Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 3
justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards
need to be testified and fought against courageously” (Said, 1994:11-12). Weenie once suggested that:
“Naming and defining the problem is the first step toward post-colonial recovery and healing” (2000:65).
The story must be told and told so loud that everybody will listen: Aboriginal people who were silenced
and forgot how to remember; non-Aboriginal people who often know the Aboriginal world only from
biased western movies and text books; and government institutions who still have the power to decide
on the fate of Indigenous people. The story must be told and discussed in a very public forum. As
Herman says:
[R]ecovery requires remembrance and mourning. It has become clear from the
experience of newly democratic countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa,
that restoring a sense of social community requires a public forum where victims can
speak their truth and their suffering can be formally acknowledged … Like traumatized
individuals, traumatized countries need to remember, grieve, and atone for their wrongs
in order to avoid reliving them (1997:242).
The world outside of Aboriginal communities must recognize that Aboriginal people live on Indigenous
territory, which was once forcibly taken away. It must be recognized that, since Aboriginal people were
never given back their rights to self-government, self-actualization and self-determination, they also
never had an opportunity to work out their own solutions to problems created from their experiences.
All over the Americas, people whose ancestors devastated, ravaged and plundered Indigenous worlds
are still living on Indigenous people’s lands. Although history cannot be undone, it can be re-told so
that it includes all the forgotten stories about the terror of warfare on innocent people, the horror of
smallpox and other infectious diseases and the myriad attempts at genocide, murder, subjugation, fear
and despair. True, these are sad and unpleasant stories, but so are the lives of people who were and are
their main protagonists.
Today, Aboriginal people fight to overcome learned social helplessness, to re-appropriate their internal
locus of social control and to produce their own representations. Today’s Aboriginal people of North
America, like many other dispossessed and colonized groups, constantly have to re-negotiate their cultural
and political identities, and their historic memories, vis-à-vis a legal and economic context created for
them by a non-Aboriginal government. This is what many researchers have acknowledged and noted.
What lacks in cultural analysis is the attention to the internal processes and mechanisms put in place by
colonizers to marginalize and downgrade the Aboriginal people’s personal roles and life ways, and the
resonance of the historical experiences of Aboriginal people that continue to be loudly audible today.
One must also pay close attention to contemporary re-negotiations as they occur between Aboriginal
understandings of tradition and change, and between their cultural and ritual practices and their social
action. In recent decades, a revival of First Nations’ strength and determination across Canada is being
witnessed. The impetus behind this revival takes many forms: the restoration of traditional systems of
belief and practice, the resurgence and reclamation of languages, the growth of a First Nations’ sense of
national identity and the reconstruction and deconstruction of Aboriginal people’s history.
Aboriginal people constantly negotiate what it means to be Aboriginal in today’s world and they constantly
re-define and refine their criteria, taking into consideration who has the traditional knowledge, who
(and how) remembers what happened before, who is strong and healthy enough to pass the knowledge
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