Historicizing Historical Trauma Theory: Troubling the Trans-generational Transmission Paradigm

Article

Transcultural Psychiatry 2014, Vol. 51(3) 407–435 ! The Author(s) 2014

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DOI: 10.1177/1363461514531317 tps.sagepub.com

Historicizing historical trauma theory:Troubling the trans-generationaltransmission paradigm

Krista MaxwellUniversity of Toronto

Abstract

The premise that “trauma” is transmitted across generations is central to the historical

trauma discourse currently circulating in indigenous communities and professional net-

works in Canada. Historical trauma may be understood as the offspring of two older

and apparently antithetical discourses: Native healing, and colonial professional critiques

of indigenous family life. While the former has maintained a therapeutic focus on

restoring intergenerational social relations, the latter has pathologized indigenous par-

enting and child-rearing practices. The emergence of historical trauma marks a global

shift in the moral economy by which victimhood status, acquired through individual

experiences of physical and especially sexual abuse, has come to wield greater currency

than collective struggles against colonialism. Providers of contemporary indigenous

healing programmes are drawing simultaneously on trauma discourse, which is seen

to legitimate individual social suffering, and older therapeutic forms centred on sharing

local social histories to restore intergenerational continuities and collective identity. But

these invocations of historical trauma may continue the colonial discourse of mental

health and social welfare professionals, who blamed indigenous parenting practices for

children’s social problems and failure to assimilate. Some contemporary mental health

and child development professionals have invoked parents’ and grandparents’ transmis-

sion of historical trauma in ways which construct indigenous families as pathological,

promote an oversimplified, universalizing understanding of Canadian colonialism, and

divert attention from the contemporary continuation of colonial structures and

relations.

Keywords

healing, historical trauma, indigenous peoples, intergenerational transmission,

settler-colonialism

Corresponding author:

Krista Maxwell, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, 19 Russell Street, Toronto, Ontario,

M5S 2S2, Canada.

Email: [email protected]

We’re still experiencing the effects of the residential school from our parents and

grandparents. We’re all damaged, and we’ll pass it on to our children, so it will

never end.

Young Anishinaabe woman in conversation with other young women and the author

outside sweat lodge. Fieldnotes, June 1, 2011, Treaty 3 Territory.

Introduction

The premise that “trauma” is transmitted across generations is central to the his-torical trauma discourse currently circulating in indigenous communities and pro-fessional networks in Canada. As articulated by the young Anishinaabekwe quotedabove, some interpretations of this model hold that generations of indigenousfamilies have suffered, and may continue to suffer, fundamental and irreversibledamage as a result of traumatizing past experiences.1 The bleak future which thisyoung woman imagines (for herself, her peers, and their future children) illustrateshow such interpretations are being taken up in everyday discourse. The increas-ingly ubiquitous paradigm underlying this discourse demands interrogation. Whatare the origins of historical trauma theory? Why do many indigenous people inCanada find it compelling at this historical moment? What are the social andpolitical implications of this etiological framing of contemporary social sufferingin indigenous families and communities?

In this paper I argue that historical trauma discourse may be understood as therecent offspring of two older discourses which were once incongruous: first, Nativehealing, whose proponents have long been concerned with the restoration of socialreproduction; second, colonial professional discourse pathologizing indigenousparents and families, thereby legitimating assimilative interventions targeting chil-dren. I propose to historicize the emergence of historical trauma theory in profes-sional discourses in Canada by tracing its continuities with both older healingdiscourse, and the pathologizing discourses of the mental health and social servicesprofessions. I am concerned with two central tenets of the historical trauma para-digm which have been widely taken up in professional and public discussion ofcontemporary indigenous social suffering in Canada. First, the premise that theeffects of “trauma” are experienced by people intergenerationally, such that indi-viduals may suffer the ill effects of an event or series of events which occurredbefore they were born, as described by the young woman quoted above.Proponents of historical trauma have proposed a wide range of mechanisms bywhich it may be transmitted across generations: “biological (including hereditarypredispositions to PTSD), cultural (through story-telling, culturally sanctionedbehaviours), social (through inadequate parenting, lateral violence, acting out ofabuse), and psychological (through memory processes)” (Wesley-Esquimaux &Smolewski, 2004, p. 76). Second, I am interested in the linked understandingthat both past experiences of traumatic events and the inheritance of historicaltrauma precipitate deleterious changes to individual selfhood and psycho-social

408 Transcultural Psychiatry 51(3)

functioning, requiring a recovery process which typically emphasizes personal,often professionally mediated, transformation, rather than broader changes inthe social and political order.

Conceptualizing indigenous health and colonization

In the Aboriginal health literature in Canada, it has become fashionable overthe past decade to invoke “colonization” as a determinant of contemporaryhealth problems and social suffering. What is often missing from these discus-sions is the central role which ostensibly benevolent interventions in the nameof health and welfare have played, and continue to play, in the simultaneousassimilation and racialization of indigenous people. An emergent body of lit-erature addresses the assimilative structure and effects of the contemporarychild welfare system, but there has been less discussion of the extent towhich the burgeoning fields of “Aboriginal mental health” and its youngersibling “Aboriginal child development” also constitute assimilative ideologiesand interventions. These linked professional discourses impose normativeunderstandings of function and dysfunction in selfhood, family andsocial relations, and child-rearing (Adelson, 2008; Calabrese, 2008; Gone,2008; Maxwell, 2011a; Prussing, 2008; for a discussion of how discourse onchildren’s rights and child development continue colonial relations globally, seeValentin & Meinert, 2009).

A more precise analysis of the relationship between colonization and indigenouspeople’s current health and wellness requires a clear conceptualization of settlercolonialism, which I understand as a dynamic social and political formation that isboth historical and ongoing. Settler colonialism is structured around a centralconcern with the elimination of indigenous peoples, who constitute an obstacleto settlers’ exploitation of land and natural resources. As Patrick Wolfe hasargued, this “logic of elimination” manifests as historically and spatially variableforms, but commonly transmutes from the brutal violence of the frontier into a“logic of assimilation” more consistent with the rule of law structuring enduringsettler societies (Wolfe, 2006). In Canada as elsewhere, the logic of assimilation hasshaped historical and contemporary public policy and professional discourse acrosssectors, ranging from education to natural resources, the criminal justice system,health care, welfare, and social services. As in other settler colonies, missionariesand state agents identified children as prime targets for assimilation, for which theprimary mechanism was to separate them from their families and communities. Formuch of the 20th century, church-run, government-funded Indian residentialschools constituted the foremost state-sponsored intervention toward this end(Miller, 1996; Milloy, 1999). Since the mid-20th century, the schools have beenreplaced in this role by the provincial child welfare system, which has engaged inthe forced removal of indigenous children from their families and communities inthe name of child “protection” (Blackstock, 2008; P. Johnston, 1983; Richardson &Nelson, 2007).

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Developing a rigorous analysis of how colonization has shaped indigenoushealth and well-being, and how health and welfare interventions perpetuate colo-nial ideas, relationships, and practices, requires careful attention to how particularstate and nonstate human actors, including policymakers, health professionals, andindigenous people themselves have taken up, challenged, appropriated, elaborated,and otherwise engaged with colonial discourses. At this juncture it may be helpfulto recall that discourse is a potentially powerful tool wielded by human actors; it isnot an autonomous agent. Historians have leveled this important critique at colo-nial studies scholars inspired by the work of Edward Said, who have tended to treatdiscourse as an omnipotent social and political actor (Cooper, 2005). This critiquemay also apply to some of the recent discussions of colonialism in the mental healthliterature (e.g., de Leeuw, Greenwood, & Cameron, 2010). Historical andanthropological scholarship addressing the colonial contexts of contemporary pat-terns of illness and social suffering (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1992; Farmer, 1992;Packard, 1989), including the intertwined trajectories of European and Americanimperialism, scientific knowledge, and colonial health care systems (W. Anderson,2002, 2006; Bashford, 2004; Birn, 2006; Boddy, 2007; Kelm, 1998; McElhinny,2005; Vaughan, 1991), may offer helpful insights for those analyzing indigenoushealth and settler-colonialism in contemporary North American settings.

