indigenous people and intergenerational trauma

Indigenous people and intergenerational trauma professional#

Others are revealing how past professional development trainings on trauma have failed to address this specific subject of boarding schools, or have simply left them feeling ‘informed’ but without actionable classroom strategies. “Because this is a very sensitive topic, some teachers, particularly, white teachers, express a fear of ‘saying the wrong thing,’ possibly offending a student or a family member, or retriggering a trauma. “I think we’re learning that there are a lot of contributing factors,” Constant says. Through a review of school practices, surveys, focus groups and intimate interviews with teachers, staff and administration, his work is revealing how and why teachers often feel ill-equipped to help students. (In both schools, more than half of students are Native American.) His primary objective was to better understand staff’s levels of confidence and competence in dealing with intergenerational trauma, and in doing so, help them identify factors that decrease and increase that capacity. For his dissertation research, he began working with two public schools with some of the highest Native American student populations in Michigan. Recognizing the impacts of this trauma on subsequent generations can be challenging, and as an educator, Constant became very interested in the role teachers might play in advocating for impacted students. “The harsh reality is many generations of indigenous families and communities were torn apart, so it should come as no surprise that this has had a deep impact even on those who never went to a boarding school.” “Intergenerational trauma is fundamentally an unresolved trauma, and it has the capacity to ripple through the generations,” Constant says. Moreover, even though Indian Boarding Schools have been closed for many decades, the impacts are thought to stretch beyond those who experienced boarding schools directly. And researchers and indigenous communities have documented impacts ranging from mental health and social issues to a nearly unrecoverable loss of language and cultural practices. By the 1920s, it’s estimated more than 80 percent of Native American children attended boarding schools. Needless to say, the impact on Native American communities has been widespread and profound. “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man” was the crude motto of one of the boarding school movement’s most famous advocates. The tactics of assimilation were coarse, involving removal of children from their families, an indoctrination into white American history, economics, social norms, and Christianity, and the forced abandonment of indigenous languages and cultural practices. In fact, Holy Childhood in Harbor Springs, Michigan remained open until 1983, making it one of the last Indian Boarding Schools to close in the U.S. But many boarding schools continued to operate well into the late 20th century. government’s funding of what ultimately grew into a system of hundreds of schools, often run by religious orders, began in the 1860s.

The history of Indian Boarding Schools is more recent than many realize. And when someone pointed out to Constant that there was an emerging body of similar research on families affected by the Indian Boarding School era, he felt an immediate connection to the subject. In fact, intergenerational trauma - the idea that the traumatic experiences of one generation can have deep impacts on another - has its origins in the study of the families of Holocaust survivors.

But he does have an extensive background in dealing with human trauma, both as a longtime educator in alternative high schools and more recently as a Holocaust educator. Constant is white, had no personal connection to an indigenous community, and didn’t have much more than a general awareness of Indian Boarding Schools. UM-Dearborn’s Tim Constant certainly didn’t expect to be part of this growing research community himself when he started his Ed.D. And it’s only been in recent years that academic researchers (primarily Canadian ones) have turned their attention to unraveling the psychological impacts of the boarding school era, in which young Native American people were sent to government-funded schools designed to assimilate them into Eurocentric culture.

Even within tribal communities, the topic can be a taboo one. The history of Indian Boarding Schools is probably less well known to most Americans than other historical periods of significant racial oppression and violence, like slavery, Jim Crow, the genocide of indigenous people, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Indigenous people and intergenerational trauma