On this National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, we must also understand that the suffering from the residential schools that were meant to eliminate the culture of the Indigenous people was not something that just happened in the past. Colonization continues to affect people, not only in structural barriers, but it lives on in the nervous system of survivors to this day. We’re also going to see how we can help even white people to heal from their own experiences of violence that took place, even if the trauma didn’t happen in this lifetime.
And if this is of interest to you, stay tuned, like, share, subscribe. You know what it is. My name is David Archer.
I’m a trauma specialist from Montreal, Canada, and this is your weekly consult. Let’s go.
The Reality of Colonization and Genocide
When I was younger and we would be learning about the creation of Quebec, you would have Samuel de Champlain, he comes down the St. Lawrence River and everything is all good. All of a sudden, he meets the Indigenous people and the Indigenous people are like, hey, what’s up? Come on over. Oh, you’re too cold? We’re going to show you how to use this bear skin to warm yourself up. Oh, you need food? We’re going to bring this food for you. You guys got scurvy and all that? No problem. We got you.
And so, it seemed as if everything was all good, right? Except for the fact that it doesn’t account for the millions of Indigenous people who were killed over the span of time. And also, it doesn’t account for the fact that if you look around in Quebec, well, where are the Indigenous people at?
Well, this is what we call genocide. It’s just that it was sanitized for us. Hopefully, in school and high schools and all that, they’re doing much better now. But a lot of us as Canadians were really unaware of the extent of the violence, like the unmarked graves burying hundreds, if not thousands, of Indigenous children, the amount of rampant physical, emotional, sexual violence that took place at these residential schools.
And also, the social workers who took, they called it the 60s scoop, that in the 1960s, they came in with buses into the Indigenous communities and took all of the kids away and put them with white parents so that they could kind of take Indigenous people away from their cultures.
The Intent Behind Residential Schools
The intent by some Canadian officials was to kill the Indian in the child. That was how they phrased it. So we know that they were preventing Indigenous people from speaking their language, preventing Indigenous people from practicing their dances, their ceremonies, their music, their way of life.
And all of this was meant to make it so that white people would then become the heirs to the land, which they called Canada, which they called United States, South America, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So they did everything they could to try to eliminate Indigenous people.
I’m here to speak about the fact that, nah, Indigenous people are still here. When I was working in Kahnawake, Kahnasatake, and Akwesasne, I learned the richness of their language, the importance of their culture. And it really inspired me. Even though it wasn’t my culture specifically, there was something very spiritual about being able to learn a language that was meant to be eliminated but is still here to this day.
There are many ways we can fight back against colonization and genocide and being able to love yourself, naming your children their Mohawk names instead of other names that other people gave them, having naming ceremonies, being able to participate in your spiritual traditions. These are also ways of being able to fight back against intergenerational suffering that was imposed upon you.
Canada’s Forgotten Slaves
Something that’s usually not spoken about when we’re talking about truth and reconciliation is something that I think is pretty important. It’s the fact that there was slavery in Canada. There’s a book called Canada’s Forgotten Slaves by Marcel Trudel, and I thought it was a pretty interesting book.
It was so revealing. The book was so amazing that they ran him out of town. So that’s how you know that this guy was speaking knowledge and speaking truth. I’d just like to quote something from his conclusion.
“Our study establishes that slavery had an official legal existence over two centuries, that is between 1632 and 1834. It’s hard to imagine why Amerindian and black slavery would not have been practiced in Quebec during this period when it was a widespread institution in all European colonies, Catholic and Protestant alike.”
So what Marcel Trudel speaks about in his book is the fact how the colonizers used Indigenous people to fight against other Indigenous people. Every treaty that was made oftentimes was broken, and that led to the reduction of the land of the Indigenous people who could be placed on reserves far away from the land that was more arable, the land that would allow you to plant things, the more comfortable places connected to the business centers.
And so that is how colonization often works. It took many centuries, but it made it so that the actual people who were here in this area were pushed off to the margins. And this erasure didn’t just happen in the past, it’s something that’s ongoing. So that’s why I always send a shout out to my Mohawk people any time when I take stage and refer to Montreal as Joh-Jah-Gay, any time, because words are important.
The language we use is important, and their language is going to keep going on, and probably even beyond this whole settler colonial project.
The Intergenerational Impact of Trauma
So as you can tell then, is that experiences from the past definitely were really stressful. There’s some studies that talk about how survivors of Holocaust, survivors of the Rwandan genocide, if you’ve heard of Dr. Joy DeGruy’s post-traumatic slave syndrome, there are many ways that trauma from the past can be inherited in the present, and it can impact us behaviorally, it can also impact us with epigenetic changes.