Colonization and the disruption of indigenous social reproduction

Historical trauma theorists are by no means the first thinkers to elaborate on howexperiences of colonization shape present-day suffering, demanding the rebuildingof intergenerational relations to restore individual and social wellness. Writing in1957, Albert Memmi described how conditions of colonization actively negate thepossibility of self-determination: parents’ diminished hopes and expectations aretransmitted to their children, and further reinforced by colonial education systems,disrupting processes of social and cultural reproduction. As a result, he argued,“colonized society is a diseased society in which internal dynamics no longer suc-ceed in creating new structures” (Memmi, 1965, pp. 98–99).

Crucially, early anticolonial scholars such as Memmi, Frantz Fanon, AimeCesaire, and others saw the intimate and structural dimensions of colonialism asintertwined, mutually reinforcing, and of equal significance: they drew on Marxistcritiques of the relationship between colonization and capitalist interests, but alsoinsisted on moving beyond economic analyses, drawing on their own experiences toarticulate the psychological and intersubjective dynamics of colonization. Theiranalyses were a deliberate departure from the narrower, political economy perspec-tive of anticolonial critiques penned by their European Marxist contemporaries. Byattending to the experiential dimensions and microsocial implications of coloniza-tion, they sought to widen the lens through which processes, experiences, andeffects of colonization are critically examined (Cesaire, 1950/1972; Fanon, 1952/1986, 1961/2004; Memmi, 1965). This longstanding insight may be sidelined ifdebate about the value of historical trauma theory becomes polarized, with clinical


perspectives focused narrowly on individual and proximal relational experiences,on the one hand, opposed to political economy critiques of the absence of struc-tural analyses on the other. In my analysis, I attempt to model an approach con-tinuous with the holistic spirit of early anticolonial critique.

Indigenous healing movements in North America and elsewhere have long beenpreoccupied with restoration of familial and broader social relations deliberatelyand systematically disrupted by colonial interventions, since well before the con-cept of trauma became fashionable in the 1990s. Rather belatedly, scholars havecome to appreciate the extent to which disrupting the social reproduction of colo-nized peoples has been central to historical and ongoing processes of colonization.Historians, anthropologists, and others concerned with the “intimate” dimensionsof colonization have addressed topics including pedagogic institutions, regulationof birthing and child-rearing practices, and policies and practices of sanitation andhygiene (W. Anderson, 2006; Birn, 2002; McElhinny, 2005; McMahon, 2007;Ram & Jolly, 1998; Stoler, 2006). Collectively, these analyses demonstrate theextent to which ostensibly benevolent interventions into domains of health andthe social have the discursive and material effects of establishing and reinforcingracial hierarchies and boundaries. Professional discourses and interventions frombiomedicine, public health, and social welfare are particularly implicated in thesehistorical analyses.

Historical trauma in therapeutic discourse on indigenous peoples

Prior to the 1990s, “trauma” rarely featured in literature on indigenous mentalhealth and healing in North America; only limited references were made to traumaas a diagnostic category linked not to colonial history, but to the long-standingeffects of events experienced by an individual indigenous person within his or herlifetime: sexual abuse, relocation to an urban centre, participation in the Vietnamwar.2 Trauma’s emergence in late 19th-century Europe and its subsequent trajec-tory can be understood as a “dual genealogy,” involving a dialectic of moral ideasabout victimhood and scientific ideas about pathology resulting from the experi-ence of suffering (Fassin & Rechtman, 2009). Thus analysing how and why traumais taken up by particular groups at particular times cannot be restricted to chartingchanges in clinical knowledge and practice, but must consider shifts in the broadersocial recognition of particular forms of victimhood.

In the 1990s, the indigenous mental health professionals, psychologist EduardoDuran and social work professor Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, adapted thehistorical trauma concept from its origins in Holocaust studies, applying it inclinical work with indigenous clients in the United States. Two decades earlier,writers of anticolonial histories of North America first began to use the concept ofgenocide, and to draw parallels between the Holocaust and indigenous experiencesof colonization (Johansen & Maestas, 1979; Stannard, 1992; Thornton, 1987).3

This framing became meaningful in the context of North Americans’ growinginterest in accounts of the Holocaust, stimulated initially by the translation into

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English of books by Holocaust survivors such as Primo Levi, and fuelled by the1978–1979 televised miniseries “Holocaust” (Ludi, 2006). With increasing publiccirculation of Holocaust narratives—importantly, including those of the descend-ants of Holocaust survivors (Epstein, 1979)—memory of the Holocaust emerged as“a paradigm for trauma”: not only because the Holocaust provided a frame ofreference for extremes of violence and suffering, but also because the belated cir-culation of Holocaust narratives demonstrated how memory of traumatic eventsmight emerge long after the event (Fassin & Rechtman, 2009, p. 13).

My argument regarding historical trauma theory is premised on the understand-ing that it is a social construct, conceived of and elaborated by people with par-ticular interests drawing on the resources available to them in particular sociallocations and at a particular historical moment. In this sense, it is no different toany other biomedical diagnostic category (Rosenberg & Golden, 1992; Wright &Treacher, 1982). What is distinct about historical trauma compared with otherdiagnostic categories, as Joseph Gone notes, is that “there are no consensuallyaccepted diagnostic criteria for historical trauma” and “reliable and valid assess-ment of historical trauma has never been a pressing issue” (Gone, 2009, p. 758).Indeed, as Gone argues, historical trauma is perhaps best understood as an“entrenched. . . folk discourse” (Gone, 2009, p. 758). In short, historical traumais not an empirically validated diagnostic category, but a highly malleable hermen-eutic tool, employed for making meaning out of social suffering in the present byreference to the past (Lambek & Antze, 1996).

Thus, we need to examine how historical trauma theory is used by particularpeople in particular contexts to draw out the implications for our understandingsof indigenous and colonial histories, as well as for contemporary social relations,subjectivities, and processes of healing. In Canada, the concept of historical traumahas been elaborated and applied since the late 1990s in the context of therapeuticprogrammes and public discourse supported by the state-funded AboriginalHealing Foundation, a central plank of the federal government’s policy responseto the work of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. The works of Duranand Brave Heart remain touchstones in historical trauma discourse by Canadianprofessionals in Aboriginal mental health, child development, and public healthfields (Ball, 2008; Cedar Project Partnership et al., 2008; Elias, 2012; Iwasaki,Bartlett, & O’Neil, 2005; Menzies, 2005). Historical trauma theory is sometimesinvoked in ways which are consistent with broader discourse on indigenous healingas a collective process which is simultaneously spiritual, social, and political. It isalso used in ways which locate pathology within the individual, akin to biomedicaland psychiatric diagnostic categories. As with any discourse that classifies peopleand their forms of suffering, these discursive framings have real, material effects onpeople’s lives, through shaping the way that people understand themselves andothers (Hacking, 2006). Further, because of its explicit reference to the past, theways in which historical trauma theory is invoked have implications for what isremembered and what is forgotten about indigenous experiences of colonization(see for example Gone, 2014).


