Transcultural Psychiatry 2014, Vol. 51(3) 370–386 !

The Author(s) 2014

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DOI: 10.1177/1363461513487671 tps.sagepub.com

Article

Healing history? Aboriginal healing,

historical trauma, and personal
responsibility
James B. Waldram
University of Saskatchewan

Abstract
What can an exploration of contemporary Aboriginal healing programs such as those
offered in Canadian prisons and urban clinics tell us about the importance of history in
understanding social and psychological pathology, and more significantly the salience of
the concept of “historical trauma”? The form of Aboriginal “healing” that has emerged
in recent decades to become dominant in many parts of the country is itself a reflection
of historical processes and efforts to ameliorate the consequences of what is today
often termed “historical trauma.” In other words, contemporary notions of “healing”
and the social, cultural, medical, and psychological disruption and distress caused by
colonialism and captured in the term “historical trauma” have coevolved in an inter-
dependent manner. I also argue that there is a tension between the attribution of this
distress to both specific (e.g., residential schools) and generalized (e.g., colonialism)
historical factors, as evident in the “historical trauma” concept, and the prevailing
emphasis in many healing programs to encourage the individual to take personal respon-
sibility for their situation and avoid attributing blame to other factors. I conclude that
“historical trauma” represents an idiom of distress that captures a variety of historical
and contemporary phenomena and which provides a language for expressing distress
that is gaining currency, at least among scholars, and that the contemporary Aboriginal
healing movement represents an effort to deal with the absence or failure of both
“traditional” Aboriginal healing and government-sponsored medical and psychological
services to adequately deal with this distress of colonialism.

Keywords
Aboriginal peoples, healing, historical trauma, idioms of distress, mental health

Corresponding author:
James B. Waldram, Department of Psychology, University of Saskatchewan, 9 Campus Dr., Saskatoon, SK, S7N
5A5, Canada.
Email: j.waldram@usask.ca

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Waldram 371

We are sitting in a circle, about 15 men in total, half Aboriginal. Today, the men in
this federal prison unit are expected to “disclose” the story of their life and crimes.
This is not a simple autobiography, however, as there is a distinct form to the
narratives to be told, and a corresponding officially sanctioned content that is
expected (Waldram, 2012). This unit is for men with particularly aggressive behav-
ior who have proven hard to manage in their home penitentiaries and resistant to
treatment. Open disclosure is not their strong suit, and they have learned over
many years in prison the importance of keeping one’s own counsel as a means
of remaining safe. But here, they are required to tell “all.”
An Aboriginal inmate is called upon today to disclose. This is the first step in
what forensic professionals hope will be the path to rehabilitation. He starts by
telling us about his childhood, life on the reserve, and the problems with poverty,
alcohol, and drugs that were endemic. He continues by explaining that these prob-
lems, of which he is a “victim” (his words), have been caused by the government,
which stole his people’s land, forced them to live on reserves, and starved them.
“That’s an ‘outside issue,’” declares one therapist. The meaning of an “outside
issue” has already been explained in the unit’s orientation to treatment. It means an
issue over which the inmate has no control, and therefore is not amenable to
treatment. It is not a “dynamic” factor that the inmate can work on to improve
his well-being and decrease his criminality. “That’s history, in the past,” continues
the therapist. “History didn’t make you do these crimes. You did.” Chastised, the
inmate weakly tries to explain that this history is important to understanding his
crimes, but he is interrupted by several non-Aboriginal inmates, who, mimicking
the therapeutic program language that they are learning, accuse him of justifying
his actions. “History is just a cognitive distortion,” declares one. Frustrated and
thwarted, the inmate sits back down, refusing to continue with his story.
A few days later I am attending a sacred circle held in the Aboriginal program
center in the same prison, conducted by an Elder who has been contracted to
deliver spiritual services to the Aboriginal inmates. The inmates sit quietly in a
circle, relaxed, quite a contrast to the raucous nature of the mainstream group
therapy sessions. The Elder speaks for a few moments about an aspect of his
life, sharing a story of his drinking days and how it affected his family and com-
munity. He then asks if the inmates want to say anything. As we go around the
circle several speak up. When it comes to the inmate I have described above, he
starts to explain his story in similar terms as he had done in the therapy group. He
describes life on his reserve, the poverty and drinking, the violence, and relates
these to the government theft of his people’s land and the reserve system. Everyone
is quiet, and there are no interruptions with the exception of quiet utterances of
support and agreement. “Hau.” “Hey hey.” When he and the others are done and
the session is coming to a close, the Elder offers a “teaching.” He tells the men that
the history of what was done to Aboriginal peoples is important, that it explains
many of the current problems that the inmates have experienced. It must not
be forgotten. This history provides a framework for understanding alcohol
abuse, violence, and criminality, because this is not the “natural” disposition of

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372 Transcultural Psychiatry 51(3)

