Native Americans and the Trauma of History

Studying Native America: Problems and Prospects, a collection edited by Russell Thornton. The essay in question is Native Americans and the Trauma of History by Bonnie Duran, Eduardo Duran, and Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart.

The Trauma of History

• intergenerational trauma constructed by colonialism and postcolonial times, and responses to the system of colonization
• based on a nine-year study of cases from an urban Native American clinic: empirical evidence on the existence of intergenerational trauma and modern, present symptomatology; hybrid treatment
• counterhegemonic thinking, healing to address alcoholism, suicide, issues by incorporating the factor of intergenerational trauma
• 60%+ morbidity and mortality caused by alcohol and drug issues
  • • poverty, learned helplessness, dependence, violence, breakdown of healthy living values
• intergenerational trauma: a paradigm to explain present symptomatology
• colonialism: an effect of imperialism which results in distant settlements
• imperialism: “practice, theory, and attitudes from a dominating, metropolitan center”
• “trauma is often passed on to subsequent generations whether it is a conscious memory or not”
• colonization of the life world: colonizer disruption of culture, social integration, and socialization domains in the world of the colonized life
  • American expansion → disintegration of Native American rationalization
  • disruptive selection of disproportionate casuality of warfare and disease
  • rapid traumatic events; inadequate time to grieve
  • loss of agricultural and territorial (subsistence) economy
  • economic and bureaucratic control wrought from Native peoples
  • force and might enacting refugee syndrome
    • relocation to barren, difficult sites which disrupted cultures and religions with geographic basis
      • families, kinship, language, ritual disrupted by geography and lack of mobility under the boundaries of the reservation system: the soul wound
• continued rapid traumatic events
  • “civilizing mission” and the disruption of identity by the us government: displacement and repopulation/resocialization and physical distance
  • 1950s: urban relocation with the accumulation of historical trauma and the addition of modern, urban economic/social/spiritual stress
    • assimilation to wage labor
    • internal failure to become fully-functioning, middle-class, “white” Americans → despair, lack of resources, return to reservation
• cultural genocide: actions which threaten the identity and survival of a social group
  • prohibition of religious freedom
  • subset of colonization of the life world
• the soul wound: “historical trauma, historical legacy, Native American holocaust, intergenerational post-traumatic stress disorder”
  • dreams based on the hostility of the world and comparison to the metaphors of colonizer effects as spiritual due to the importance of spirituality
  • complex, multigenerational, cumulative, constellation
  • incomplete mourning and depression absorbed by children
  • intergenerationally cumulative and compounding for future generations
  • witnessed in Holocaust survivors: “survivor’s child complex”
    • psychic reality disruption: themes of parental survival, persecution, unconscious deaths of relatives; found in the psychological structure, fantasy, and acknowledgement
    • parental survivorship and quality of transmission; depression, uicidal ideation, guilt of betrayal by exclusion, internalized obligation to endure ancestral pain
    • “persecutory fantasies and a perception of the world as dangerous, the fantasy of the return of the old way of life, analogous to compensatory fantasies, para­noia, apprehension, shame, withdrawal, grandiosity in daydreams, and anxiety about aggressive impulses”
  • maintained by acculturative stress produced through acculturation → depression, alienation, psychosomatic symptoms, identity confusion
  • also includes aftereffects of racism, oppression, genocide
  • “survivor syndrome” is non-monolithic, but experiences tend towards difficulty in mourning, collective grief and memorialization
    • “Survivors feared the uncon­trollable rage locked within them, they feared they would be devoured by thoughts of avenging the deaths of their loved ones. These repressions result in psychic numbing.”
  • lack of ability to refer to others and share burdens; no ability to emigrate to escape oppression and psychic genocide
    • “Native American people are aware of the conspiracy of silence that invalidates the pain they endured. It is yet another level of ongoing trauma that must be confronted. Consider the example of a fifteen-year-old Pueblo girl referred for a suicide attempt from an aspirin overdose. She said that she did not want to kill her­self but that she felt an overwhelming sadness that she could not share with her parents: ‘I just can’t talk to my parents. I don’t want to burden them with my problems and feelings. They have so much pain of their own. I just can’t bring myself to do that, but I felt like I had no one to talk to.’ In another case, a young man reported walking in his homeland and finding himself in the middle of a massacre, engulfed by horses and cavalry. He saw old Indian women and children huddled against the river bank and trying to shield them­selves from the sabers and the bullets. When he shared this vision with some of the elders of his community, they informed him that a massacre had oc­curred over a hundred years ago on that very spot.”