My focus in this paper is to historicize and analyze certain applications of his-torical trauma theory in professional and therapeutic discourse applied to indigen-ous people in Canada. My working definition of the historical trauma paradigmincorporates elements derived from my readings of texts produced by Duran andBrave Heart (Brave Heart, 1998, 2008; Duran, 1995) and by other authors underthe auspices of the Aboriginal Health Foundation (Chansonneuve, 2005; Wesley-Esquimaux & Smolewski, 2004). In my analysis, I draw on a range of sources fromresearch on urban indigenous healing conducted in the central Canadian provinceof Ontario since 2008: oral history and ethnographic interviews with managers,Elders, healers, and professionals involved in healing programmes, and broadercontemporary policy, professional, and public discourses relating to indigenoushealing, mental health, child development, and child welfare (Maxwell, 2011a).

In the sections which follow I have three objectives. First, to historicize theemergence of historical trauma discourse in relation to broader shifts in the dis-course and practices associated with “Native healing.” My aim here is to show theextent to which both historical trauma discourse and indigenous healing morebroadly have been shaped by globally ascendant mental health and trauma para-digms which medicalize social suffering. This medicalization reframes contempor-ary social suffering and interlinked political struggles of indigenous and othermarginalized populations as, on the one hand, problems of behaviour to be reme-died by professional interventions, and on the other, problems of individual victim-hood to be remedied by financial compensation. Second, I want to demonstratehow historical trauma discourse has been taken up in ways which continue theconcern with social reproduction central to Native healing discourse and practice.To this end, I discuss one contemporary urban indigenous healing programme,Mamisarvik Healing Centre in Ottawa, examining the relationship between historyand healing, and the coexistence of biopsychiatric models with indigenous narrativeforms in this therapeutic context. In the third section, I trace how colonial profes-sionals have historically pathologized indigenous parenting practices and socialrelations. Finally, I discuss how contemporary professionals invoke historicaltrauma in their published writing in ways which continue the colonial pathologiza-tion of indigenous families.

From Native healing to Aboriginal mental health:Historical trauma discourse in historical context

During the late 1960s, a diffuse social movement emerged from small-scale localinitiatives that was often described by indigenous people across Canada and theUnited States as “Native healing.” Proponents of Native healing characteristicallyfocused on reclaiming and adapting indigenous social relations, knowledge, andceremonial practices disrupted by colonization (Adelson, 2000, 2001; Kunitz &Levy, 1997; Maxwell, 2011a; Tanner, 2009; Waldram, 1997). The movementgained momentum through political protest and the development of programmesduring the 1970s in indigenous communities and urban centres. Early examples of

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Native healing initiatives in the city of Toronto included Pedahbun Lodge, estab-lished in 1974 as the first residential alcohol treatment programme in Canada to berun by and for indigenous people (Maxwell, 2011a), and a diabetes managementprogramme operating out of the Native Canadian Centre in the early 1980s(Hagey, 1984). Anishinaabeg in Treaty Three territory in northwestern Ontariodeveloped multiple initiatives during the same period (Maxwell, 2011a, 2011b).Native counselors operating out of the Kenora Waystation from 1967, such asDonald Morrison, visited surrounding reserves and resurrected Anishinaabe drum-ming practices as an explicit path for recovery from chronic alcohol abuse. Withother Anishinaabeg, Morrison went on to establish the Lake of the WoodsPowwow Club in the early 1970s, through which a group of families who werestruggling with alcohol abuse revitalized Anishinaabe ceremonial and spiritualpractices as healing. Some of the same community leaders established the NativeHealers programme at the Lake of the Woods Hospital in Kenora in 1980, bringingAnishinaabe and other indigenous therapeutic interventions and ceremonies intothis biomedical institution.

Historian Scott Rutherford argues that while indigenous intellectuals and pol-itical leaders in 1970s Canada located their work in relation to global anticolonialstruggles, the priority they attached to the resurrection of local indigenous know-ledge and practices distinguished anticolonial approaches in Canada from those ofthinkers and movements elsewhere (including Cesaire and some of the Africanliberation movements) who embraced modernization and “development” dis-courses (Rutherford, 2010). At the same time, even in its early stages adherentsto the Native healing movement engaged tactically with contemporary discoursesranging from Alcoholics Anonymous to Black Power, popular psychology, and“New Age” practices (Kunitz & Levy, 1997). Thus, the emergence of Native heal-ing as a trans-local social (and at times explicitly political) movement is intimatelyentwined with broader North American social and political movements of the1960s and 1970s.

Practices and discourses associated with Native healing in Canada have beenfurther shaped by the expanding terrain of mental health and the global ascent oftrauma discourse. The expansion of community mental health and addictions pro-gramming from the mid-1970s onwards contributed to transforming a grassrootsmovement drawing on local healing traditions into a bureaucratized networkincreasingly reliant on dominant professional discourses and government funding.While public funding for many socially and politically oriented indigenous pro-grammes (including advocacy groups, media and communications, and urbanNative friendship centres) was drastically cut during the early 1990s, like mostpublic services in Canada (Cohen, Morrison, & Smith, 1995), provincial commu-nity mental health budgets expanded during the same period to support the deinsti-tutionalization of psychiatric hospitals (Mechanic, 1999; Wiktorowicz, 2005).

Thus it is unsurprising that since the 1990s, growing numbers of indigenousservice providers have tactically engaged with the mental health paradigm, render-ing the terrain of “Native healing” increasingly coterminous with that of


“Aboriginal mental health” (Maxwell, 2011a, 2011b). Emerging policy discourseon Aboriginal mental health holds out the promise of a comprehensive frameworkwhich both legitimates social suffering in indigenous communities with its “bio-psycho-social” etiology, and draws diverse but interrelated forms of social sufferinginto a single framework.4 Indigenous professionals trained in social work andmental health have played leading roles in bringing bio-psycho-social discoursefrom psychology and psychiatry into Native healing programmes. Some commen-tators have called for greater “integration” of “western” biomedical and indigenousapproaches (Hardy, Apaquash, & Butcher, 2000; Maar & Shawande, 2010); othersare more cautious and critical, recognizing the limited compatibility of some indi-genous healing forms with institutional settings and professional practice, the lim-ited capacity of many psy-professionals to grasp the diversity and complexity oflocal indigenous therapeutic traditions, and significant variability between indigen-ous communities in the extent to which local healing practices have been main-tained (Gone, 2010; Waldram, 1997).

Such skepticism regarding “integration” is also warranted given that accessingmental health funding generally requires the reframing of social and political issuesas behavioural problems. The discourse on Aboriginal mental health which beganto circulate around the early 1990s blunted the critical edge of earlier Native heal-ing discourse, which typically engaged more directly with both structural determin-ants of health and well-being, such as housing and the criminal justice system, andwith fundamental issues of self-determination (Maxwell, 2011a). The depoliticizingeffect of mental health discourse is well illustrated by the 1991 Medical ServicesBranch report on the first national “mental health needs assessment” of FirstNations reserves, which identified all of the following as “mental health problems”:accidents, violence, homicide, suicide, overrepresentation in prisons, family vio-lence, child sexual abuse, children’s “failure to achieve,” depression, children inthe care of child welfare, substance abuse, and neurological damage resulting fromimpaired births (Medical Services Branch, 1991). The authors observed that mentalhealth problems must be related to broader social economic context, yet failed tourge action to address structural issues such as indigenous peoples’ dispossession ofland and natural resources, political marginalization, inequitable access to educa-tion and health care, or overrepresentation in the criminal justice system. Instead,they argued that poor living conditions and high rates of unemployment render“assistance to the behavioural area [emphasis added] the more imperative, for it willsignificantly affect the ability of the communities to use economic opportunities”(Medical Services Branch, 1991, p. 4).