Aboriginal people. It is “not our way” he emphasizes. It has been caused by gov-
ernment and settlers and their policies and thievery. So don’t feel bad, because you
are not bad, he explains. You were made bad. Our people were not like this before.
The residential schools killed our spirit, and we must get it back, he relates quietly.
But, he adds, pausing for effect, you cannot blame others for your actions. You did
the crime, and only you, and you must take responsibility for that. “Warriors take
responsibility,” he emphasizes, “They make things right. They don’t blame.” The
room is dead quiet, every man hanging on these words as the Elder concludes.
“Hey hey,” the men respond softly, nodding their heads solemnly.
Let’s make sense of these two contrasting sessions. In the mainstream session,
appeals to history are viewed as an attempt to justify criminal actions, as a form of
cognitive distortion within the cognitive behavioral model of forensic treatment
(Waldram, 2012). Such appeals are routinely rejected in favour of an interpretation
of criminality as the product of an agentive individual who “chooses” to commit
crimes. In the Aboriginal session, historical explanation is central, yet here too, in
the end the lesson is the same: take responsibility for your actions, don’t blame
others. In my work on Aboriginal healing programs in prisons (Waldram, 1997),
I documented how the Aboriginal approach seemed to be more effective in com-
municating this message in a way that resonated with Aboriginal inmates. Why?
For these Aboriginal inmates, to discount the history of their people is to discount
them personally. When historical issues are raised and summarily rejected, many
Aboriginal men shut down, passively refusing to engage with the mainstream
programming.
What can an exploration of contemporary Aboriginal healing programs such as
those offered in prisons tell us about the importance of history in understanding
social and psychological pathology, and more significantly the salience of the con-
cept of “historical trauma”? In this article, I weave together three arguments. First,
I suggest that the form of Aboriginal “healing” that has emerged in recent decades
to become dominant in many parts of the country is itself a reflection of historical
processes and efforts to ameliorate the consequences of what is today often termed
“historical trauma.” The reason for this, in my view, is that “healing” of “historical
trauma” has, for these same historical reasons, emerged as one of the key areas in
which appeals to Aboriginal culture, spirituality, and tradition carry some currency
with Aboriginal as well as non Aboriginal peoples (including government agencies
which fund healing programs). I am proposing that “healing” and “historical
trauma,” despite emerging at somewhat different historical moments, have more
recently continued to evolve in a relational manner. In other words, contemporary
notions of “healing” are designed to ameliorate “historical trauma,” and “histor-
ical trauma” exists as an emerging idiom to allow for healing.
In my second argument, I explore the tension between attribution of social,
cultural, and psychological distress to both specific (e.g., residential schools) and
general (e.g., colonialism) historical factors, as evident in the “historical trauma”
concept, and the prevailing emphasis in many healing programs to encourage the
individual to take personal responsibility for both their situation and their healing

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Waldram 373

while avoiding external attribution. While historical forces are acknowledged as the
root cause of much pathology, in these programs “historical trauma” discourse per
se is often absent and personal agency is stressed.
Finally, in my third argument, I explore how “historical trauma” has emerged
not only as a framework to explain contemporary social suffering among
Aboriginal peoples, but also as an idiom of distress (Nichter, 1981) that connects
the individual to the social, the cultural, and the historical simultaneously and in a
manner that both explains contemporary pathology and situates it strategically
along a continuum of agency that allows for healing despite the on-going presence
of colonial risk factors. Further, it is an idiom that must be learned, often actively,
as part of the broader emphasis on teaching individuals how to heal.

Aboriginal healing in contemporary perspective

Contemporary Aboriginal “healing” looks very different from it did in the earlier
eras of colonization. Indeed, there is considerable historical evidence that demon-
strates that Aboriginal healing activities—perhaps better thought of as “medi-
cine”—were once much more public and secular than they are now, more
comprehensive, and perhaps even more focussed on “medical” conditions than
on psychosocial distress. This is not to suggest that ritual and spirituality were
not important; rather, it appears as though these therapeutic elements were less
dominant than they are now, as a result of a decline in the treatment of medical
conditions.
We do not need to look too far into the past to find good evidence of the nature
of these medical systems. Vogel (1970) provided an excellent overview which dem-
onstrates both surgical techniques and pharmacological sophistication, the latter
echoed also in the work of Moerman (1986, 1995). As Vogel suggested, there was a
period in the history of colonial North America when Aboriginal medicine was
more readily available and perhaps more effective than that available to colonists
from their own professional, and more frequently lay, treatment providers. Herbal
doctors were particularly valued by Aboriginal and settler alike. There were, of
course, complex systems of sickness etiology at work here, and treatments typically
involved ritual and ceremony, and other therapeutic techniques such as the use of
the sweat lodge. Manual manipulation was also practiced; for instance, bone set-
ting was common, and sucking doctors were often engaged to remove pathologies
from sick bodies. Admittedly some aspects of treatment, often taught matter-of-
factly from healer to apprentice and, occasionally, shown to non-Aboriginal people
(e.g., Mandelbaum, 1979), were in turn often disparaged by settlers as somewhat
fraudulent, leading to suggestions by observers that shamans and other healers
were charlatans duping their patients; similarly, recourse to spirits in healing was
seen as evidence of heathenism (Waldram, Herring, & Young, 2006). But what
both Aboriginal and settler patients sought was essentially the same—a cure for
their ailments—even if their understanding of the means by which this was attained
differed. Aboriginal healing in this era appears to have been significantly focused

