Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 4
information in my DNA Structure. A close examination of that DNA can tell us about
the migrations, the diseases, even what our diet was (as cited in Johnson and Budnick,
1994:226).
It is also true that one now knows more about what happened directly after contact and in the few
centuries following contact. Written historical records and the events that brought Aboriginal people to
where they are now, in ways that were not possible even fifty years ago, can now be addressed. One has
access to historic knowledge that speaks to Aboriginal people not only from oral tradition, but also
directly from the outsiders’ historic records that stand as firm testaments and stark declarations written
and legitimized by the forces that brought the diseases and purposefully contributed to Indigenous
suffering. From that same record, one can confirm that this utter destruction has continued to be
passed down to Aboriginal people, albeit in silent, unseen and even more insidious ways. There are
other aspects of historic trauma transmission that has not been addressed in-depth, although it did raise
the effects of a changing diet and the introduction of life ways that do not fit what the Elders have tried
to teach. Mike Haney speaks of his understanding of the adoption of foreign substances and beliefs,
and its effects:
It’s my understanding from our legends that the reason we have the four colours is that
we were all children of God. Not four races, but one race of four different colours:
white clay, red clay, black clay, and yellow clay. And we feel that all people were given
original instructions from [the] Creator. Those who have gotten away from them have
suffered. I’m told that in Africa, beer was and continues to be, one of the treatments
given by their medicine men. But alcohol and sugar were not indigenous to this area,
therefore our chemical makeup couldn’t metabolize it. Just as diseases ravaged us when
they were introduced into our culture because we had no defense mechanism to fight
them. The same is true with sugar and alcohol. Our metabolism was affected by it then
and still, to this day, continues to be. This can be proven and documented, and it is
exactly what our elders have always taught us (as cited in Johnson and Budnick,
1994:225).
The type of historic information that has been put forward in this study does not create the most
comfortable basis from which to argue the current status of Aboriginal people in contemporary settings,
because it is a story of almost total loss and destruction. Rather, it has become more acceptable to speak
and write of the Aboriginal history with the ceremonies and teachings preserved and brought forward
as intact. This research is an attempt to elucidate the darkest side of the most distant, written and yet
forgotten past so that one can throw light on inexplicable behaviours that so determinedly oppose the
beliefs and behaviours postulated by the Elders. Through returning to the period directly after contact,
and exploring the collective and continental degree of sheer destruction, this study has attempted to
expose the deeper rivers of grief that continue to course through the Aboriginal people’s collective
consciousness. These dark waters have coursed along beneath the re-membering of ceremony, traditions
and ancient beliefs for the past five hundred years. It is as if the grief cannot be detected or even seen
through dreaming or visions. It is as if a dark curtain fell over that period in Indigenous history when
Aboriginal people bid for psychogenic survival; however, the grief can be felt. It is suggested that those
times continue to be remembered and acted out by the collective spiritual selves. This, in turn, suggests
that while all was lost in a figurative sense, when death took Indigenous people by the millions so long
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