This unconvincing rationale suggests acquiescence to the established social-poli-tical order; further, it perpetuates the discredited culture of poverty theory whichclaims that it is poor people’s problematic attitudes and behaviours rather thansystemic barriers which prevent them from moving out of poverty. The framingadvanced by the authors of this report contrasts with alternative analyses duringthe same period which prioritize structural over behavioural interventions, such asthe early 1992 inquest report in the aftermath of multiple suicides and attempted

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suicides in Big Cove, New Brunswick, whose authors identified a lack of adequatecommunity housing as a major factor underlying the suicide epidemic (RoyalCommission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1995).

The threat that increasing bureaucratization and institutionalization pose toindigenous healing practices is well illustrated by the trajectory of the Nativehealers programme in Kenora, founded in 1980 by members of the Lake of theWoods Powwow Club in collaboration with physician Dr. Alan Torrie, and fundedunder the Ontario Community Mental Health Services Programme. The pro-gramme enjoyed substantial community respect and support for many years, butshifts in hospital and provincial government policy began to undermine its foun-ders’ vision.5 Archival records show increasing bureaucratic scrutiny and monitor-ing demands from the mid-1990s, when Ministry of Health staff began to expressconcerns regarding the lack of “appropriate and acceptable parameters” definingthe work of the Native Healers program, and the unavailability of quantitativedata with which to “measure actual program activities and services delivered toclients.”6

Madeline Skead, the Anishinaabe coordinator of the Native Healers programmein Kenora, asserted in her program plan/report for 1996–1997, that “the spirit ofthe (recent provincial) mental health reforms will be implemented through theguidance of the (Ontario) Aboriginal Health Policy. The Native Healer Programhas been at the forefront in this area, since healers associated with the programprovide the bulk of primary mental health services to traditional people on Kenoraarea reserves.”7

The Ministry Consultant approved Madeline’s submission for further fundingbut contradicted her assertion regarding the program’s leading role in providingcommunity mental health services, noting that “this program does not providecommunity mental health services; a good review is needed.”8 A narrow under-standing of mental health as being about individual clinical interventions, lack ofrespect for the transformative potential of collective healing activities, and anunwillingness to support principles of indigenous self-determination in programmedesign and delivery are enduring themes in the relationship between state bureau-cracies and Native healing programmes. This has been demonstrated most recentlywith the premature termination of federal funding for the Aboriginal HealingFoundation (Maxwell, 2011a).

The second, linked shift in Native healing discourse since the 1990s, is thegrowing ubiquity of “trauma.” The ascent of trauma is a global phenomenon,which Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman have linked to the emergence of amoral economy in which victimhood status, acquired through individual experi-ences of physical and especially sexual abuse, has come to wield greater currencythan collective struggles against colonialism and oppression (Fassin & Rechtman,2009). Fassin and Rechtman propose that trauma has come to be seen as more thana cause of suffering: it is now a resource for those who suffer, “a tool used in ademand for justice” (Fassin & Rechtman, 2009, p. 279) which may be tacticallyemployed to demand and access a diagnosis, treatment programmes, and


financial compensation. This interpretation is crucial to the current analysis, as itenables us to appreciate both the agency of those invoking historical trauma, andthe contingency of the concept. As Fassin and Rechtman note, trauma is nowrelatively autonomous from the professional domains of psychology and psych-iatry, shoring up Gone’s descriptor of historical trauma as “folk discourse.”Untethering historical trauma from professional discourse enables us to analyseit as an everyday idiom, as in my opening quotation.

The influence of this ascendant global paradigm is discernible in discourse onexperiences of residential school survivors, which shifted notably between the late1980s and the late 1990s. While writers of earlier research and policy reportsemphasized a diverse range of experiences and included examples of the myriadways in which students and their families had challenged, subverted, and generallyresisted attempts by the schools to eradicate their language, world view, and famil-ial relations, later policy discourse came to focus more narrowly on experiences ofphysical and sexual abuse.9 Similarly, while mental health professionals writingabout residential schools during the early 1990s considered a broad range of mech-anisms by which the schools contributed to enduring deleterious psycho-socialeffects, including the loss of indigenous livelihoods and other knowledge formsas well as the breakdown of intergenerational relations and disruption of families(Duran, 1990; Mussell, Nicholls, & Adler, 1991), the introduction of the concept oftrauma shifted the focus to individualized experiences of abuse and subsequentpsychopathology (as exemplified by Chansonneuve, 2005).

At this juncture I want to clarify that my argument is not intended to undermineformer residential students’ accounts of experiences of abuse and its after-effects.The shifting social climate around allegations of historical experiences of physicaland especially sexual abuse surely influenced survivors’ willingness to share theiraccounts publicly and with health and legal professionals. In particular, the com-monplace association of trauma with the Holocaust—“a paradigm for trau-ma”—serves to legitimate the reframing of past experiences as “traumatic” longafter such experiences have ended: legitimation not readily available prior to theemergence of trauma (Fassin & Rechtman, 2009, p. 18). Rather, in drawing atten-tion to how trauma theory has retooled the parameters of discussions of residentialschool experiences, my intention is to raise questions about the broader implica-tions of the contemporary political, social, and moral contexts in which experiencesof abuse carry proportionately greater currency than collective experiences of struc-tural violence. The same historical period which has encouraged those who experi-enced abuse in residential schools to come forward, share their stories, and applyfor financial compensation, has seen the continuation of widespread public denialof historical and contemporary colonial relations in Canada (and the exacerbationof material poverty among indigenous people).10 This apparent contradictionshould compel us to question how historical trauma might encourage the remem-bering and wide circulation of certain histories, while simultaneously facilitatingthe marginalization and forgetting of other histories, and distracting attention fromcontemporary inequities.

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Historical trauma and social reproduction in indigenoushealing discourse

While many providers of healing programmes have tactically adopted the languageof the psy-professions, this belies the extent to which some programmes simultan-eously continue to focus on facilitating intergenerational communication and rela-tionships, consistent with older Native healing discourse and practices.Ethnographic research examining how those involved in managing healing pro-grammes understand both the etiology of social suffering and the healing processprovides insights into the complex coexistence of individualizing bio-psychologicalmodels, and collective approaches to healing. Although the influence of psy- dis-course is evident, healing practices remain rooted in the social in ways that arecontinuous with earlier anticolonial intellectual traditions. To demonstrate this,I draw on discussions with an Elder and a manager of Mamisarvik HealingCentre in Ottawa, the only Inuit-run residential addictions treatment programmein Canada.11

At first glance, trauma appears dominant inMamisarvik’s model of care. All staffhave participated in accredited professional training on trauma, and clients areassessed for symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), both before andafter participating in the treatment programme. The intake assessment form incorp-orates at least nine different standardized assessment instruments, constitutingapproximately 4 hours of paperwork per client.12

Deeper engagement reveals the sociality inherent to Inuit healing at Mamisarvik.With detailed reference to her own family history, manager Reepa Evic-Carletonexplained to me how Inuit’s ignorance of their people’s historical experiences ofcolonization contribute to present-day suffering, preventing the resolution of griefand trauma and driving many people to alcohol and drug abuse “to numb the pain.”Thus the collective reconstruction of shared histories is inherently healing:

As hard as the realities are, when you begin to put the pieces together, there’s always a

healing element there . . . It’s a hard history, it’s a hard reality, but we have to know.

Not knowing and not sharing the stories, it’s eating us away and so, that’s what

I teach here, is the Inuit history. Because when people understand what’s happened

to them, with that knowledge, because they’re here to get the help, to learn more

about themselves, when they get that information, it moves them and it empowers

them and it makes them say “No wonder! No wonder we are the way we are today.”13

In Reepa’s analysis, silences within families and between generations have pre-vented Inuit from accessing and discussing memories which are essential formaking meaning of suffering in the present. Developing this shared understandingof the particular historical context of contemporary Inuit social suffering catalyzesindividual processes of healing.