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374 Transcultural Psychiatry 51(3)

on restorative or curative processes, that is, the removal of pathology and the
return of the patient to a normalized, presickness condition (Waldram, 2013).
One product of colonialism was that Aboriginal medical systems were placed
under threat by church and government (Waldram et al., 2006). But the target of
these oppressive efforts was not typically the medical or therapeutic aspects, but
rather the ritual and spiritual aspects. Church and government did not set out to
destroy Aboriginal medicine per se; these institutions set out to destroy Aboriginal
spirituality and, more broadly, Aboriginal culture, as part of a program of assimi-
lation. This, of course, is where the reserve system comes in, especially in western
Canada, with the restrictions placed on individual travel to thwart both political
organizing and spiritual promulgation. The residential school system augmented
the reserve system in its assimilationist goals, and the individual abuses that were
suffered there by some of the students are no longer a matter for conjecture and
remain a black mark on the Canadian state’s on-going and turbulent relationship
with Aboriginal peoples (Miller, 1996). Together, church and state forced cultural
changes that proved in many ways irreversible, and set in motion those events and
experiences that have led many to the formulation now under consideration here:
historical trauma.
With the ceremonial aspects of Aboriginal medicine teetering, beginning in the
1960s the federal government began to develop more formal medical services for
Aboriginal people, and especially registered Indians and Inuit (with the Métis being
relegated to the provinces for medical services) (Waldram et al., 2006). Slowly,
nursing and health stations were opened in Aboriginal communities, with doctors
and other specialists often rotating through, and provisions made for patients to
access non-Aboriginal health facilities or to be transported to urban centres for
more sophisticated treatment. Access to pharmaceuticals and over-the-counter
medications increased correspondingly. While this medical system still leaves
much to be desired even today, the point here is that as these services expanded,
there was a continuing decline in the utilization of the traditional Aboriginal med-
ical services. Modern pharmaceuticals came to replace traditional plant medicines,
community nursing stations and clinics became overwhelmed with patient demand,
and hospital-based diagnostic and surgical services became the preferred standard
of care, so much so that unequal and relatively poor access to biomedical services
remains a hot political topic in discussion among Aboriginal and state govern-
ments. Aboriginal people today demand—quite rightly—full and equal access to
biomedical services, and not to sucking doctors, because scientifically derived bio-
medical services are, simply put, better at treating most of the medical conditions
that affect Aboriginal people. Add to these changes the legacy of previous church
and government efforts to assimilate Aboriginal people, and we see a decline in
Aboriginal medical and spiritual expertise to the extent that by the end of the 20th
century there were Aboriginal communities with little or no significant traditional
medical knowledge or spiritual expertise and no practitioners beyond the domestic
sphere (e.g., parents treating sick children with spruce gum for colds while at
traplines).

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Waldram 375

Aboriginal medicine did not so much disappear, however, as it transitioned into

what is now known as “healing.” The appeal of healing is its on-going connection
to the past, to its “traditionality,” that is, to an ill-defined era in which Aboriginal
“culture” is assumed to have been intact, integrated, functional, and even thera-
peutic. In a parallel development, a continental zeitgeist emerged from the 1960s
emphasizing holism and personal spirituality as the means toward health, balance,
and self-fulfillment. Aboriginal, and especially American Indian, philosophy and
knowledge were tapped (at least in theory, if we set aside issues of fraud) in the
emergence of “New Age” thinking; several influential works were produced that
celebrated alleged Aboriginal spirituality and approaches to healing (e.g., Carlos
Castenada, Black Elk, Ed McGaa Eagle Man, Hyemeyohsts Storm, Rolling
Thunder, Lynn Andrews) that were embraced by a segment of the non-
Aboriginal population. A conflation of ideas ensued. For instance, echoing these
New Age sentiments, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996, p. 348)
defined “traditional healing” “as practices designed to promote mental, physical
and spiritual well-being that are based on beliefs which go back to the time before
the spread of western ‘scientific’ biomedicine.” This does not exclude on-going use
of “herbal medicines and other remedies” (e.g., Uprety, Asselin, Dhakal, & Julien,
2012), but my argument here is that these elements were progressively circum-
scribed for the reasons explained above, leading to the accentuation of “the pro-
motion of psychological and spiritual well-being using ceremony, counselling and
the accumulated wisdom of elders,” (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples,
1996, p. 348) which together constitute what I believe is the meaning of “healing”
today. But the catalyst for this contemporary form of healing was not solely
endogenous: the spark came when, as a result of a shift in the political landscape
and zeitgeist, things “Aboriginal” started to take on an increased salience, espe-
cially to the government and social service sector. Efforts to destroy or simply
ignore Aboriginal cultural traditions gave way to efforts to utilize these traditions
in therapeutic as well as commercial contexts.
Aboriginal healing gained considerable currency throughout the 1980s and into
the 1990s, as hospitals and clinics started to accommodate traditional services,
Aboriginal organizations demanded, and obtained, more direct control over
health care delivery, alcohol and substance-abuse programs opened across
Canada that invoked Aboriginal culture and spirituality as core elements of the
therapeutic process, and of course the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
crossed the country, leading to such important outcomes as the Aboriginal Healing
Foundation. Aboriginal healing even gained a foothold in penitentiaries, tellingly
not at first as healing modalities but as spiritual or religious practice (Waldram,
1997). These services focused on the psychosocial aspect of the therapeutic process
however, and for a variety of both legal and pragmatic reasons, the use of traditional
herbal medicines and other medical practices remained circumscribed. It became
politically and legally expedient to practice a form of healing that was focused on
psychotherapeutics involving an emphasis on cultural revitalization. Even some
healers who continued to use traditional plant medicines tended to keep this part

