Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 4
The Elders Speak
Today, seven generations later, you turn to us as your own culture is failing. The land
you took from us, tricked us out of, is becoming too poisoned to feed you. Your rivers
and streams are dying. I wonder, why do you turn to us now? Is it because through it
all we never stopped praying? Never stopped beating our drums, dancing and singing
songs to the Creator? And that somehow, somehow, you couldn’t silence us? (Sioux
Elder cited in Johnson and Budnick, 1994:1)
In closing, it is important to conclude with a chapter that captures the voices of Elders and their views
on Aboriginal memory, tradition and healing. It is understood, in spite of the turmoil and human
destruction that spewed across the entire continent after contact with Europeans, that there was much
in the way of the spiritual that was preserved by Indigenous people in both the southern and northern
hemispheres. Ceremony and traditional teachings were spirited away and safely stored in the homes,
minds and hearts of those that survived the terrible holocaust of the epidemics. From the elders still
living across the continent, it is known that even though the epidemics tore through the Indigenous
population like fire across a field of dry grass, were followed in rapid succession by genocidal policies
spewed forth by colonial governments and, later, multiple and unrelenting attempts at assimilation and
genocide, the people carried their life ways forward in their hearts and spirits.
Bertha Groves shares her thoughts on the question of continuing life ways, and on how Aboriginal
people have remembered to be in this world:
Spirituality is what holds the world and mankind together. When it is gone, there is
nothing. Like a dead person when their spirit leaves them. It takes years to learn to be
the type of person you have to be. It’s not like going to school where you graduate from
four years of college and then you know everything. Spirituality is not like that. To be
a healer or a pipe carrier, you have to be humble. The way of my teachings is that the
creation came into being, all the trees, animals, insects, and then at the end was mankind.
We are supposed to be his most wonderful creation, and yet they always tell us that we
have to be more humble than the insects, the lowest crawling creature (as cited in Johnson
and Budnick, 1994:168).
Throughout this paper, the past was looked at in-depth to formulate hypotheses based on historic
trauma and its effects, and to create a better understanding of why Aboriginal people continue to suffer
on a more global basis than would seem reasonable, given the apparent survival of Aboriginal teachings
and the sense of cultural continuity that is prevalent in oral tradition and in more contemporary historic
texts. This study could not be complete without an understanding of how the elders (grandmothers
and grandfathers) see the unfolding of Aboriginal history. Lavine White from the Haida Nation speaks
to the devastation of loss and the optimism of herself and her people for recovery:
There were three different epidemics among the Haida people. I’m seventy-three now,
and I remember when I was little hearing the elders speak about them. They remembered
the first time that our people were decimated through contact with white people, the
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