History has featured in Mamisarvik’s programming since the centre first opened.Participants learn from Inuit Elders’ oral histories, and a range of other resources


including documentary films, about the impacts of colonization on Inuit familiesand communities; in turn, they contribute their own accounts. They discuss issuesincluding experiences of residential schools, as well as coerced relocation fromtraditional camps to permanent settlements, the slaughter of sled dogs by theRoyal Canadian Mounted Police in Nunavut and Nunavik, and the rapid loss offluency in Inuktitut. It is not simply the telling and hearing of stories which istherapeutic, but the active participation in piecing together a shared history, inthe context of shared suffering in the present.

Significantly, the social context provided by the Mamisarvik programme enablesparticipants to experience and appreciate the extent to which many Inuit haveretained their knowledge, and how this knowledge is of continuing relevance andvalue in the present. This is actively demonstrated by the Elders fluent in Inuktitutwho play leading roles in healing work at Mamisarvik. One of these Elders,Nunavut-based Meeka Arnakaq from Pangnirtung, has recently published aseries of books described as “wellness resources,” which present her teachings ona range of topics including parenting, healing, healthy living, and team work.14

Arnakaq is unilingual in Inuktitut, and the English language books are carefultranslations of her accounts of orally transmitted Inuit knowledge, originally writ-ten by her in syllabics.

Thus, despite the apparent influence of conventional psy- approaches to treat-ment, therapeutic work at Mamisarvik is never about an individual in isolation.Rather, healing constitutes a social process of rebuilding a collective identity,through reconstructing shared pasts, and asserting the continuing value of Inuitoral teachings. A crucial dimension of this process is crystallizing a shared aware-ness of histories of colonial violence, oppression, and processes of victimizationwhich have contributed to individual and collective experiences of sufferingand loss.

In what ways does historical trauma theory contribute to the processes of restor-ing Inuit social reproduction central to healing at Mamisarvik? From Reepa’sperspective, the value of trauma discourse lies in its normalizing effect, enablingthe interpretation of destructive or troubling behaviour as “normal reactions to avery abnormal event.”15 At the same time, she rejects the notion that someone whohas been traumatized is in any sense permanently damaged due to irrevocablebiological changes, thereby tacitly acknowledging that trauma may simultaneouslyserve as a stigmatizing and limiting concept.

Nuanced interpretations of how historical trauma theory is understood andapplied in particular therapeutic and broader social contexts cannot be developedthrough surveys or abstract speculation, but require multisited ethnographic anddiscursive analyses. Cvetkovich’s work on lesbian sites of trauma and culturalresponses to trauma illustrates the possibilities of such a cultural analysis oftrauma. She conceptualizes trauma as a “public culture” neither shaped by medicaldiscourse nor characterized by victimhood or pathologization, but rather as terrainfor “creative responses [to historical and ongoing oppressions] that far outstripeven the most utopian of therapeutic and political solutions” (Cvetkovich,

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2003, p. 3). Further ethnographic research is needed to explore how indigenouspeople are understanding and using the concept of historical trauma: in therapeuticsettings (Fiske, 2008; Fletcher & Denham, 2008), but also in everyday discourse,circulating through professional and other trans-local social networks, and ethno-nationally diverse reserve, urban and rural community settings.

Pathologizing indigenous families in colonialprofessional discourse

In 1946, psychiatrist Dr. Charles Stogdill visited an Indian residential school atShubenacadie, Nova Scotia. Stogdill, Chief of the Division of Mental Hygiene inthe Canadian Department of National Health and Welfare, later wrote to theSuperintendent of Welfare and Training at Indian Affairs that the schools“impressed me very favourably indeed.”16 Stogdill was particularly delighted thatthe syllabus was organized to compensate for what he imagined to be the deficien-cies of the children’s home environments:

I was very pleased to see manual training and domestic science as part of the course

even from early grades . . . In my opinion, that type of training is especially suitable for

Indian children, as they will be helped in their grasp of abstractions by the use of

materials . . . and as they haven’t the home background of verbalizing and reading that

most white children have.

This psychiatrist’s assumptions regarding the inferiority of indigenous family lifeand the moral imperative of modernizing colonial interventions demonstrate howprofessional discourse can serve to legitimate colonial domination, while simultan-eously bolstering the national self-image of colonial society as enlightened and ben-evolent. Stogdill’s letter is one among a regular correspondence which psychiatristsin the Mental Hygiene Division of National Health and Welfare maintained withIndian Affairs officials through the late 1940s and 1950s. An important theme in thiscorrespondence was how the psychiatric profession might support the ongoing stateproject of assimilating indigenous children through the Indian residential schools.17

The longstanding tradition of Canadian colonial professional discourses whichblame indigenous parents’ dysfunction for their children’s social suffering and fail-ure to assimilate is perpetuated by some contemporary health and social serviceprofessionals. The idea that parenting constitutes a discrete mechanism by whichtrauma is intergenerationally transmitted provides a new discursive tool for thepathologization of indigenous families. While proponents of historical traumatheory propose various psycho-social, Lamarckian, and other biological mechan-isms by which parents pass their trauma to their children (Walters et al., 2011), myparticular concern here is with how mental health and social service professionalsinvoke historical trauma while drawing on dominant popular psychology dis-courses, including interpretations of posttraumatic stress disorder and the cycleof abuse, in ways that perpetuate a decontextualized understanding of colonization


in which indigenous people are always and only victims, and that disregard how thecontinuation of colonial institutions, discourses, and practices disrupt indigenousfamily life in the present.

A decade before residential schools became a prominent theme in Aboriginalmental health discourse, the Canadian Psychiatric Association’s “Native MentalHealth Section” hosted a 1983 meeting in Ottawa entitled “The Native Family:Traditions and Adaptations.”18 My analysis of the transcript of the 1983 meetingreveals the tension between psychiatrists’ determination to locate the psycho-socialproblems of Native children in their parents’ “traditional” and, therefore, dysfunc-tional parenting practices, and indigenous participants’ reframing of the problemas one of colonial interventions and normative settler family values underminingpreviously well-functioning family and social relations. Note that at this time,residential schools were considered but one among multiple incursions by the colo-nial state into indigenous lives, and had not yet been identified as of particularsignificance in shaping contemporary parenting practices and social suffering.

Speaking at the 1983 meeting, child psychiatrist Paul Patterson explained in hispresentation on the subject of “Native child rearing practices,”

All these [Native] values had their function and had their purpose but I am also

suggesting that some of them at this particular time in evolution may in fact be

dysfunctional and maladaptive and, in fact, dangerous for our children. (Canadian

Psychiatric Association Section on Native Mental Health, 1983, p. 42)

Patterson’s invocation of “evolution” and location of “Native values” in the pastestablishes modernization as both rationale and vehicle for the ongoing assimila-tion of indigenous peoples, while indigenous parenting is deemed to be premodernand therefore “dangerous.” From this perspective and as the meeting’s title sug-gests, indigenous parents must “adapt” their behaviour if they are to raise theirchildren to be functional members of (dominant, settler) society. Undoubtedly theCanadian state’s often coerced relocation and rapid sedentarization of (mostlynorthern) indigenous communities from the 1930s through the 1970s profoundlydisrupted patterns of livelihood and intergenerational sociality in ways which ren-dered longstanding methods of teaching and supervising children less effective(Kirmayer, Fletcher, & Watt, 2009, pp. 305–309; Shkilnyk, 1985).19 What is bothproblematic and disturbing is how the psychiatrists represent processes of colon-ization as both desirable and inevitable, while occluding how agents of theCanadian state used coercive and violent methods to enforce colonial policies.Discussing Inuit sedentarization, Dr. Eric Hood makes no mention of the govern-ment threat to withhold family allowances or the Royal Canadian MountedPolice’s (RCMP) slaughter of sled dogs (Canadian Psychiatric AssociationSection on Native Mental Health, 1983, p. 7).