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376 Transcultural Psychiatry 51(3)

of their practice quiet for fear of scrutiny from legal authorities and professional
medical associations. The bottom line here is that the field of psychotherapeutics for
Aboriginal people today is not dominated by the therapeutic systems of the colonizer
the way biomedical services are; as a result, Aboriginal therapeutic practice has
shifted emphasis to an engagement with patients that concentrates on forms of
psychological, spiritual, and cultural counselling and therapy.
The psychosocial practices to which I refer take many different forms, and
include direct counselling involving healers and Elders, forms of group therapy
through “sacred circles,” certain ritualistic modalities such as the sweat lodge,
and programs of cultural revitalization such as “bush therapy,” where troubled
individuals are taken into remote areas for extended periods to undergo instruction
on ways to live off the land and the values inherent in traditional Aboriginal soci-
ality. It is here that various historical forces combined to create a new, contem-
porary form of “healing.” Specifically, the loss of culture and spirituality caused by
the actions and inactions of government and church, the economic marginality
caused by the Indian Act and the reserve system, the increasing rates of “social
pathologies” such as low education and high unemployment, combined with the
usurpation of medical services by the biomedical system, lead to the promotion of
the idea that “culture” is inherently therapeutic (Brady, 1995; Gone & Calf
Looking, 2011). The problems of contemporary Aboriginal people were related
to the “loss” of culture and a simultaneous rejection of full assimilation by a
dominant society which sought to keep Aboriginal people marginalized.
Therapeutic approaches that emphasized a return to Aboriginal “culture” emerged.
“Culture is treatment” (Brady, 1995), it was suggested, and therapy came to involve
education in certain aspects of culture. Aboriginal healing today, then, is as much
about cultural education, restoration, promotion, and protection as it is about
therapeutic process. But “culture,” here, was not and is not envisioned anthropo-
logically, as the shared cognitive mechanism for the negotiation of life in one’s
social world, but rather more narrowly as sets of specific practices, values, and
beliefs, primarily spiritual in orientation, and often reflective of contemporary
Plains or pan-Indian traditions. This is not an understanding of culture that is
easily reconciled with the contemporary realities of a culturally and socially diverse
Aboriginal population, and generalizations and essentialisms have inevitably come
to dominate.
Yet if the psychosocial and cultural issues faced by Aboriginal peoples, those
that are most often included under the umbrella of “historical trauma,” are indeed
the product of historical forces related to colonization, and if those forces remain in
play (as commentators tend to suggest, and even in a “postcolonial” context; see
Duran & Duran, 1995), what is the point of treatment? How is any kind of treat-
ment possible? The answer to this ontological dilemma is largely a discursive one:
the idea of “healing” shifts from one focussed on restorative or curative outcomes
to one focused on transformation (Waldram, 2013).
Some of the best evidence to support this argument comes from an examination
of healing programs developed with the support of the Aboriginal Healing

