HISTORIC TRAUMA TRANSMISSION

Over time, the experience of repeated traumatic stressors become normalized and incorporated into the cultural expression and expectations of successive generations, while trauma manifesting as culturally prevalent will not be necessarily and readily identifiable as a specific or individual disorder. It is accepted, however, that "traumatic events often have widespread and devastating impacts on health and national and community stability, even when only a few individuals are primary victims."

The effects of unresolved emotional trauma on Aboriginal people, termed generational, intergenerational or multigenerational grief, has been described by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation as:

"Intergenerational or multi-generational trauma happens when the effects of trauma are not resolved in one generation. When trauma is ignored and there is no support for dealing with it, the trauma will be passed from one generation to the next. What we learn to see as "normal" when we are children, we pass on to our own children. Children who learn that physical and sexual abuse is "normal" and who have never dealt with the feelings that come from this, may inflict physical abuse and sexual abuse on their own children. The unhealthy ways of behaving that people use to protect themselves can be passed on to children, without them even knowing they are doing so." (3)

RECOVERY SERVICES

The resilience of Aboriginal people's social and cultural knowledge is presently a vital and active component in the process of defining and redefining Aboriginal identity. Only by naming and deconstructing historic trauma and remembering the past, will Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people be able to free them selves from the oppositional realms they occupy in existing dominant and resistant cultural structures.

The goal of healing for Aboriginal people is concerned with attaining and maintaining balance between the four dimensions of the person: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. These four dimensions in each person's life must work in unison for balance to be achieved.

Healing within Aboriginal understanding focuses on interconnectedness between family, community, culture and nature. In addition, because of the strong ties that Aboriginal people have to tradition and the past, all fragmented parts of Aboriginal people's past, present and future must be re-integrated again to fully facilitate healing on a communal level.

Recovery services are best accepted and utilized if they are integrated into existing, trusted community agencies and resources. In addition, programs are most effective if workers indigenous to the community are integrally involved in service delivery.

WHAT IS HTT?

Historic Traumatic Transmission is a term created in the 1980's. The definition is cumulative emotional and psychological wounding across generations, including one's own lifespan, because everything up to a minute ago is history.

"The experience of historic trauma and intergenerational grief can best be described as 'psychological baggage' being passed from parents to children along with the trauma and grief experienced in each individual's lifetime. The hypothesis is that the residue of unresolved, historic, traumatic experiences and generational unresolved grief is not only being passed from generation to generation, it is continuously being acted out and recreated in contemporary Aboriginal culture. Unresolved historic trauma will continue to impact individuals, families and communities until the trauma has been addressed mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually.

"Research completed by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation has already demonstrated that as abused children grow up in our communities, they learn specific behaviours and build defense mechanisms to protect themselves. These behaviours and defense mechanisms can be seen as healthy and dysfunctional at the same time. They are healthy because they help the individual survive untenable situations; and unhealthy because the individual invariably ends up imbalanced and/or continues to blame himself or herself for the abuse experienced, may lack trust, and may act out the abuse experienced in a variety of dysfunctional ways." (1)

TRAUMATIC IMPACT

Two traumas can be identified: first, the occurrence of the event itself; second, the destruction of community life and the loss of social contacts.

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that, in the case of Aboriginal people, traumatic impact was widespread and profound, and involved a shattering of family and community life. First Nation people were traumatized in a global context, and this global context of trauma and suffering produces similar psychological and social reactions in trauma victims, regardless of their cultural background or direct experience with the original source of the trauma.

To back up the contention of effect and transmission of trauma and unresolved grief, examples are drawn from European history of disease and epidemics. In order to highlight the multiple layers of the process of colonization and historic trauma that influenced and keeps influencing lives of Aboriginal people in North America, the effects of colonization on five areas of impact have been identified. They are:

1) Physical: associated with the first stage of colonization (cultural transition) and the introduction of infectious diseases that decimated the Indigenous population, and resulted in an intergenerational and culturally produced widespread form of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. (2)

2) Economic: associated with the first stage of colonization (cultural transition) and a violation of Native stewardship of land, and the forced removal of people from their natural habitat and ways of life.

3) Cultural: associated with the second stage of colonization (cultural dispossession) and the wave of Christian missionization intended to bring about religious transformation and cultural destruction through prohibitions imposed on Aboriginal culture and belief systems.

4) Social: associated with the second stage of colonization (cultural dispossession) and the stages of Aboriginal displacement through colonial settlement, which brought alien social structures, introduced non-traditional coping mechanisms, and silenced "knowledgeable subjects" within the Aboriginal population, thereby damaging families, altering gender roles, and diminishing authority, cultural values and morals.

5) Psychological: associated with the third stage of colonization (cultural oppression) and the marginalization of Aboriginal people as their social selves became largely diminished and impoverished. As well, any perception of control that they had over their lives became reduced and badly undermined and, ultimately, placing perceptions regarding position of control on the colonizers.

For the past 500 years, entire Indigenous communities have been traumatized by multiple deaths from disease, expulsion from their homelands, loss of economic and self sufficiency, removal of children from their homes, assimilation tactics, and incarceration in residential schools. Historic experiences of trauma were compounded by a loss of ceremonial freedom, language, dance, song and other methods that would have helped Indigenous people express and grieve their losses.

It is understood today that massive suppression from imposed authority is particularly important to address, since it predisposes individuals to repeated traumatization in very specific ways. For example, the impacts of epidemics, immediately after contact during the 1400s, were followed by the transmission of overwhelming and unresolved emotions up to contemporary generations.

Aboriginal people are not only suffering from the impacts of generational grief, they are acting it out at personal and cultural levels and recreating trauma as a way of life. While not every single individual manifests overt HTT or PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) symptoms in their lifetime, the expression of latent symptoms can be ascertained from the high incidence of lateral violence, family breakdown and community dysfunction.