Those communities began with the governments putting in some services, establish-

ment of air bases, bringing in health services, schools and various other organizations.

Maxwell 421

The people were naturally attracted [emphasis added] to those places because they

brought some benefits, especially in relation to health and survival. (Canadian

Psychiatric Association Section on Native Mental Health, 1983, p. 7)

Hood’s account is devoid of any analysis of power relations, and reinforces theunderstanding that Inuit “freely chose” to abandon their camps.

Mohawk psychiatrist Dr. Clare Brant elaborated the argument which blamescontemporary pathologies on dysfunctional indigenous parenting, in his discussionof how “Native ethics” shape child-rearing practices, illustrated by the case ofSteven, a teenager on his second admission for attempted suicide. Brant describesindigenous child-rearing ethics as respect for individual autonomy leading to non-interference, suppression of anger, withholding praise, instruction by modeling,and withdrawal in response to social stress (Canadian Psychiatric AssociationSection on Native Mental Health, 1983, pp. 30–34). He asserts that Steven’s par-ents’ “classical Native parenting behavior” is at the root of his problems:

[His parents’] opposing values to the larger culture easily explained the difficulties

Steven is having in coping with the majority white society and attempting to find a

place in it. In this particular case one must wonder whether the exercising of Native

ethics and rules of behavior are a method of achieving personal enrichment and

growth or whether or not they are used to sidestep responsibility for parenting

which is to prepare the youngster for life in Canada in 1983. (1983, p. 36)

Again, in order to be deemed “responsible,” Native parents must adopt the“values” of “majority white society”—in other words, assimilate. Brant portraysindigenous parents’ efforts to maintain their own patterns of family relations asself-indulgent and irresponsible, whereas assimilation is both desirable andinevitable.

But George Desnomie, a Native counselor from Winnipeg, challenged thepsychiatrists’ decontextualized and pathologizing accounts:

Child rearing is and was a community event or a community problem. Everybody had

a hand in everybody’s children . . .The child was not reprimanded for making mis-

takes, but it meant a great deal of involvement for us as adults [emphasis

added] . . .When I told people in Winnipeg I was going to do this [presentation]

they said “make sure you mention that the relationship was an ongoing everyday

practice [emphasis added].” It wasn’t just in the evenings or after work or whenever

things were [convenient]. (1983, pp. 46–48)

Thus Desnomie insists that the denigrated value of “non-interference” be under-stood in social and historical context, stressing the roles of grandparents, aunts,and uncles in child-rearing, and how changing livelihoods have undermined indi-genous family life. Indeed, as multiple adults were engaged in supervising andteaching children on a daily basis, “non-interference” seems to be something of a


misnomer reflecting the absence of European didactic techniques rather than rec-ognition of the particular ontological bases for indigenous practices.

Desnomie went further by implicitly challenging the settler values which priori-tize individual participation in the wage economy over collective wild harvestingactivities, and thereby limit opportunities for intergenerational sociality. Of course,it is these very values which underlie the state policies and settler practices whichprofoundly disrupted intergenerational relationships in many indigenous commu-nities, particularly during the middle decades of the 20th century. These interven-tions included not only residential schools, but also settler and industrialencroachment onto and pollution of traditional territories, and provincial regula-tions effectively outlawing livelihoods based on wild-harvesting (Lutz, 2008).

Other Native participants, including Elders and para-professionals, similarlypresented accounts of indigenous families which diverged from those of the psych-iatrists, some arguing explicitly that broader social and economic changes wroughtby the Canadian state and society are the root causes of the challenges facing theircommunities. John Childs, Elder from Big Trout Lake and former CommunityHealth Representative, described how in his community it was the “educatedIndians” who were struggling with parenting, whereas those who continue tospeak their language were able to benefit from Elders’ teachings which supportthem in their role as parents. Another participant argued that Native parents’excessive “borrowing” of settler practices contributed to “child abuse” in her com-munity, citing corporal punishment, rigid feeding schedules, a lack of value forElders, unrealistic behavioural expectations of very young children, and the ideathat biological parents should assume sole responsibility for their children(Canadian Psychiatric Association Section on Native Mental Health, 1983,pp. 24–25).

What these accounts from indigenous leaders and para-professionals of the1980s make plain is the complex range of historical and contemporary factorsshaping the experiences and behaviour of indigenous parents in the late 20th cen-tury. While not explicitly named, colonization is clearly understood as both his-torical and ongoing incursions by Canadian institutions and professionals intoindigenous family life, and the imposition of dominant Euro-Canadian valuesvia these and other systemic channels. At the same time, there is an undercurrentof confidence regarding the endurance and value of distinct indigenous social rela-tions, including parenting and child-rearing.

“It will never end”: How historical trauma transmissioncontinues to pathologize indigenous families

Where the psychiatrists of the 1980s blamed “traditional parenting practices” forthe actual and presumed social problems suffered by indigenous families, today’smental health and child development professionals increasingly invoke the trans-mission of historical trauma by parents and grandparents. As we have seen, his-torical trauma discourse has been produced at a historical juncture when mental

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health explanations for indigenous social suffering are increasingly dominant, evenhegemonic, and individual victimhood as a social identity holds out greater prom-ise for attracting resources and attention than collective struggle for social andpolitical change.20 Proponents of historical trauma as a diagnostic category typic-ally advance highly simplified versions of colonial history which leave no room forthe diversities and particularities of local indigenous histories (Gone, 2010, 2014;Waldram, 2004). Similarly, popular therapeutic discourse in Canada has reifiedresidential school attendance as the ultimate and uniquely damaging experienceof colonization, “a marker of Indianness” (Waldram, 2004, p. 229), crowding outthe breadth and complexity of indigenous experiences of colonial interventions.This line of thinking leads some to assume that if former residential school studentsand/or their children or grandchildren are struggling with addictions, mental ill-ness, or any other form of psycho-social suffering in the present, these problems areattributable to experiences endured while at residential school, most likely experi-ences of abuse.

The influence of the “cycle of abuse” doctrine, introduced by pediatricians in1962 and since widely debunked, is discernible in much recent discourse on theintergenerational transmission of historical trauma.21 This “popular cliche,” toquote Ian Hacking’s descriptor, assumes that experiences of abuse may be equatedwith lasting psycho-social damage and, in particular, a propensity to abuse others.Despite a lack of empirical evidence, this remains a pervasive assumption in popu-lar psychological discourse. But this is a relatively recent development: as Fassinand Rechtman describe, it is only since the 1980s that “a line of imputability andinevitability has gradually been established” between the experiences and psychicconsequences of suffering (particularly abuse), a relationship not previously recog-nized outside of the expert fields of psychiatry and psychology (Fassin &Rechtman, 2009, p. 4). The embeddedness of this assumption in historicaltrauma discourse is illustrated in a recent paper by Brenda Elias and colleagues,who express “surprise” at their research findings that residential school attendanceis not associated with a history of suicidal thoughts or behaviour and, with seemingreluctance, acknowledge that “a mentally healthy residential school survivor cohortmay be present in these communities” (Elias et al., 2012, p. 1566). Although Eliaset al.’s (2012) study is the first in Canada to empirically investigate associationsbetween residential school attendance and its purported intergenerational effects,historical trauma discourse presumes a causative relationship as established truth,as expressed in the young Anishinaabekwe’s casual remark which openedthis paper.

