Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 3
and memory on to next generations, and who is best able to shift the emphasis on knowledge from a
traditional to an everyday canon of narratives. Narrations of the tragic past, memories internalized to
the point of silenced voices that still resonate in people’s collective (non-) remembering of the tragic
past and people’s relationships to the past, become the groundwork for future discussions and negotiations.
There is also an underlying conflict between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people over who will have
the authority to link memory, experience, practice and meaning for Aboriginal people and, thus, produce
value, power and authority for the self and social group in today’s world.
In this climate of revival and change, it is vitally important to understand the mechanisms by which
practice (Aboriginal people’s lives, today and in the past) and identities (how Aboriginal people interpret
themselves and their positions in the world outside their communities) are linked with past events and
past experiences. This understanding is far more important to the healing process necessary for Aboriginal
people to regain lost social and cultural selves than just finding a handy (albeit empty and dry) definition
for the underlying fabric of these identities and practices used when dealing with their non-Aboriginal
counterparts.
It is also necessary to pay close attention to the dialogical and contested nature, value and meaning of
Aboriginal action. Disputes people have over the meaning of events that occurred in the past have very
different political and sociological consequences when held within and outside their communities.
Non-Aboriginal people are mostly unaware of the impact of the history of colonization on contemporary
Aboriginal lives. Disputes that Aboriginal people have over these issues do not often resonate outside
their communities. Unfortunately, except for the controversial re-enactment of Riel’s trial on CBC in
the fall of 2002 and the highly publicized residential school issue over the past decade, Aboriginal
people’s past and present do not enter into the non-Aboriginal people’s social conscience. Meanwhile,
it is impossible to discuss Aboriginal cultural and social contemporary identity without considering the
impact of historic trauma on many generations of Aboriginal people. This fact has a sobering effect on
the sometimes overly-romanticized view of Aboriginal placement in the dominant culture that still
exists in popular media. For the healing process to be complete, one must adopt a method of strategically
essentializing the past of Aboriginal people. Even though the historical body of knowledge about the
effects of historic trauma on Aboriginal people is constantly negotiated by both Aboriginal and non-
Aboriginal people, and its political context, social context is recognized as critically influencing what
part of that knowledge is to be revealed and the actual body of historical knowledge itself must not be
altered by political, social context or climate. Those negotiations of what can or cannot be told are
often silenced in the company of non-Aboriginal people for various reasons. Also, the Aboriginal
cultural organization of knowledge is itself on trial; people ask themselves when and where does one
begin to look for the existing “past” in the multiple conceptions and structures of history.
Although Aboriginal traditions are constantly gaining stability and solidity today, one must remember
that Aboriginal people all over North America live under a Western gaze: how they act is apprehended
by a Western political-economic framework and is assessed by Western models of productivity. Aboriginal
people need tools to inscribe a new relationship between themselves and the dominant culture and to
create new and renewed links between themselves and their immediate world(s). There will be changes
in Aboriginal social and cultural structures.
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