Rethinking Historical Trauma

Abstract

Recent years have seen the rise of historical trauma as a construct to describe the impact of colonization, cultural suppression, and historical oppression of Indigenous peoples in North America (e.g., Native Americans in the United States, Aboriginal peoples in Canada). The discourses of psychiatry and psychology contribute to the conflation of disparate forms of violence by emphasizing presumptively universal aspects of trauma response. Many proponents of this construct have made explicit analogies to the Holocaust as a way to understand the transgenerational effects of genocide. However, the social, cultural, and psychological contexts of the Holocaust and of post-colonial Indigenous "survivance" differ in many striking ways. Indeed, the comparison suggests that the persistent suffering of Indigenous peoples in the Americas reflects not so much past trauma as ongoing structural violence. The comparative study of genocide and other forms of massive, organized violence can do much to illuminate both common mechanisms and distinctive features, and trace the looping effects from political processes to individual experience and back again. The ethics and pragmatics of individual and collective healing, restitution, resilience, and recovery can be understood in terms of the self-vindicating loops between politics, structural violence, public discourse, and embodied experience.

Childhood violence and mental health among indigenous Sami and non-Sami populations in Norway: a SAMINOR 2 questionnaire study

“…It is commonly believed that inferior mental health conditions among indigenous people may be due to historical injustice and oppression [50]. Our finding of a higher prevalence of PTS symptoms among the Sami than among the non-Sami may reflect more trauma exposure among the Sami compared to the majority population [11,56]. To our knowledge, no studies on PTSD diagnosis or PTS among indigenous Sami have previously been performed.…”

Trauma, Shared Recognition and Indigenous Resistance on Social media

“…Among Indigenous peoples, intergenerational trauma, as an effect of "shared recognition" is often linked to the innumerable deaths of many peoples through violence, mass genocide, and the spread of disease (Kirmayer et al, 2014). Intergenerational trauma is also related to the impact of loss in connection to the loss many Indigenous people endure of their homes, lands and for some generations their culture (Dudgeon & Kelly, 2014;Ranzijn, McConnochie & Nolan, 2009).…”

Disrupting the Continuities Among Residential Schools, the Sixties Scoop, and Child Welfare: An Analysis of Colonial and Neocolonial Discourses

“…For example, recent epidemiological research exploring the relationship between Indigenous people's health conditions and colonialism uses "residential school attendance" and "removal from biological parent" as the primary indicators of colonial violence and trauma (see for instance Cedar Project et al, 2008;Lemstra, Rogers, Thompson, Moraros, & Buckingham, 2012;Mehrabadi et al, 2008;Spittal et al, 2007). While these indicators are important, given their intergenerational effects, it is equally important to recognize that there is an extensive system of colonial policies, practices, and discourses influencing Indigenous people's lives and their profound material and social impacts (Kirmayer et al, 2014;Maxwell, 2014;Tait, 2009). For instance, Maxwell (2014) revealed that mental health and child development discourses often discursively mobilize historical trauma to justify state-sanctioned interventions into Indigenous families "on the grounds of children's needs for 'protection' and parents' needs for clinical intervention" (p. 426).…”