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Waldram 377

Foundation (Waldram, 2008). Five programs across Canada were studied utilizing
a common methodology, with the intent to determine the models and meanings of
healing invoked in actual healing programs working with complex patient bases (as
opposed to developing an understanding based primarily on rhetoric). What
emerged was a metaphorical view of healing as a journey, a difficult journey for
sure in which roadblocks, detours, and “falling off the Red Road” or the “Road to
Wellness” was to be expected. And while the journey has a direction, it lacks a true
final destination. Individuals can only be on the healing journey; one never com-
pletes it. Healing is a process, not an event. As one healing program administrator
in northern Manitoba stated, “We are moving towards the paving of the Red Road
to Wellness” (Gone, 2008, p. 155). The tentativeness is no doubt deliberate: to
complete the healing journey would be to suggest that a “cure” is possible, yet
talk of “cure” is rarely heard in these programs. The analogy to addictions pro-
grams is evident, and indeed there may be some program drift involved from
Alcoholics Anonymous and other similar programs popular with many
Aboriginal people that emphasize that one is never cured and therefore must be
ever vigilant. Even the wheel metaphor of the “Medicine Wheel,” a common elem-
ent of many Aboriginal healing programs, suggests an on-going journey without a
specific, fixed destination.
The healing journey involves the reparation of damages caused by colonial
processes in a way that accentuates both individual agency and collective respon-
sibility. Individuals cannot be forced to “heal.”1 They must make the decision to
undertake the healing journey themselves, take responsibility for their actions,
and seek to repair the social relationships that have been damaged by their self-
centered and destructive behaviors. They are aided on their journey by Elders
and healers, and often others who are on their own healing journeys, especially
family members but also those who occupy similar social positions, such as fellow
prison inmates. But while the focus is on the individual to engage the healing
process and make amends, their situation is placed firmly within the colonial
context. History is not denied; rather, history helps individuals understand
their circumstances, how they came to be damaged, and why their healing jour-
ney must involve a reconnection with family and culture. History also helps them
understand why there is no cure, why the healing journey is never complete: the
legacy of the historical processes of oppression remains as threats to personal and
collective well-being. And this is why the idea of “historical trauma” has reson-
ance today. It is an explanatory framework that places the plight of the individ-
ual within the collective, and the collective within historical processes that still
remain in force. It allows for some external attribution while emphasizing per-
sonal responsibility. This is an idiom of distress that has harmonized with chan-
ging notions of “healing” in Aboriginal Canada: the problem and its treatment,
merging and evolving together.
As Gone (2008, p. 189) noted, individual responsibility remains a core element
of Aboriginal healing even where the impact of historical processes is

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378 Transcultural Psychiatry 51(3)

acknowledged. In the northern Manitoba centre he studied, “therapeutic relief was

obtained through disclosure. . . the release of painful emotional burdens through
the acknowledgement and confession of past ordeals. . . and the resultant emotional
catharsis.” This process of responsibility-taking is compatible with the prison heal-
ing programs described earlier, and is not incompatible with traditional views
regarding the need for individuals to confess spiritual or social transgressions
when illness or misfortune strikes the community or family. Indeed, taking per-
sonal responsibility for past transgressions that have resulted in illness or distress
appears to be a core cultural trait of many Aboriginal societies that possibly pre-
dates colonization (Hallowell, 1963; Waldram et al., 2006.). It also reinforces the
point that, while history provides the broad sweep of explanation, lives lived daily
in the shadow of risk factors require individual, proactive attention and action and
not blame.
Personal responsibility was also central to the use of the Medicine Wheel at
Building a Nation, a now defunct healing centre in Saskatoon.2 “The Medicine
Wheel shows. . . personal responsibility, and personal responsibility is making the
right choices,” explained a therapist (Waldram, Innes, Kaweski, & Redman, 2008,
p. 224). He continued: “The right choices meaning the right choices for what is
right for us as individuals. What choice might be right for me might not be right for
the next person.” But this individualistic approach also emphasizes the importance
of sociality; as part of their healing, individuals are encouraged to determine who
their actions have harmed, make amends, and rejoin the family and community.
It is in their hyper-individualistic, hedonistic behavior that the problem lies. They
need to reconnect and learn to be responsible for themselves and to others, and to
learn self-control.
But where is the role of history here? It is still evident. One client at Building a
Nation explained:

I’m going to be dealing with my healing for the rest of my life . . . because there’s
always going to be something that’s going to trigger . . . something from my past.
And how to deal with that? And being able to come here and talk to other people
about my own experiences and about how to deal with it, some of the negativity and
all this stuff that happened to me, you know, at the residential school and what went
on in foster care. You know, how it shaped my well-being, my persona physically,
you know? No, there’s no way [that a person is ever completely healed], not
with the psychological damage, emotional damage, the physical damage, and with
any spiritual damage that’s done to you. Because it’s still there. (Waldram et al.,
2008, p. 253)

Here, the effects of history are individualized, and this individual client recognized
that he is responsible for his healing. While history impacts both the collectivity
and the individual, healing seems more to be about individual experience in his-
torical context, perhaps because the history is beyond the control of both the

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Waldram 379

individual and the collective. And blame is to be avoided. “Some of the challenges
I have to deal with [are] when I look at my childhood and what happened to me,”
explained another client,

and not putting blame on my parents for what happened to me. And not saying to
myself that I was a victim, but that I was at the wrong place at the wrong time. . . I can
forgive them but I’ll never forget.

