Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 4
diseases killed so many of them. There were once 80,000 Haidas on our island, after
the last epidemic there were only 500 left. Today, there are about 6,000, but we’re
scattered all over. The island is about eighty miles below Alaska and about eighty miles
off the mainland. It’s called Haida Gwaii, “Island of the Haidas.” You know it as the
Queen Charlotte Islands, but we’re taking our names back, of our homelands, our
mountains, and our rivers. I hope the whole country does this on this (as cited in
Johnson and Budnick, 1994:189-190).
It is precisely because of the problems that continue to manifest in Aboriginal communities that this
report was written from an historical standpoint that contemplates a deeper, more psychological reason
for the myriad of mental, emotional and spiritual issues that Aboriginal people are continuing to grapple
with at a contemporary cultural and social level. It was felt that casting one’s gaze even further back,
beyond residential schools, proselytization and colonial occupation, one would encounter additional
data and answers to what seemed like unanswerable questions. It was also felt that reviewing not only
historic, but anthropological and psychological texts for clues might provide a different kind of hypothesis;
one that would deepen and support proposals for healing on an inter-connected or collective level.
Elder Lavine White addresses this consideration for connectedness when she notes that:
[B]efore white people came we had an educational process and our own way of governing
ourselves, depending upon which part of the country you were from. In ours it was the
Longhouse. And we don’t have divisions, everything is connected, so this whole Western
system of education was very difficult to try and fit into. Goodness knows we tried, but
we don’t fit in where everything is separated (as cited in Johnson and Budnick, 1994:191).
This study focused on the theme of inter-connectedness throughout. This theme is prevalent throughout
most First Nation cultures and has been aptly described as a series of relationships, starting with the
family, that reaches further and further out so that it encompasses the universe (Brown, 2001). In this
regard, the nucleus of pain generated by the massive loss of life at contact and subsequent acts of
genocide is seen as a similar product of inter-connectedness of Aboriginal people; albeit, one born out
of trauma. That nucleus of pain has generated strong emotions of grief and loss that, in turn, has
reached out further across time until all have been encompassed in its web.
This is something that Elders have also stressed in explaining how Aboriginal people are connected
within the circle, from the past into the present and from the present into the future. Throughout this
study, liberty has been taken of moving from the present into the past and back from the past into the
present, in an effort to explain and situate current complex post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects
within the concept of historic trauma transmission. Therefore, this study has been written from both a
past and present standpoint, looking back into antiquity to confirm and define an historic impact that
has moved forward into the present with continuing cycles of traumatic impact, despair, loss, displacement
and unresolved grief. The effects of historic trauma on Aboriginal lives then and, more importantly,
now are described. This concept of historic trauma and healing is beautifully articulated by Alanis
Obomsawin who, among other methods, has used the medium of film to address the pain of Aboriginal
loss in the past and as a means of healing in the present. She asks to reclaim Aboriginal voices in the
present, as well as reclaim the Indigenous past:
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