />
Similar healing modalities can be devised <strong>and</strong> successfully implemented to help <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people<br />
negotiate <strong>and</strong> successfully practice their social <strong>and</strong> cultural knowledge in a contemporary world, <strong>and</strong><br />
use their disastrous experiences of de-population <strong>and</strong> forced assimilation to their benefit. It is of vital<br />
importance for <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people’s survival, in both a physical <strong>and</strong> cultural sense that, during times of<br />
change <strong>and</strong> possibility, they are able to create a new social formula from the conflicting cultural meanings<br />
that <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people were forced to internalize. Only then, <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people will be able to resolve<br />
the tensions inherent in the task of formulating their contemporary social <strong>and</strong> cultural identity. Hopefully,<br />
this will also disprove social judgements of <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people expressed by the non-<strong>Aboriginal</strong> population<br />
<strong>and</strong> change the dominant causal attributions of <strong>Aboriginal</strong> behaviour <strong>and</strong> <strong>Aboriginal</strong>ity, eliciting a new<br />
cognitive appraisal, changing internalized cultural st<strong>and</strong>ards <strong>and</strong> opening avenues for self-actualization<br />
for <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people. For <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people, self-actualization means one simple thing: to become<br />
everything that they are capable of becoming.<br />
<strong>Aboriginal</strong> people never had enough time, between various sequences of new world epidemics, genocide,<br />
trauma <strong>and</strong> forced assimilation to develop tools for passing through the periodic social <strong>and</strong> cultural<br />
disintegration of their nations. Aliens in their own l<strong>and</strong>, under constant siege from their oppressors <strong>and</strong><br />
separated from their own cultures, <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people slowly subsided into despair <strong>and</strong> a hollow silence,<br />
punctuated by tragic outbursts of self-defeating behaviour. First, their elders <strong>and</strong> youth perished in the<br />
waves of epidemics that wiped out entire communities <strong>and</strong> lineages. One must remember that these<br />
diseases were not always spread by natural means.<br />
Lord Jeffrey Amherst, for example, who was Governor General of British North America, openly<br />
advocated biological warfare against the <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people in Canada. In letters to his subordinate<br />
officers in 1763, Amherst suggested they “inoculate the Indians by means of [smallpox infested] blankets,<br />
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