![]() How can we fight intergenerational trauma?Īccording to Bombay, a combination of Indigenous and Western approaches, including PTSD treatments, can combat intergenerational trauma. But Ek-kanakii said she’s spent many years healing and reconnecting with Siksika ways to overcome behaviours pushed on her at Old Sun, which she attended until 1971. Today, when Ek-kanakii’s grandchildren want to cuddle with her, they do. While trauma can be passed down through generations, so can healing. People grappling with trauma break the intergenerational cycle all the time, whether we’re talking about addiction or day-to-day routines. “You can unlearn behaviours and I’m pointing it out to my grandchildren so they don’t have to carry that burden.” “I was like, ‘Pick a different day break the cycle,’” McNab said. McNab cut the practice by the time she was 28, with her third child, and has since encouraged her kids and grandkids to avoid cleaning on Saturdays. “It was robbing me of my serenity and peace, and it was affecting my relationships with my kids.” “I could wake up on a Saturday and be so happy, and once I moved to cleaning mode, my whole character changed,” McNab said. “By 24 I was clean and sober,” McNab said, so she started to think intentionally about the harmful patterns she had learned at residential school-like Saturday morning cleaning. McNab, who had grappled with addiction as a result of residential school abuse, said she started healing in the early 1990s, when she was in her 20s her university education, in particular, helped her come to terms with the past and openly discuss her residential school experience, something many others weren’t comfortable doing. “We’re talking about multiple generations that had this shock, trauma experience,” said McNab, who, along with her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents was forced to attend residential school. ![]() ![]() The trauma didn’t just afflict the children forced to attend it also afflicted parents who had their children taken away as well as the children of survivors, and communities, said Marlene McNab, a Nêhiýawak citizen of the George Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan, assistant professor at the First Nations University of Canada, and an Indigenous social work expert. ![]() Thousands of children were killed, while others were left with incomprehensible trauma. Physical and sexual abuses were common, as were malnutrition and disease. The Canadian government, along with churches, the majority of them Catholic, ran residential schools to forcibly assimilate 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children-to “kill the Indian in the child,” a famous phrase endorsed by several residential school architects, including Canada’s first prime minister, John A. ![]()
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