Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 4
Today, traditional teachings seem to be as important as they ever were for Aboriginal people. In an
earlier issue of the First Nations Messenger’s Fast Facts, it is noted that: “Eighty-two percent of female
respondents in the First Nations and Inuit Regional Health Survey (1999) said a return to traditional
ways [emphasis added] was the way to promote community wellness” (2000:9). Following this viewpoint,
Waldram makes a good point in regards to healing and the use of traditional forms of spirituality, and
even speaks to the thesis of this paper in stating that: “spirituality as a form of symbolic healing can be
understood within the discourse of oppression, liberation, and cultural repatriation” (1997:217). His
observations also speak very clearly, in some ways, to the stated need to return to traditional ways by
Aboriginal people who are recognizing that something was, and is, amiss. Waldram goes on to say that:
“This form of healing [spiritual] speaks not only to the individual’s affective or emotional state, but also
to the whole of his existence as understood in cultural as well as historic terms [emphasis added]”
(1997:217). This study fully subscribes to Waldram’s viewpoint that, like this research, addresses the
spiritual and historical continuum through which Aboriginal people have, and can create their own
interpretations and understandings of self, personal, family and community health and well-being.
Throughout this study, it was suggested that the tremendous impact from the period directly after
contact, which rocked and shattered the world of Indigenous people’s ancestors, has continued to ripple
forward and upset the psychological and emotional states of Aboriginal people in a contemporary
context.
We are the keepers of time. We must know the places of invasion in our histories and in
ourselves so that we may illumine the paths of those who cannot see or who do not
know. Because our pain is a “part of this land,” we are also the Uncomfortable Mirrors
to Canadian society. And few can look at the glaring reflections our mirrors provide
(LaRocque as cited in Perreault and Vance, 1990:xxvii).
The fragmentation and shattering that the Elders speak of is a very real phenomenon, but thankfully,
the current movement towards wholeness is equally real and has been in progress for at least the past
two or three decades. Sara Smith from Six Nations near Brantford, Ontario, articulates the choice that
Aboriginal people have made towards healing by noting that:
We are given choices. Which ones are we going to make? Where do we see our lives
taking us? And what about the little ones and the ones still to come? I think it is time
to begin the deepest search within ourselves for the coming generations … They are
coming into new understanding with their new thoughts and many of them are coming
with a good, clean mind (as cited in Johnson and Budnick, 1994:92).
It is essential to dig deep and make connections to those parts of the Indigenous past that have not been
explored in-depth because Aboriginal people did not have complete access to those earlier historical
facts and figures. According to Mike Haney, even non-Aboriginal people did not always have access to
those facts and figures and are more recently developing their own tools for understanding what happened
to Indigenous people on an increasingly deeper level:
Lately researchers are getting into what is called microbiology and microarcheology.
They’re just now finding out with their scientific data what my grandfather told me
forty years ago. Everything that was ever done in my ancestor’s time is hidden in
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