So history remains important, but something to transcend through healing. “For

me to heal is to accept the things that happened in my past, the things around me,
and go on from there. . . You can’t change it [the past], it has already happened, so
learn from it. . .” explained a client at Building a Nation. Another client expressed
the same sentiment: “Healing to me is. . . dealing with your past and. . . instead of
looking at the bad, you’re moving forward.” Reconnecting to family is essential
to healing: “Healing is [repairing] all those disconnections that we have because of
residential school, alcohol, drugs.”
The past here is individualized and is expressed in personal terms even while
there is implicit acknowledgement of underlying historical processes. These pro-
cesses themselves tend to distill into concerns about identity as much as or more so
than trauma. “Healing to me is understanding who you are,” stated one Building a
Nation client, “rediscovering who you are as Aboriginal people” because this indi-
vidual and collective sense of identity was seriously damaged. Aboriginal spiritu-
ality plays a pivotal role in this reparation of identity because it speaks not just to
religious contentment but also to broader notions—often generalized across
many First Nations—of what Aboriginal “culture” was once before, and could
yet again be.

“Historical trauma” as an idiom of distress

Like any idiom, historical trauma must be learned. The “work of culture,”
Obeysekere (1985) reminded us, involves the corralling of disparate affects and
somatic sensations around a more coherent idiom, and even a specific syndrome
or disorder. The idiom of historical trauma provides a succinct means of capturing
the essence of a very long period of historical change—some of which was indeed
traumatic—in combination with contemporary social suffering (Adelson, 2008) in a
manner that diverts attention from individual fallibility. It even allows those who
have a weak or dubious claim to specific traumatizing experiences to nonetheless
lay claim to an emerging ingredient of contemporary Aboriginal identity. But, as
contemporary culture theorists also remind us, we are not all evenly exposed to nor
internalize all that we are exposed to through cultural processes. The idea of “his-
torical trauma” does not resonate evenly with Aboriginal people. Flashing back to
the mid-1990s, when the idea of “residential school syndrome” was being popular-
ized and lawyers were signing up clients to class action suits, arguments in my
Native Studies classes frequently erupted over the existence of this so-called

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380 Transcultural Psychiatry 51(3)

syndrome. The gist of the argument was this: while some people were indeed abused
at residential schools and therefore entitled to compensation, many more were
claiming to have been victims of abuse that were not. Further, in reference to
what would become known as the “intergenerational” transmission of the
trauma, it was suggested that some “victims” were claiming to be traumatized by
virtue of distant and somewhat disingenuous connections to those who had been in
the schools.
In my prison healing research, as noted above, some reference to collective
historical factors by inmates was commonplace though somewhat vague.
“We are just an oppressed people right now,” said one inmate (Waldram, 1997,
p. 63). But while I employed the concept of “trauma” to explain the life experiences
of many inmates, they themselves rarely invoked the concept or spoke of historical
factors in other than these very general terms. Not surprisingly, most of the nar-
ratives of trauma were very individualized. “[My parents] used to fight a lot,”
disclosed one inmate,

[My father] was always angry about something. We were scared to walk by him . . .
we’d get punished. That’s the lifestyle we lived. Fear of getting hit for nothing. And
scared if you moved the wrong way while we’re watching TV. (Waldram, 1997, p. 48)

“Our foster father, he was sexually assaulting my sister all the time,” explained
another inmate (p. 51). “I tried to fight him a few times, so I’d get beaten up so bad
I couldn’t even go to school.” Foster placement and residential school experiences
were detailed, along with terrible experiences in the individual’s homes and com-
munity, which occasionally referenced the intergenerational nature of something
that could be thought of as historical trauma. “I am a product of my environment,”
declared an inmate,

I learned violence and everything at home, and I just carried it on when I got older. . .
And the cycle continues. I end up in jail, and if I didn’t stop and realize what I was
doing, then my kids would end up like me. (p. 55)

At Building a Nation, as we saw, this characteristically eclectic group of urban

Aboriginal clients also thought of history only in the most general terms, and
likewise did not invoke metaphors of trauma to explain the impact of colonial
and state processes, despite detailing experiences which could be seen as traumatiz-
ing. Healing is highly individualized: while placed in historic context, the individual
alone is responsible for repairing his or her life.
Fast forward now, and in a recent Saskatchewan study (Dickson, 2011), few
Aboriginal postsecondary students demonstrated awareness of the term “historical
trauma,” and when requested to detail those factors that they believed negatively
affected their ability to attend and be successful at university, few made reference to
historical processes of colonialism or residential schools, instead referring to more
immediate issues such as lack of family support and finances. While the idiom

