Today, Indigenous communities have long journeys against this systemic trauma.
Family structure, rather than being based on the kinship model where everyone had responsibility for everyone else (sisters and brothers) became based on the learned and conditioned behaviours associated with trauma. What remained was the pain, the inability to heal and all of the accompanying impacts. Therefore, the impact from trauma occurs both as a result of the trauma itself and from the inability to undertake healing practices.
Colonizers first created the harm and compounded the trauma by outlawing the Indigenous culture practices that could heal the harm done in the 1884 amendment to the Indian Act. Today, it is embedded into the very fabric of some communities. While some of this is expected as “learned behavior,” some of it could only be explained as inherited (innate) behaviours.įor Indigenous Peoples in Canada, intergenerational trauma has been passed on through generations. They found that, despite not having attended the schools, many children of survivors exhibited traumatic responses ranging from depression, suicidality and anger, all the way to post-traumatic stress disorder. To identify the best ways to help survivors, they first needed to understand and define the problem. After the Canadian Indian residential school disclosures in the 1990s and early 2000s, researchers and educators began to catalogue the impacts of the residential schools, first as an educational process and later to assist with healing.
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