Pre-Columbian Family Systems

“Because neither do you understand us, nor do we understand you. And we do not know what it is that you want. You have deprived us of our good order and way of govern­ment, and the one with which you have replaced it we do not understand.”

• collective liability: group behavioral sanctions used for regulation
• reliance and understanding of relationship, not role units; a role system is a distortion, and relationships lead to activities and actions which are associated to them
• problems existed before genocide, but genocide caused disruption and replacement of traditional resolution systems by foreign, dysfunctional systems or no symptoms
• systematic destruction of many initiation ceremonies with healthy developmental practices

Healing Approaches

• Western psychology and social service intervention are insufficient to assist Native American healing
  • “intellectual colonization” persists in representation
• “theories” applied by public and Native Health Service officials for sociocultural, behavioral, and disease analyses: non-neutral assessments that assume based on erroneous, “realistic” representations in history
  • “realism” is Eurocentric; non-Western cultures are “unrealistic” under the hegemony of colonialism and American ideology and is used to describe “neutrality” by disavowing non-Western cultural practice
  • western methodology is incompatible with complete Native life and pathology; “epistemic violence” and rewriting of traditional, cultural understanding
  • anthropology and empirical research is based on “the illusion of objectivity with a transhistorical, transcultural orientation”
  • a priori operandi: essentialist Cartesian model of a unified, rational, autonomous subject; objectification of a family and the deprivation of material history and context
• exposure to Western therapy is not enough; extracultural adoption disrupts history, culture, class
  • rootless, unvalued thought; suicide rate is est. twice of Native Americans on reservation
  • destructive practice; 1975 advisement against by American Academy of Child Psychiatry; “robs of cultural heritage; adult life of estrangement from both worlds”
  • Indian Child Welfare Act threatened by Congress; disruption of cultural diversity
• Native American epistemology metaphors for intervention; postcolonial practice with indigenous and Euro-American models of therapy blended; hybrid therapy and postcolonial thought
  • indigenous interventions
  • critical orientation to scholarship, practice, representation, and marginalized contribution
  • not the logic of equivalence (A:non-A) but the logic of difference (A:B); celebrate, not compare diversity

Hybrid Therapy

• “community clinic” model
• hybrid Western and Native treatment/epistemological systems; Western-trained and traditional Native American healers and psychotherapists
• bicultural approach
  • historical inclusion which acknowledges roots of psychology
  • internalized oppression, adoption of negative stereotypes, self-reimagination
  • mutualistic sincere respect and appreciation between healers; healers follow traditional and modern forms and believe in both approaches
    • otherwise caricature vision
• insight-oriented treatment; dream therapy intervention
  • Jungian approaches integrated with Native American therapeutic modalities
  • hybrid therapy eases implementation of other modalities besides Jungian: cognitive behavioral, behavioral, client-centered, psychoanalytic, addictions
    • Western therapies become effective due to inclusivity of hybrid therapy

1. Family referral by a community agency or direct contact to a traditional provider or psychologist
2. Traditional assessment and conference with other providers towards mental health functioning, level of acculturation, spiritual functioning, general health
3. Psychotherapy and traditional ceremony blend
   1. Medicinal needs referred to traditional belief medicine if possible; tribal-specific, and if unavailable, generalized traditional intervention
   2. Education by medicine people in intervention; reconnect to tradition and make sense of the world from traditional view vs. acculturated view
4. Evaluation and recommendation for ongoing therapy or ceremony

Communal Healing Rituals

• group treatment model

• Lakota

  • traditional communal memorialization of historical trauma and mental suffering via Tatanka Iyotake and Wokiksuye Ride, tracing Hunkpapa and Miniconju massacre at Wounded Knee
  • catharsis, abreaction, group sharing, testimony, traditional expression, ritual, communal mourning; refusal of forgetting

• education of historical trauma → awareness of trauma, impact, effects → catharsis when shared

  • ability to heal and mourn together; reduced grief, growth of group identity and dedication to healing and constructive development

• culturally syntonic grief resolution and healing intervention model

• congruent with Nazi Holocaust survivor and children model

• restorative factors: sharing experiences, providing hope, collective mourning, social support

• bonding via common traumatic experience and mutual identification

• self-determination and cultural revitalization vs. assimilation or segregationist alternatives

• determination of subjectivity rejected; self-determination and choice of identity based on culture and tradition of community and family structures

• discontinued rejection of adoption of pathologized self, further education