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 />
a background of violence, you are sometimes unable to give your growing child what he<br />
needs. You unintentionally involve your child in what you yourself have experienced.<br />
In this way a second-generation problem can occur (Foundation Centrum ’45, 2003:1).<br />
The clinicians at the centre offer many healing modalities to help people who have experienced trauma;<br />
among them, insight-giving psycho-therapy, behavioural therapy, group therapy, relationship <strong>and</strong> family<br />
therapy (Foundation Centrum ’45, 2003). All these modalities have been proven effective in helping<br />
people who experience learned helplessness <strong>and</strong> possess an external locus of control. These healing<br />
modalities can successfully be re-worked to deal with socially transmitted, albeit muted, memories of<br />
trauma <strong>and</strong> despair. They can successfully be adapted to heal communities <strong>and</strong> their members, as long<br />
as the healers remember to address the whole spectrum of conditions associated with the responses to<br />
trauma.<br />
In designing any program intended to help people deconstruct the terrible legacy of the past, one must<br />
pay close attention to the dialectical interplay between what happened to people <strong>and</strong> how they (non-)<br />
interpret it. Together, these two factors will determine the parameters of <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people’s freedom,<br />
resilience <strong>and</strong> life span development in the present, <strong>and</strong> in the days <strong>and</strong> years to come. Praxis is thus a<br />
matter of negotiating a path between the past <strong>and</strong> the future. For <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people, this path is now.<br />
The ultimate goal of any healing modality, to be employed in these cases, is to restructure the past <strong>and</strong><br />
to reconnect people to the present, to empower, to incorporate <strong>and</strong>, in the end, to help people recover<br />
from fear <strong>and</strong> despair. As Herman says:<br />
[T]he survivor who has accomplished her recovery faces life with few illusions but often<br />
with gratitude. Her view of life may be tragic, but for that very reason she has learned<br />
to cherish laughter. She has a clear sense of what is important <strong>and</strong> what is not. Having<br />
encountered evil, she knows how to cling to what is good. Having encountered the fear<br />
of death, she knows how to celebrate life (1997:213).<br />
The only way to address the healing needs of <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people is to open culturally-appropriate avenues<br />
for producing change in existing memory structures <strong>and</strong> belief systems that will allow <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people<br />
to regain their collective strength. Recently, a lot of work has been done in the field of psychological<br />
study called human strength. According to Aspinwall <strong>and</strong> Staudinger (2003), to underst<strong>and</strong> the microgenesis<br />
<strong>and</strong> ontogenesis of human strength, one must take under consideration the situations <strong>and</strong><br />
experiences that promote or reduce it.<br />
This study looked at how the situations <strong>and</strong> experiences that shaped <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people’s lives were<br />
inter-connected <strong>and</strong> how they worked against the development of Indigenous people’s communal <strong>and</strong><br />
individual strength. Many operational definitions were used, such as areas of impact, stages of<br />
colonization, etc. These are ways of punctuating the <strong>Aboriginal</strong> historical reality in order to find <strong>and</strong><br />
define circular causality. Other definitions could be used to convey the same message; such as, in order<br />
to initiate the process of re-telling the story of Indigenous historic trauma with the intent to decolonize<br />
the <strong>Aboriginal</strong> story of loss <strong>and</strong> absence, one must analyze the interactive effects of the historical <strong>and</strong><br />
the cultural, at the same time using multiple vantage points for assessing change. Recent research, for<br />
example, has demonstrated that the advent of losses often promotes growth or that some growth may<br />
only be possible because of losses (Baltes, Lindenberg <strong>and</strong> Staudinger, 1998). It is certainly true that, as<br />
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