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The Grassroots Speaks…
About Intergenerational Trauma
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Youth Lead the Way
Young people carry in the Sacred Hoop during one
of the many Hoop grand entries during the 2005
White Bison Wellbriety conference in Denver.
Elder Horace Axtell and other veterans (inset)
carry in the Colors. |
The last issue of Wellbriety! Online
Magazine (Volume 6, #6) presented a talk on intergenerational
trauma by Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart of the
Takini Network. In this issue we hear what conference
participants said about healing intergenerational
trauma in their home communities and an Elder’s
comments about the entire presentation of 100 solutions.
The Circle on intergenerational trauma was one of
ten grassroots circles that took up different problems
in Indian country, offering the Conference their
top ten solutions to that problem. Wellbriety! Magazine
will present the remaining grassroots solutions in
an upcoming issue.
Our first solution was—No more cell phones!
Because it keeps us hypervigilant and re-traumatizes
us. Ehhh!…nooo!…joke!
This was a tough one! We all got
in a circle after Maria’s talk and we had to have a talking circle.
We had to do simultaneous healing while we went to
a head level of solutions. That in itself is a solution.
You have to do a healing while you’re also doing
the head stuff.
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| Theda New Breast presents the Top Ten Solutions
for Intergenerational Trauma |
The Number One solution that came
for us involved our Elders. We had a lot of dialog
on our language and bringing
our language back and
how other indigenous people around the world have
done healing, like in New Zealand and Australia and
other places by bringing their language back. Our
first solution is that we have to even bring it back
to our children and to our cats and our dogs. Our
sister even said it’s
her daughter talking Arapahoe to her cat. That’s
how much our language has to come back to us in healing
from intergenerational trauma.
Another was that a lot of our participants
looked at our elected leadership and other leadership,
like our spiritual people too, our Medicine men—are
they sober? Part of the answer in intergenerational
trauma is that they themselves become sober, or declare
their sobriety. One of our participants said when she
moved back to her community she automatically said, “My
name is so and so, and I’m an alcoholic.” It
just came. One of her Elders come over to her and in
their language whispered, “Why did you say that?” We
have to start standing up in our communities and declaring
our sobriety and demanding it of our leadership.
The third solution coming from
our group said, “We
can’t do anything back home, we’ve got
to start with us.” We’re powerless over
what our tribal council is doing. We’re powerless
over what our young people are doing and saying. It
really has to start with looking in the mirror and
talking to our hearts, and loving ourselves, and healing
ourselves. The self-work has to go on here (our hearts)
before we go back there and deal with intergenerational
trauma.
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| Conference participants
in one of the Problems and Solutions circles |
Our fourth solution which was repeated
in many, many ways amongst our group was that we
have to bring back our ceremonies of dealing with
grief and shame and dealing with feelings that we’re
having, which come out of intergenerational trauma.
Our fifth one we called gender
forgiveness. We had a lot of pain with women not
trusting men, and men not trusting women. In some
of the healing movement, depending on who is running
a particular event, trust issues are involved. If
it’s a man, his trust
issues with women are there. If it’s women in
the movement or on the board of directors, do they
have trust issues with the men? In healing intergenerational
trauma we need to have gender forgiveness. Trust building
between men and women has to be some of our focus.
Why do we have a lot of single women raising their
kids? They are mother and the father. This is what
our group discussed.
As another solution we said we
have to go to our grassroots, to our people and show
up with a blank piece of paper like this one. Just
show up and say, “What do
you think?” And then shut up and write down what
they think. So we said we have to facilitate
the grassroots.
Another solution we talked about in our group was
that it was so good to hear the truth
about the past.
The truth about our grandparents. The truth about our
parents. It was so good to hear the truth, speaking
the truth about what really happened and not being
shamed, saying what really went on and saying it out
loud: telling the truth needs to happen as part of
the solution.
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| A grassroots
Circle in action |
Another thing we talked about I
labeled “body
work.” We talked about “quantum spirituality,” things
at the molecular level in our group. Our body diseases
carry the intergenerational trauma in our colon cancer,
in our sinuses, in our headaches, in our backaches,
in our bad knees, in our arthritis. So the solution
is that we have to work on our body, to heal our body.
We have to work on the male and female sides. To work
on your male side you have got to pay special attention
to this right side of your body. To work on your female
side you have to pay attention to the left side of
your body. Those were part of our solutions.
The ninth solution about intergenerational
trauma is in diet. We saw even diabetes as a symptom
of our intergenerational trauma. That’s why we can walk
around with a blood sugar of seven or eight hundred.
We are so used to trauma we can still function. Our
solution is in diet and returning
to the belief of our ancestors that food is medicine. Food is our original
medicine. Our ancestors would not have eaten Lay’s
potato chips and fried food, and Pepsi and Coke. That
was cultural suicide.
