Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Executive Summary
This study proposes a model to describe the intergenerational transmission of historic trauma and
examines the implications for healing in a contemporary Aboriginal context. The purpose of the study
was to develop a comprehensive historical framework of Aboriginal trauma, beginning with contact in
1492 through to the 1950s, with a primary focus on the period immediately after contact. Aboriginal
people have experienced unremitting trauma and post-traumatic effects (see Appendix 1) since Europeans
reached the New World and unleashed a series of contagions among the Indigenous population. These
contagions burned across the entire continent from the southern to northern hemispheres over a four
hundred year timeframe, killing up to 90 per cent of the continental Indigenous population and rendering
Indigenous people physically, spiritually, emotionally and psychically traumatized by deep and unresolved
grief.
Following the work of Judith Herman (1997), Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, from
domestic abuse to political terror, a new model is being introduced for trauma transmission and healing,
citing the presence of complex or endemic post-traumatic stress disorder in Aboriginal culture, which
originated as a direct result of historic trauma transmission (HTT). A variety of disciplines, including
history, anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and political science, are called upon to illuminate
the model of historic trauma transmission and provide different perspectives and information on how
historic trauma can be understood as a valid source of continuing dis-ease and reactivity to historical
and social forces in Aboriginal communities.
Purposeful universalization of the Indigenous people’s historic experience is proposed as a means to
explain the basis for the creation of a nucleus of unresolved grief that has continued to affect successive
generations of Indigenous people. The process of the universalization of trauma is purposefully placed
in direct opposition to the particularization of Aboriginal cultural and social suffering.
The stage for this theory is set with a comprehensive review of the historical records of the diseases,
violence and de-population of the Americas during influenza and smallpox epidemics in 1493 to 1520,
which also triggered successive epidemics until at least the nineteenth century. This section of the study
addresses the early contact years and the subsequent demographic breakdown that eventually touched
the Indigenous population across the continent. An estimated 90 to 95 per cent of the Indigenous
population died within two generations of contact in 1492. The section of the study that addresses the
epidemics is considered a critical component of the entire dialogue. It is set as the point of departure for
the cumulative waves of trauma and grief that have not been resolved within the Aboriginal psyche and
have become deeply embedded in the collective memory of Aboriginal people.
This study is broken down into five areas of impact: physical, economic, cultural, social and psychological.
These areas of impact are then organized chronologically, according to the waves of colonization: cultural
transition (early period), cultural dispossession (middle period) and cultural oppression (late period).
Examples are provided as evidence of the genocidal nature of what befell Indigenous people in the
Americas. Familiar stories of genocide from Australian, Polish and Tasmanian experiences illustrate the
similarity in the characteristics of genocide in the Americas.
The following sections analyze a variety of healing models and First Nations’ therapeutic interventions
aimed at healing Aboriginal communities through facilitating specific aspects of Aboriginal knowledge
and traditional values, such as: balance, inter-connectedness, intra-connectedness and transcendence.
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