Thus some proponents of historical trauma, taking the most extremely negativeof residential school experiences as universal and embracing the cycle of abusecliche, propagate a host of erroneous assumptions which pathologize entire familiesand communities: that all or most former students were abused, that all or mostformer students suffer mental illness and dysfunction as a result of their experiencesin the schools, and that all or most former students lack parenting skills. A recentlypublished paper on indigenous children by psychologist Jessica Ball illustrates how


historical trauma discourse is used to pathologize indigenous parents and familiesby simultaneously universalizing experiences of abuse, overextrapolating the impli-cations of abuse, and failing to acknowledge the existence of countervailing experi-ences. Ball advances two linked claims. First, she argues that as a result of physical,emotional, and sexual abuse in residential school, and “having never been nurturedby their own parents, many of today’s First Nations parents and grandparents didnot learn parenting skills” (Ball, 2008, p. 7). Second, she suggests that “manyformer residential school students lost confidence in their capacity to engage inthe kind of nurturing social interaction with young children that promotes attach-ment and intimacy” (Ball, 2008, p. 7).

Ball’s first claim—that former students were “never . . . nurtured by their ownparents”—is particularly far-fetched given that only in very rare cases did childrenattend residential school before age 7, and many started attending at older ages.Further, her assumptions disregard both the diversity of individual residentialschool experiences and, perhaps most significantly, the extent to which the endur-ance of indigenous kinship and broader social relations and practices through the20th century have mitigated negative experiences, including the profound andenduring effects of early childhood experiences with extended kin, summermonths spent at home, and the restorative effects of indigenous healing practicesand programmes. The sole evidence she invokes for her second, sweeping claimregarding former residential school students’ incapacity to nurture children is the2004 report Historical Trauma and Aboriginal Healing by anthropologists CynthiaWesley-Esquimaux and Magdalena Smolewski, itself a purely theoretical paperwhich provides no empirical evidence that residential school attendance under-mines parenting capacity (Wesley-Esquimaux & Smolewski, 2004).

Indeed, it is empirically impossible to isolate the psycho-social effects of par-ticular historical experiences, such as residential school attendance, from thebroader context of indigenous people’s past and present experiences of the complexand shifting range of policies and practices which make up Canadian colonialism.Further, one must query both the rationale and implications of attempting todo so. And yet, Brenda Elias and colleagues’ recent study, invoking multigener-ational trauma as a central concept, demonstrates precisely this blind spot. Theauthors set out to demonstrate associations between familial histories of residentialschool attendance and various indicators of poor mental health, including reportedhistories of abuse and attempted suicide (Elias et al., 2012). The study relied onsurvey data which excluded any detailed contextual information about family andcommunity histories. Nevertheless, the fact that some respondents reported afamily history of residential school attendance, a “lifetime history of abuse”22

regardless of when and where abuse was experienced, and suicide thoughts orattempts, was taken by the researchers as a sufficient evidential base from whichto assert that “poor parenting or trauma transmission may have occurred” (Eliaset al., 2012, p. 1566).

A singular focus on residential school experience as the primary determinant ofpresent-day dysfunction excludes myriad dimensions of colonization which have

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had profoundly disruptive effects on social and intergenerational relations: thesystematic disenfranchisement of indigenous women, forced relocation of commu-nities, criminalization and incarceration of indigenous people, erosion and viola-tion of wild harvesting rights and destruction of traditional livelihoods, impositionof the welfare system, and forced confinement for tuberculosis treatment subse-quent to removal from home communities (Bussidor & Bilgen-Reinart, 1997;Grygier, 1994; Lawrence, 2004; Lutz, 2008; Olofsson, Holton, & Partridge, 2008;Roberts & Melchers, 2003; Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1994;Shewell, 2004; Shkilnyk, 1985). Further, it obscures attention to the myriad con-temporary manifestations of colonial dominance and inequities which have pro-found implications for parenting and family relations: substandard andovercrowded reserve housing, huge inequalities in funding for reserve education,entire cohorts of young people forced to choose between living with their family orpursuing education and employment, everyday experiences of racist violence, awoeful shortage of affordable child care services, and the disproportionate removalof indigenous children from their families and communities in the name of child“protection.”

Some present-day health and social service professionals are using historicaltrauma as a new tool with which to stigmatize and undermine indigenous families,thereby legitimating their own state-sanctioned interventions into indigenousfamily life on the grounds of children’s needs for “protection” and parents’needs for clinical intervention (cf. de Leeuw et al., 2010; Richardson & Nelson,2007). Here we see the latest incarnation of the colonial psychiatric discourse whichblamed the inferiority of indigenous child-rearing practices and parents’ “failure toadapt” for children’s social suffering, and the 1990s Aboriginal mental health dis-course which reframed complex social and political issues as problems of behaviourameliorable to professional intervention. Rather than advancing serious challengesto the longstanding and entrenched racism in Canadian public services from crim-inal justice to housing, today’s psycho-social professionals hold up quantifiableindicators of continuing colonial dominance and social suffering, ranging fromsuicide rates to incarceration, as evidence of the ongoing failures of indigenousparents. However well-intentioned they may be, professionals who discursivelyframe the trans-generational transmission of dysfunction as the etiology behindcontemporary indigenous social suffering are fuelling increasing state interventionsinto indigenous families and communities, which will continue the imposition ofnormative values of parenting and childhood and apprehensions of children whilstleaving intact the logic of assimilation structuring contemporary settler colonialismin Canada.

Conclusion

I have argued that the discourse on historical trauma is simultaneously continuouswith both Native healing and colonial professional discourses. Native healing dis-course and practice has centred on rebuilding social relations.


Colonial professionals have pathologized indigenous parenting, thereby legitimat-ing assimilative educational and clinical interventions targeting children.As such, historical trauma embodies the complexity and contradictions inherentto indigenous peoples’ everyday struggles against a colonial state which hasboth permeated indigenous lives and repeatedly co-opted efforts to reestablishself-determination. This discourse incorporates both critique of the dominantsocial order and colonial concepts wielded by that same social order against indi-genous families.

In this paper, I have built on existing anthropological critiques, which argue thathistorical trauma theory presumes a singular understanding of history and univer-salizes indigenous experiences (Waldram, 2004), in ways that detract attentionfrom structural determinants of indigenous health and well-being, whilst obscuringpolitical strategies which might address such determinants (Moses, 2011). I havegone beyond established critiques by calling for greater attention to how the his-torical context of dominant political-cultural formations, such as the moral econ-omy of victimhood, have facilitated the emergence and circulation of historicaltrauma theory, and how health and social service professionals both co-opt andacquiesce to dominant and colonial discourses.

While historical analysis is central to understanding contemporary indigenoussocial suffering, the notion of “trauma” invoked in the discourses on historicaltrauma may do more harm than good: it obscures more than it elucidates, patho-logizes rather than liberates, dooms to victimhood rather than inspires to action.But the valence of historical trauma theory points to the broader issue of how alargely biomedical mental health paradigm has become a hegemonic frameworkstructuring discussion of contemporary social suffering in indigenous communitiesin North America. Even critical accounts are constrained by their authors’ framingof everyday experiences of family relations, addictions, and violence as “mentalhealth problems.” We must move beyond the confines of medicalized categories ifwe are to have any hope of producing serious scholarly analyses which contributeto the dismantling of enduring colonial structures, discourses, and social relationsin Canada. At the same time, the continuing circulation of historical trauma ineveryday discourse speaks to a longstanding challenge for indigenous sovereigntyand anticolonial movements: to engage with issues of affect and the intimate,including interpersonal and interfamilial conflict, alongside conventional concernswith governance, land, and natural resources (cf. K. Anderson & Lawrence, 2003;Warry, 1998). In rising to this challenge, ethnographic studies which integratesovereignty, socialities and subjectivities in nuanced ways, and locally groundedindigenous social histories of colonization which include a full spectrum of indi-genous subject positions, will be valuable resources.

