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 4<br />
[T]he basic purpose is for our people to have a voice. To be heard is the important<br />
thing, no matter what it is we’re talking about … <strong>and</strong> that we have a lot of [sic] offer<br />
our society. But we also have to look at the bad stuff, <strong>and</strong> what has happened to us, <strong>and</strong><br />
why … We cannot do this without going through the past, <strong>and</strong> watching ourselves <strong>and</strong><br />
analyzing ourselves, because we’re carrying a pain that is 400 hundred years old. We<br />
don’t just carry out everyday pain. We’re carrying the pain of our fathers, our mother[s],<br />
our gr<strong>and</strong>fathers, our gr<strong>and</strong>mothers – it’s part of the l<strong>and</strong> (Alioff <strong>and</strong> Schouten Levine,<br />
1987:13).<br />
It is understood that one must contemplate a deeper core reason for the myriad of mental <strong>and</strong> emotional<br />
issues that <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people are grappling with in the cultural present. At the same time, one must<br />
accept <strong>and</strong> embrace the underst<strong>and</strong>ing that many individuals have risen above those impacts, have<br />
managed to hold the spiritual web for others <strong>and</strong> are able to provide access to the spiritual past.<br />
The cosmos of the Native North American was, <strong>and</strong> to a large degree still is, a universe<br />
shaped by <strong>and</strong> viewed through the spirit. Certain women <strong>and</strong> men of the hundreds of<br />
different American Indian Nations have always answered the calling to be medicine<br />
people, priests, healers, doctors, <strong>and</strong> shamans – specialists in the realm of the sacred.<br />
Yet people of the nations have always understood that every human being can have<br />
direct access to the spiritual realm <strong>and</strong> that no intermediary is ever needed to be able to<br />
gain wisdom or to pray (Bruchac, 1995:2-3).<br />
This study supports the contention that accessing the collective memory, through dreams <strong>and</strong> visions,<br />
is a way that <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people always used to create healthy mores <strong>and</strong> maintain traditional life ways.<br />
It is agreed that, in spite of those many <strong>and</strong> merciless onslaughts from contact, ceremony <strong>and</strong> tradition<br />
have survived <strong>and</strong> have been carried forward <strong>and</strong> passed on to successive generations. However, even<br />
the Elders have agreed that: “We Native people have had a shattered past. Now, today, we are trying to<br />
pick up all the pieces <strong>and</strong> put them back together so that our future will not be so fragmented. We want<br />
to transform our future” (Johnson <strong>and</strong> Budnick, 1994:61).<br />
The concept of a shattered past must be defined <strong>and</strong> understood so that <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people can begin<br />
the work of putting things back together again. There is much hope <strong>and</strong> future orientation in <strong>Aboriginal</strong><br />
people. It is also apparent in Mike Haney’s words:<br />
More <strong>and</strong> more I underst<strong>and</strong> how important our traditional teachings are, <strong>and</strong> how<br />
important it is to keep them alive by talking about them in classrooms <strong>and</strong> over the<br />
dinner table at home. The real reason we are still here five hundred years after Columbus<br />
is that we kept the original instructions sacred <strong>and</strong> holy as the Creator instructed us to<br />
do. We still speak our languages, <strong>and</strong> we still do the same ceremonies that we have been<br />
doing for generations. Our reward is in our youth. I became a gr<strong>and</strong>father for the first<br />
… time last year. That’s evidence to me that [the] Creator wants my bloodline to go on,<br />
<strong>and</strong> I feel good about that (as cited in Johnson <strong>and</strong> Budnick, 1994:226).<br />
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