Historical Trauma Healing from Trauma to Address Substance

Historical Trauma: Healing from Trauma to Address Substance Abuse Tribal Opioid/Substance Use Conference Indigenous Approaches to Building Capacity & Resiliency to Substance Use Disorder Tennille Larzelere Marley (White Mountain Apache)

Presentation Overview • What is historical trauma? • How historical trauma is perpetuated today • How connection to culture and community can heal the wounds • An Indigenist Stress Coping Model

American Indians have unique experiences directly related to surviving colonization within the boundaries of the United States. The federal government has attempted to acculturate and deculturate American Indians on their own lands through government sponsored policies of tribal/racial genocide and ethnocide (i. e. destroying their ethnic, cultural, tribal being). Examples of institutionalized acculturative practices include forcing Native children into boarding schools and forbidding them to speak their Native languages; outlawing Native religious practices; forcibly removing and relocating Indians away from traditional lands; and disproportionately removing Indian children and placing them into non-Indian homes. From a Native Son: Selected Essays on Indigenism, 1985 -1995

What is historical trauma?

What is historical trauma? • Collective, cumulative emotional wounding across generations resulting from cataclysmic events • Events target not just individuals, but a whole collective community • Trauma held personally, across generations Even those who have not directly experienced the trauma can feel the effects generations later

Intergenerational Trauma • Exposure of an earlier generation to a traumatic event that continues to affect subsequent generations • • Layers of grief due to the erosion of the family Erosion of Tribal structure Loss of cultural traditions and practices Loss of spiritual ties

Manifestations of Historical Trauma • Depression • Self-destructive behavior (violence and substance use disorders) • Psychic numbing • Anger • Elevated mortality rates from suicide

Discussion Questions • What does historical trauma mean to you? • What examples of historical trauma do you know about? How have they affected you? • In what ways do you see the effects of historical trauma impacting and playing out in your community?

How is historical trauma perpetuated today?

What are historically traumatic events? • Planned phenomena by government • Boarding schools, massacres… • Environmental trauma • Impact on environment • Spiritual Trauma • Prohibition of spiritual practices

Outside Perpetrators • Eligible to be declared insane • Became educable • Outlawed Religion • Forced removal of children, far away from community, culture, family • More than 25 boarding schools • 100, 000 children forced to attend

Historically Traumatic Events • Traumatic events such as the Wounded Knee massacre, the Trail of Tears, the Navajo Long Walk to Bosque Redondo • The unresolved trauma of genocide, loss of culture, forcible removal from family, and traditional lands (Reservations and boarding schools)

What are microaggressions? • Events involving discrimination, racism, and daily hassles that are targeted at individuals from diverse racial and ethnic groups • Contemporary violent experiences • Often covert in nature • Interpersonal and environmental messages • Verbal and non-verbal encounters that place burden of addressing them placed on recipient of encounter, causing stress • Images or lack of images • Mascots & stereotypical images cartoonizes us, makes us unidimensional, makes us invisible • Affects the psyche of individuals and the group s/he belongs

Historical Trauma Response & Colonial Trauma Response (CTR) • Historical trauma response is “the cumulative effect of historical trauma brought on by centuries of colonialism, genocide, and oppression” • CTR incorporates historical trauma response and includes contemporary and individual responses to injustice, trauma, and microagressions • CTR is connected to colonialism • Colonialism is the “historical and contemporary traumatic events that reflect colonial practices to colonize, subjugate, and perpetuate ethnocide and genocide against contemporary AIAN peoples”

Historical Trauma Response & Colonial Trauma Response (CTR) • AIANS who experienced historical trauma as part of their community are also subject to microaggressions as individuals • These everyday injustices “serve to connect [the individual] with a collective and often historical sense of injustice and trauma” • Individual may feel more closely connected with ancestors who have experienced historical trauma and sometimes feel a particularly strong reaction to the microaggression

Microaggressions • Invisibilty is reinforced through microaggressive acts • People may be susceptible to both historical trauma and microaggressions • Microaggresive acts can perpetuate trauma • Daily discrimination can result in more distress and strong negative health outcomes

• • • Symptoms of Historical Trauma Obsessive ruminations Intrusive trauma imagery Nightmares Maladaptive coping Survivors Guilt Numbing • Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Worry • Identification with ancestral pain and deceased ancestors Depression • Psychic numbing and poor affect tolerance Withdrawal • Elevated mortality rates from cardiovascular Anxiety diseases as well as suicide and other forms Unresolved grief of violent death Erosion in community and family systems • • More violence More stress

“…The residue of unresolved, historic, traumatic experiences and generational or unresolved grief is not only being passed from generation to generation, it is continuously being acted out and recreated…” C. Wesley-Esquimaux & M. Smolewski (2004) “The sign of ultimate oppression working is when the oppressor can take away his hands, stand back and say ‘look at what they’re doing to themselves. ’” Jessica Gourneau, Ph. D.