Funding

This paper draws on doctoral research supported by a Social Science and Humanities

Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Canadian graduate scholarship (2005–2008),Network for Aboriginal Mental Health Research graduate scholarships and research

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awards (2008–2010), and postdoctoral research supported by a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow-

ship (2011–2012).

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper from participants at theFebruary 2012 workshop “Rethinking Historical Trauma in North American Aboriginal

Contexts: Implications for Research, Services, Policy and Promotion,” organized byLaurence Kirmayer, Joseph Gone, and Joshua Moses, and sponsored by the Division ofSocial & Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University and the National Network for

Aboriginal Mental Health Research. I also acknowledge feedback from three anonymousreviewers, and thoughtful comments from Laurence Kirmayer as discussant for the panel“American Indian ‘Historical Trauma’: Critical Assessment and Future Directions” at theAmerican Anthropological Association’s 2012 Annual Meeting, all of which helped me to

improve the paper.

Notes

1. Anishinaabekwe means Anishinaabe or Ojibwe woman. In this paper I use a range ofterms to describe the original peoples of Canada and their descendants. Where referring

to a particular ethno-national group I use the indigenous language term used by thatgroup to self-identify, that is, “Anishinaabe.” “Native” was commonly used in Canadianpolicy discourse through the 1980s, and continues to be used in everyday discourse in

many northern settings and by older people; I use this term in relation to these contexts.“Aboriginal” is currently the dominant term in Canadian public policy and thereforeoften associated with government and professional discourses; I use it here particularly

with reference to public policy and programming. I use “indigenous” in recognition of theglobal existence of peoples whose lands have been colonized and of the possibility ofsolidarity across contexts, whilst also acknowledging that the term is controversial and

contested.2. This observation is based on my reading of the relevant literature and confirmed by a

PsychINFO search using keywords “trauma” and “Native” or “Aboriginal” or “indigen-ous” or “Indian,” conducted June 4, 2010.

3. Joseph P. Gone (in press) problematizes how proponents of historical trauma discoursetypically invoke a singular “genocide” to characterize the totality of European coloniza-tion of North America. He suggests an alternative framing which simultaneously recog-

nizes multiple genocides defined as “group-based mass murder,” and more carefullyattends to the complexities of historically and geographically varied indigenous experi-ences of colonization.

4. The latter point was explained to me by Sylvia Maracle, Executive Director of theOntario Federation of Indian Friendship Centres, during oral history (OH) interviewsMarch 17, 2009 and April 17 2009, Toronto.

5. Elder Joseph Morrison, oral history, November 28, 2009, Hamilton, OH 20.1:

1 hr 33min.6. Ontario Provincial Archives, Record Group 10–76 “Community mental health services.”

File B409623 (1996) “Native Healer Coordination.” October 28, 1996 letter to Cindy

Gasparini, Assistant Executive Director, Financial and Support Services, Lake of theWoods Hospital, from Robin Daly, Regional Consultant, Ministry of Health.


7. Ontario Provincial Archives, Record Group 10–76 “Community mental health ser-vices.” File B409623 (1996) “Native Healer Coordination.” Program Plan/Report for1996–1997.

8. Ontario Provincial Archives, Record Group 10–76 “Community mental health ser-vices.” File B409623 (1996) “Native Healer Coordination.” Group Review Criteriafor Operating Plans form.

9. Examples of earlier writing include (Furniss, 1992; Haig-Brown, 1988; B. H. Johnston,1988).

10. The work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is ongoing at the time of writing,

and it is premature to assess its impact, but its remit is narrowly confined to the Indianresidential schools.

11. I thank Reepa Evic-Carleton and Elder Ruby Arngna’naaq for their contributions tothe research on which this paper is, in part, based (Maxwell, 2011a).

12. Mamisarvik’s intake assessment form includes: the DSM-IV Post Traumatic StressDisorder Checklist (civilian version), the Addictions Research Foundation’sTreatment Entry assessment (1997), the Drug Abuse Screening Test (DAST) and

Michigan Alcohol Screening Test (MAST), the Behaviour and SymptomIdentification Scale (BASIS-32), the Stages of Change Readiness and TreatmentEagerness Scale (SOCRATES) 8A and 8D (personal drug), the Centre for Addiction

and Mental Health’s Drug Taking Confidence Questionnaires (DTCQ-8) for drugs andalcohol, and the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (PSSS), 2001 ver-sion. Estimate of completion time based on author’s communication with addictionstherapist Janine Robinson, Problem Gambling Programme, Centre for Addictions and

Mental Health, Toronto.13. Reepa Evic-Carleton, oral history, Ottawa, April 9, 2010. OH 29, 20–25min.14. This project was in collaboration with the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse. The

books are available from the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse (CCSA).15. Reepa Evic-Carleton, oral history, Ottawa, April 9, 2010. OH 29: 45–54min.16. Archives Canada, Record Group 29, Volume 333, File 436-3-4: 1945–1956, Mental

Health Division. Letter dated September 30, 1946.17. Archives Canada, Record Group 29, Volume 333, File 436-3-4: 1945–1956, Mental

Health Division.

18. Canadian psychiatrists interested in “Native mental health” first came together infor-mally in 1975; some had participated in the assessment and treatment teams who beganto visit northern Aboriginal communities from the late 1960s. By 1978 the group hadformed the “Native Mental Health Section” with 35 members. Psychiatrist Dr Clare

Brant, a Mohawk from Tyendinaga territory and the group’s only Native member, wasappointed Chair in 1982. Brant proceeded to expand the section’s focus, from raisingawareness among psychiatrists to educating growing numbers of community-based

Native para-professionals. At this time, these were mostly Community HealthRepresentatives and counsellors in the National Aboriginal Alcohol and DrugAddiction Programme (NAADAP).

19. In 1996, the Royal Commission of Aboriginal Peoples identified the Canadian state’sforced relocation of indigenous communities as one of four colonial policies causing themost enduring harm to indigenous peoples, alongside the Indian Act, residentialschools, and the treatment of war veterans. The practice of relocating Aboriginal com-

munities has been widespread with varied rationales, ranging from the assertion of

Maxwell 429

Canadian sovereignty claims in the Arctic, to urban and capitalist developments, to theregulation and containment of indigenous peoples. Regardless of the rationale, all suchrelocations were characterized by a lack of Aboriginal participation in decision making,

and usually very little notice was given to the communities involved (Bussidor & Bilgen-Reinart, 1997; Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1996; see also Matthiasson,1992).

20. One simple illustration of this with respect to contemporary indigenous–state relationsin Canada is the amount of media coverage given to the issue of abuse in the residentialschools as opposed to peaceful protest over resource extraction issues, such as the

longstanding blockade at Grassy Narrows (Willow, 2012).21. Ian Hacking provides a helpful summary of how the cycle of abuse doctrine was ela-

borated and effectively argued against (Hacking, 1991, pp. 280–281, footnote 49).22. Accepted evidence for a “lifetime history of abuse” is an affirmative response to the

question “Have you ever experienced any form of physical, mental, emotional or sexualabuse or violence, either as a child, in an adult relationship, or at any other time?” (Elias,2012, p. 1561).

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Krista Maxwell is Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Departmentof Anthropology, University of Toronto. Krista has been engaged in researchrelating to indigenous mental health and healing and Canadian settler-colonialismfor the past decade. Previously she has conducted research on racialization andhealth and sexual health in Britain and Nigeria. Krista has a PhD in Social Scienceand Health from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto,and an MA in Medical Anthropology from the School of Oriental and AfricanStudies, University of London.

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Historicizing Historical Trauma Theory: Troubling the Trans-generational Transmission Paradigm

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