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resonated with and was embraced by some, especially after being informed about it
by the researchers, others viewed the matter more as one of political and financial
expediency. That is, the “symptoms” of “historical trauma” appeared as the prod-
uct of social structural inequalities which, while having historical roots, were
much more contemporary in their manifestation and impact (cf. Whitbeck,
Adams, Hoyt, & Chen, 2004).
Yet we now hear frequently about historical trauma, and it has become a popu-
lar topic in Aboriginal mental health research (Kirmayer, Brass, & Valaskakis,
2009).This raises awkward questions: are Aboriginal people today being taught
how to be traumatized, or to express personal distress, in a new way—the product
of specific historical forces—as a result of lawsuits, royal commissions, truth and
reconciliation commissions, and the emergence into popular, national conscience of
the fact that some serious harms were done at the hands of church and state? Has
the actual pain and suffering caused been repressed? Does it need to be recalled
through the therapeutic process of healing? Are many Aboriginal people ignorant
of these historical processes, or in denial about their impact? Is there value—and
risk—in attempting to frame current social and psychological pathologies within
the context of an idiom of historical trauma that assumes that people should be
taught that they have it even if they feel fine? Is it appropriate to force the “work of
culture?” I recall attending a workshop on the impact of residential schools where,
after several painful narratives of abuses were shared, one woman stood and
declared “I used to think my experiences were positive, but now I realize I am in
denial.” And what of those Aboriginal people who had positive experiences in
residential schools, foster homes, or in adoption into non-Aboriginal families,
and who are afraid to relate such experiences because of the dominance of the
trauma narrative (Swidrovich, 2004)?
The idea that Aboriginal people need to be educated about their experiences of
trauma—even when they deny such experiences—is advocated in some of the lit-
erature. Wesley-Esquimaux and Smolewski (2004, p. 1), for instance, noted that it
is important “to remind people that Indigenous social and cultural devastation in
the present is the result of unremitting personal and collective trauma due to
demographic collapse” as a result of “infectious diseases, conquest, warfare, slav-
ery, colonization, proselytization, famine and starvation.” Duran and Duran
(1995) and Duran, Duran, Brave Heart, and Yellow Horse-Davis (1998) intro-
duced the notion of a “soul wound” caused by historical processes, a concept
infused with Jungian psychology which postulated an “unresolved” trauma and
grief response. Brave Heart and DeBruyn (1998, p. 68), in turn, suggested that
contemporary Aboriginal peoples “have a pervasive sense of pain from what hap-
pened to their ancestors and incomplete mourning of those losses.” Brave Heart
(1998) also advocated for workshops to teach people about the trauma experienced
by their ancestors, to “stimulate. . . traumatic memories” of events they could not
have possibly experienced, on the premise that these memories remain somehow
buried in the subconscious, passed down through the generations, and “unre-
solved.” Such a psychoanalytic perspective leaves much to be desired for many

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382 Transcultural Psychiatry 51(3)

reasons, including the suggestion that memories are transmitted via DNA (or by
some parallel “soul” inheritance).
This is not to say that historical processes are not partially, even substantially,
responsible for current sociopsychological distress, and I agree completely with
Wesley-Esquimaux and Smolewski’s (2004, p. 5) assertion that “the historical
experiences of First Nations people, which disrupted the process of Aboriginal
cultural identity formation, continue to resonate in the present, and that the
harm done in the past continues to manifest intergenerationally into the present.”
But I am less convinced of their firm assertion that “There is no doubt that the way
Aboriginal people remember [emphasis added] their past and interpret [emphasis
added] those events as individuals and as a people contributes to contemporary
social problems in Aboriginal communities” (p. 51), especially the emphasis on
memories of trauma and abuse. I am not certain much memory work is involved,
and the research by me and my students suggests that the engagement with histor-
ical processes may be less florid than these authors would have us believe. I do not
question the role that oppression, discrimination, and abuse play in contemporary
“cultural and social dysfunction” (p. 51), but I do question the latent psychoana-
lytical premise that links this dysfunction to manifest or latent memories of abuse
effects. Our research suggests that the abuse was very personal and immediate, and
that individuals tend to speak of the problems of the past with reference to per-
sonal, not historic, experience, barring broad references to residential schools and
the like. Aboriginal people engaged in healing programs, where the understanding
of these relevant historical processes is most acute, do not seem to recite the his-
torical trauma narrative in any measure unless educated to do so. Possibly, of
course, the idiom of historical trauma provides a language through which to
express personal experience—precisely the “work of culture”—and is therefore
therapeutic, but it remains unclear if the idiom is serving the distress or creating it.

Conclusion
Historical trauma represents a powerful metaphorical idiom of distress that points
the finger of blame at current and past governments and social movements, and
away from the individual. In contrast to what the Elder in my prison research was
suggesting, that history is important but you alone are responsible, the current
trend seems to be one of creating and sustaining a class of individuals who can
lay claim, rightly or wrongly, to historical trauma as the explanation for personal
distress. The intergenerational aspects are embedded in the process and the logic is
simple: until colonialism is reversed, and the colonizer leaves, there will always be
historical trauma. And since the colonizer shows no signs of ever leaving,
Aboriginal “healing” must be transformative in nature, rather than restorative.
Healing must accommodate a future of coexistence among the individual patient,
his or her collective group, and the contemporized historical forces that exist in the
form of racism, discrimination, low levels of education, poor health care infrastruc-
ture, and so on.

