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 />
justice from worldly powers or nations, <strong>and</strong> that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these st<strong>and</strong>ards<br />
need to be testified <strong>and</strong> fought against courageously” (Said, 1994:11-12). Weenie once suggested that:<br />
“Naming <strong>and</strong> defining the problem is the first step toward post-colonial recovery <strong>and</strong> healing” (2000:65).<br />
The story must be told <strong>and</strong> told so loud that everybody will listen: <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people who were silenced<br />
<strong>and</strong> forgot how to remember; non-<strong>Aboriginal</strong> people who often know the <strong>Aboriginal</strong> world only from<br />
biased western movies <strong>and</strong> text books; <strong>and</strong> government institutions who still have the power to decide<br />
on the fate of Indigenous people. The story must be told <strong>and</strong> discussed in a very public forum. As<br />
Herman says:<br />
[R]ecovery requires remembrance <strong>and</strong> mourning. It has become clear from the<br />
experience of newly democratic countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, <strong>and</strong> Africa,<br />
that restoring a sense of social community requires a public forum where victims can<br />
speak their truth <strong>and</strong> their suffering can be formally acknowledged … Like traumatized<br />
individuals, traumatized countries need to remember, grieve, <strong>and</strong> atone for their wrongs<br />
in order to avoid reliving them (1997:242).<br />
The world outside of <strong>Aboriginal</strong> communities must recognize that <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people live on Indigenous<br />
territory, which was once forcibly taken away. It must be recognized that, since <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people were<br />
never given back their rights to self-government, self-actualization <strong>and</strong> self-determination, they also<br />
never had an opportunity to work out their own solutions to problems created from their experiences.<br />
All over the Americas, people whose ancestors devastated, ravaged <strong>and</strong> plundered Indigenous worlds<br />
are still living on Indigenous people’s l<strong>and</strong>s. Although history cannot be undone, it can be re-told so<br />
that it includes all the forgotten stories about the terror of warfare on innocent people, the horror of<br />
smallpox <strong>and</strong> other infectious diseases <strong>and</strong> the myriad attempts at genocide, murder, subjugation, fear<br />
<strong>and</strong> despair. True, these are sad <strong>and</strong> unpleasant stories, but so are the lives of people who were <strong>and</strong> are<br />
their main protagonists.<br />
Today, <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people fight to overcome learned social helplessness, to re-appropriate their internal<br />
locus of social control <strong>and</strong> to produce their own representations. Today’s <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people of North<br />
America, like many other dispossessed <strong>and</strong> colonized groups, constantly have to re-negotiate their cultural<br />
<strong>and</strong> political identities, <strong>and</strong> their historic memories, vis-à-vis a legal <strong>and</strong> economic context created for<br />
them by a non-<strong>Aboriginal</strong> government. This is what many researchers have acknowledged <strong>and</strong> noted.<br />
What lacks in cultural analysis is the attention to the internal processes <strong>and</strong> mechanisms put in place by<br />
colonizers to marginalize <strong>and</strong> downgrade the <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people’s personal roles <strong>and</strong> life ways, <strong>and</strong> the<br />
resonance of the historical experiences of <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people that continue to be loudly audible today.<br />
One must also pay close attention to contemporary re-negotiations as they occur between <strong>Aboriginal</strong><br />
underst<strong>and</strong>ings of tradition <strong>and</strong> change, <strong>and</strong> between their cultural <strong>and</strong> ritual practices <strong>and</strong> their social<br />
action. In recent decades, a revival of First Nations’ strength <strong>and</strong> determination across Canada is being<br />
witnessed. The impetus behind this revival takes many forms: the restoration of traditional systems of<br />
belief <strong>and</strong> practice, the resurgence <strong>and</strong> reclamation of languages, the growth of a First Nations’ sense of<br />
national identity <strong>and</strong> the reconstruction <strong>and</strong> deconstruction of <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people’s history.<br />
<strong>Aboriginal</strong> people constantly negotiate what it means to be <strong>Aboriginal</strong> in today’s world <strong>and</strong> they constantly<br />
re-define <strong>and</strong> refine their criteria, taking into consideration who has the traditional knowledge, who<br />
(<strong>and</strong> how) remembers what happened before, who is strong <strong>and</strong> healthy enough to pass the knowledge<br />
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