Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

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