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Waldram 383

Idioms such as historical trauma emerge, expand, and are sustained because they
resonate with many people who identify with shared experiences, regardless of
what commentators such as me think. In this sense, historical trauma is, or will
become, as real as any idiom of distress. But we do not yet know just how wide-
spread it has become among sufferers, and to date it possibly remains more vivid
within the purview of scholars, therapists, and political commentators, and elem-
ental to national events such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And
this is not to say that it represents a unique disorder, either, as this is a separate
question and one which, I think, cannot yet be answered with available data and
psychiatric frameworks.
But as the idiom of historical trauma continues to gain popularity, tension
remains. Aboriginal healing today reflects an amalgam of influences, such as lib-
eralism, Christianity, Alcoholics Anonymous, New Age philosophy, and
“invented” pan-Indian “tradition” along with cultural knowledge carried forward
from the past and that shared across cultural distances. The approach in much
contemporary Aboriginal healing is, by necessity, eclectic, and emphasizes personal
agency. Yet other, more overtly political, forces are bringing into play notions of
collective and intergenerational trauma, and laying blame at the feet of historical
processes in which one party is clearly guilty of harming the other. Here the idiom
of historical trauma becomes problematic: if traumatization continues to emerge as
a signifier of Aboriginality, the validity of the parallel and popular notion of resili-
ence among Aboriginal people (Tousignant & Sioui, 2009) also becomes problem-
atic. Can a traumatized people also be a resilient people? Denham (2008) suggested
that these are not necessarily mutually exclusive statuses, and that the proof of
historical trauma should not require evidence of a pathological response. But with-
out such a response, the concept becomes potentially too diluted to be analytically
meaningful. In previous work, I noted the tendency of researchers to assume faulty
methods and concepts when Aboriginal communities displayed relatively low rates
of posttraumatic stress disorder, rather than exploring more meaningfully the idea
that the rates really were lower (Waldram, 2004). To assume that Aboriginal people
are, by definition, a traumatized people would be a mistake in my view, and would
render invisible and silenced those individuals who have not, in fact, experienced
such trauma or whose resilience has ensured a very positive and productive life.
Certainly more research is needed into the relationship of trauma and resilience.
I would suggest that the problems experienced by Aboriginal people today are
not so much directly related to distant historical processes as to the past inability of
diminished restorative Aboriginal medical systems to respond to the emerging psy-
chosocial problems caused by colonialism that are at the core of the idiom of
“historical trauma,” in combination with the disinclination, refusal, or inability
of the colonizer to deal with these problems through both its own medical and
psychotherapeutic systems and its broader political ethos (e.g., by promoting actual
rather than theoretical equality and opportunity). The contemporary Aboriginal
healing movement, then, is an effort to deal with these failures. It remains to be
seen if the current epistemological and philosophical approach of Aboriginal

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384 Transcultural Psychiatry 51(3)

healing and the idiom of historical trauma will continue to converge, if the notion
of individual responsibility will be affected by ever more popularized discussions of
harm done to the collective by the colonizer, and how Aboriginal healing programs
will respond to the finger pointing that is engendered by ontological blaming. Will
future Aboriginal approaches attempt to heal history, or will they continue to focus
on healing the individual?

Funding
The research that forms the backbone of this article has been undertaken over many years,
in many different contexts, and has been funded by a variety of agencies, including the
National Network for Aboriginal Mental Health Research (with funding from
the Canadian Institutes of Health Research), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research,
the Correctional Service of Canada, and the University of Saskatchewan. I am grateful for
all of these sources of funding.

Acknowledgements
Three reviewers for this journal offered valuable suggestions which have improved the
article. Nothing written here should be taken to represent the views of anyone other than
the author, and all errors of fact or interpretation are my responsibility alone.

Notes
1. Here I would note that there remain some contemporary forms of traditional treatment
modalities in which voluntariness and agency are less important, as in the case of “spirit
healing” in some northwest coastal areas, where treatment against the patient’s wishes is
considered appropriate (Denis, 1997).
2. Building a Nation, Inc., was a highly successful, independent, store-front clinic offering
psychotherapeutic services in downtown Saskatoon that was forced to close its doors
when the funding from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation was terminated (as a result of
a federal government decision to defund the Aboriginal Healing Foundation more gen-
erally) and other government agencies refused to step in.

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James B. Waldram is a medical and psychological anthropologist at the University of

Saskatchewan. He is currently undertaking research on Maya healing in Belize, and
on the psychological and cultural consequences of emergency evacuation of north-
ern Aboriginal communities. His most recent book is Hound Pound Narrative:
Sexual Offender Habilitation and the Anthropology of Therapeutic Intervention
(University of California Press, 2012).

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