The solution from the group that
we ended with is that we have to stop
shaming each other. Stop shaming each other. It’s simple things, like when someone
is trying to learn to speak the language don’t
tell them, “You didn’t say that right.” Or
if someone first tries to sing their Indian ceremonial
songs, we tease or belittle them sarcastically. We’ve
got to stop the shame and we have to address it. When
we do that we will address the healing of intergenerational
trauma.
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| Contact
the Takini Network if your community would like
to sponsor more learning opportunities about intergenerational
trauma. |
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My Goodness! What you have come
up with in terms of 100 or so recommendations
is really indicative of knowing who you are and
knowing what your community is, and needs, to
be healthy and to be whole again. There were
some recurring themes that I noted and there
seemed to be, just because of my background,
a great deal of faith and trust and promoting
education and awareness in our respective communities
about a number of items.
I sat in the youth suicide group
today simply because as a grandmother I was devastated
by what our grandchildren are capable of. As
a Cheyenne woman, suicide, culturally speaking,
in terms of our original instructions and teachings
is not an option for Cheyennes. It never was,
but it becomes especially worrisome when in a
contemporary context our children, Cheyenne Children
included, my brother among them, have become
apparently so filled with despair that there
is no way out for them except to terminate that
most cherished gift that we have each been given,
and that is life. Life. The most precious of
all blessings. One of our law-ways, again, was
you don’t kill another individual, especially
one of your own—another Cheyenne.
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Our
Elders Speak
Dr. Henrietta Mann (center)
comments on the “Top 100” while
Horace Axtell (l) and Marie Randall (r)
listen. |
I think that, unfortunately,
as much as I would rather not admit it, this
says something about the breakdown in some
of our cultural values and our teachings. If
it’s
just one case or two it is still troublesome.
It is still our responsibility as the older generation
to think about implementing those wonderful solutions
that you have already provided to us. Having
more men’s circles, and equally, having
women’s circles. Again, as the natural,
ordinary people of this land we know about interdependence,
and a part of this interconnected, relational
world in which we live we know that there is
something that we call pairs, very necessary
to the whole.
We look at those pairs in terms
of life and death and you can look at them in
terms of heat and cold. There are all these pairs
that we can make choices from every day. But
of all of those pairs the most important, or
among the most important, are male and female:
they are complementary. Our grandparents taught
us that we live in these societies where there
is an equal emphasis upon the men and women.
We know the impact of the kind of education brought
to this land by our brothers and sisters that
come from the white direction and their orientation
toward patriarchy, which certainly came into
a clash with those traditional societies, ours
here, who put a great deal of emphasis upon matriarchy
and the respected and esteemed role of the women.
We know that the impact of education has resulted
today in an unequal view of gender so that I
think that last group on intergenerational trauma
is really on the mark. We have to talk about
gender forgiveness. It’s very important
if we are going to be whole again to treat each
other as equal partners.
I can remember a conversation that
Theda’s mother, my friend Betty Cooper,
and myself had one day. She said, you know, we
as women walk side by side with our men. We don’t
have to deal with feminism in the way that our
sisters from the white direction do. But we do
have to do a great deal of that work as men and
as women.
What I heard also in these ten
reports was a need to go back to our original
instructions. Our ways as a people that were
given to us at the beginning of time, which have
sustained us throughout all of our life on this
continent. We have to go back into ceremonies
and pass those on to our children. We have to
remember that we need to acknowledge, as we discussed
in the group, those rites of passage which signal
our young people that they are no longer children,
that they have attained womanhood or manhood
and now have different responsibilities.
In terms of this larger society
in which we live, we hear a great deal about
rights—and I cherish those rights, especially
the right to be who we are as the indigenous
peoples of this land. But our views of the world
do not stop there. We are also a people that
are about responsibility. In another session
we said that what happened in that one community
affected all of us. Our children need to know
their own role models so that they do not have
to go on the internet and find other people or
other groups to begin to try to emulate to find
that sense of belonging that is absolutely one
of our most critical needs as human beings—to
know that we belong. Our families in that regard
provide us with those places. When a child is
born, that child belongs. That child has a place
within the family, within the traditional structure,
within our communities. A sense of belonging
is exceptionally important.
What a wonderful, wonderful theme
for some of the young people who have come here
to get to spend time with all of you. The Haudenosaunee
have that saying, “It takes an entire village
to raise a child”—and that is what
all of you are doing collectively. I think the
young people, our children, our grandchildren
that came to this conference are doubly blessed
in being able to be around you, to know that
we do have wonderful role models—Don Coyhis
himself! Those are just my comments to get the
responses started.
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Ehhh!…nooo!…joke!
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