Discussion Questions • How do people and communities experience historical trauma? • In what ways have you observed or experienced microaggressions? • Have you ever dismissed them because you second-guessed or doubted that they happened or were of significance? If so, why do you think you had that response? • What federal or state policies, societal/community pressures, or initiatives may contribute to microaggressions? • How might reflecting on the long-term effects of historical trauma influence how you think about current pressing social/political issues?

How connection to culture and community can heal wounds

What is cultural healing? • Connecting people to their cultural identity through understanding traditions, customs, and practices • What does it mean to be a good human being? • What does it mean to eat well? • How do we conduct ourselves? • Reconnecting and reestablishing relationships with self, body, mind, spirit, culture, community, and history • Creating new historical narratives

What is cultural healing? • Examining the effects of historical trauma not only within a single individual or family, but across entire communities • What were the original instructions for the people? • What were the historically traumatic events that happened to the community? • How did the community respond? • What were the survival strategies? • What were the family’s responses?

What is cultural healing? • Listening, caring and giving voice to what is carried forward across generations helping people process grief of past and current trauma • Conversation • Contact • Connecting • Listening • Going deeper • Going behind the pain What is it that you cannot say?

Cultural Health Discussion Questions • What cultural practices do you use to support your own health and wellness? Do you consider the practices to be healing? • How can you support the preservation of cultural traditions, languages, and practices of others? • How can knowledge about historical trauma inform the ways individuals/workplaces/communities/societies/cultures promote cultural healing? • In what ways can you support healing from historical trauma and microaggressions through connecting people, families, and/or communities?

Indigenist Stress-Coping Model Walters, K. L. , & Simoni, J. M. (2002). Reconceptualizing Women’s Health: An “Ingienist” Stress-Coping Model. American Journal of Public Health 92(4): 520 -524.

Indigenist Stress-Coping Model • Identifies how “cultural buffers” moderate the effects of historical trauma and microaggressions on the health of AIAN women • Identity attitudes, enculturation, spiritual methods of coping, and traditional healing practices • Buffers/coping strategies describe pathway between historical trauma (and other traumatic experiences) and health outcomes • Physical health, mental health, and alcohol and drug use

Indigenist Stress-Coping Model • Model highlights protective factors rather than pathology • Emphasizes resilience within AIAN communities • Cultural buffers identify why some AIANs have better health outcomes than others in the midst of stress and historical or contemporary trauma

Identity Attitudes • Refers to the extent to which one internalizes or externalizes attitudes toward oneself and one’s group • Positive identity attitudes is associated with enhanced self esteem, ability to cope with psychological distress, and depression avoidance • Identity development • Internalizing and/or overvaluing the majority culture • Becoming aware of differences between the majority culture and one’s own culture • Shedding stereotypes about one’s own culture • Integrating identity attitudes and cultural buffers

Enculturation • Process by which individuals learn about and identify with their minority culture • Different than acculturation: process by which people from a minority culture adopt and assimilate into the majority culture • Important for AIANs to distinguish between • What is part of their original culture, and • What has been forced upon them due to historically traumatic events and/or discrimination

Spiritual Methods of Coping • Associated with • Adjustment to stressful life events • Physical and mental health • Spirituality permeates all aspects of Native life and lifeways • Protective factor against historical and contemporary trauma

Traditional Healing Practices • Shown to relate to positive health outcomes • A study showed that seventy percent of AIAN patients in an urban primary care setting often used traditional health practices • Health practices such as the use of herbal medicines or sweat lodge ceremonies were often chosen to heal the underlying causes of physical and mental illness or trauma, rather than acute symptoms

Decolonizing Strategies • Learning about precolonial history • Example: identify traditional ways of identifying and healing from trauma • Documenting historically traumatic events and colonial trauma that give meaning to current experiences • Highlight resilience within cultures and individuals • Create new narratives that recognize negative influences on Native culture and identify how and why behaviors were learned • Community grief ceremonies that include cultural rituals and support healing

Questions? Contact Information: Tennille L. Marley Tennille. marley@asu. edu (480) 965 -3634