Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Abstract

This study proposes a model to describe the intergenerational transmission of historic trauma and examines the implications for healing in a contemporary Aboriginal context. The purpose of the study was to develop a comprehensive historical framework of Aboriginal trauma, beginning with contact in 1492 through to the 1950s, with a primary focus on the period immediately after contact. Aboriginal people have experienced unremitting trauma and post-traumatic effects (see Appendix 1) since Europeans reached the New World and unleashed a series of contagions among the Indigenous population. These contagions burned across the entire continent from the southern to northern hemispheres over a four hundred year timeframe, killing up to 90 per cent of the continental Indigenous population and rendering Indigenous people physically, spiritually, emotionally and psychically traumatized by deep and unresolved grief.