And so it can happen in ways that we might know, it can happen based on stories we’ve heard. So we might think, okay, well my grandmother went through this stress, my mother went through this stress, and so maybe me as a woman, I’m going to go through the stress. Or you might think, you know, well my grandfather was poor, and my father was poor, so there may be some way that I’m going to be poor.
So it can be passed on through narratives. However, it can also be passed on through your nervous system. If you’re going through a whole lot of stress and you’re pregnant, well unfortunately the fetus is also experiencing that cortisol and interacting with it. This is the reason why we need to help to heal trauma whenever we can, and as early as possible, and even before it even impacts us in this lifetime.
Healing Past-Life Trauma with EMDR
When we think of colonization and genocide, white people are the first victims of their colonization. They experimented with colonization in other quote-unquote Europeans before, of course, European was seen as a concept. But I want to talk about a story that relates to a person who identified as white, and also had her culture attacked in a past life, and how processing this trauma actually helped her in her present.
Let me give you an example. One of the first people that I did EMDR therapy with, there was this white woman, she was in her 40s. This is a person who she was doing energy work, and I’m a person, I do the Reiki energy healing.
I’m into all that meditation, all of that stuff, right? So this person was talking about how she wanted to do more of this meditation energy healing, but the problem was she had some fear, and she didn’t feel good about herself. We did what’s called the racial trauma target history, and what that involves is going through multiple events in one’s life from the age of zero until their present age, and checking to see the adversities they’ve been through and survived.
However, there’s a pivotal question that I ask that makes it so we can list some things that might have happened before the person was even alive. I ask about were there any events that took place before you were born that may relate to racial trauma, gender, depression, national stress, any of those kinds of things.
And so her eyes lit up because she said, you know, no therapist has ever asked her about this, but one of her earliest memories is in a past life being a witch and being burned at the stake. She said she didn’t feel comfortable telling me about this because she felt maybe this isn’t an actual thing, and because she practices the Wiccan faith, she felt some hesitancy.
I’m like, no, no, that’s a trauma target. This is something that we’re going to work on, and so then we proceeded to do it. So even if it’s not something that actually might have happened in this present age, she still had in her mind a visualization of what took place, a negative belief about what took place, and when we cleared the target, there was a positive belief that was able to help her to believe in herself.
I don’t quite remember word for word what the negative belief was or the positive belief was, but it’s likely that the negative belief had to do with the fact that it’s dangerous for her to be herself, which is why she was killed as a witch in a previous life. But the positive belief had to do with her being okay with accepting herself as being a witch in this present life. So this is the first time that I had done anything like that, and I was wondering, okay, well, we cleared the trauma target.
It seemed as if even though I wasn’t alive hundreds of years ago, and maybe she wasn’t, or maybe she was, the basic idea is after we cleared the trauma target, seemed uneventful, everything was good, I was like, all right, cool, I’ll see you next week. Next week, I checked in with her, and then she tells me about how all of a sudden she has her website up, doing her energy work, all of a sudden she’s got clients coming in, she contacted people from over here in this country, in this country, and so we had to speak about it.
Well, what do you think was actually the main change? And the change for her was that because she was able to heal this event that stored this negative energy for her, she felt that she was free to express herself as the energy healer that she’s meant to be in this day and age, in the 2000s, instead of in the 1600s, or whenever it was that the burning happened.
Validating the Client’s Experience
So I say this because she was able to turn her whole life around, because she was free from this narrative. And regardless of whether it is that I believe it happened or not, because my spirituality shouldn’t get in the way of her expressing her spirituality, it was important for her to know that I cared about her existence, regardless of my preconceived notions.
What the therapist believes is secondary to what the client lives and experiences. If the client has passed down this message that they were killed before because of their spiritual practices, if they believe it, they feel it. It lives on in their body.
This is what we’re talking about. An anti-racist psychotherapy, an intersectional anti-racist psychotherapy, cares about the experiences of Indigenous people. It cares about white people. It cares about who white people were before they became white.
And ultimately I think if we can heal those types of scars that have happened before we’ve even been born, we start off our sessions, we start off our trauma processing on a good step of letting them know that all parts of themselves, including their ancestors, were people of value, were people who mattered.
Every child matters. Every person matters. Black lives matter. Trans people matter.
We need to let people know that regardless of wherever you came from, what your past, what your background is, you matter. You’re beautiful because you exist. And that’s what’s up.
On this truth and reconciliation day, let’s keep the Mohawk language alive. Let’s show respect to the Haudenosaunee, to the Inuit, to show respect to all First Nations, people from all over. We want to let you guys know that yes, every child matters. We want to let you know that you matter too.
Many blessings to you. Peace. Thank you very much and peace.
See more of my