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March-April 2008
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 In the summer of 1971, two heavy imbibers, Andy and Phyllis Chelsea, left their seven-year-old daughter, Ivy, with her grandparents to go off on yet another weekend binge. When they returned, Ivy adamantly refused to go home with them. This stunned Phyllis Chelsea, and she determined to give up alcohol. Her husband followed suit a week later, and the next year, the Alkali Lake band elected Andy Chelsea its chief. He had campaigned on an anti-alcohol platform. Even so, sobriety isolated the Chelseas from the band’s social life, so they escaped to hockey tournaments and rodeos on weekends. But they also invited a trained counselor in to run “alcohol awareness” sessions that evolved into Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The Chelseas prohibited neighboring ranchers from trading cases of wine for haying rights, set up sting operations for bootleggers, and took steps to end the practice of Indians “drinking up” their assistance checks. Phyllis Chelsea began teaching Shuswap language classes and created dancing, drumming, and song groups, while reviving such traditional practices as the use of sweat lodges. The Chelseas also tapped into contemporary ideas like the California-based “Lifespring” human-potential seminars, which by the early 1980s had enrolled and trained the majority of the band’s adult members. Despite powerful opposition, the band elected Andy Chelsea as chief again and again. Growing numbers of sober adults began to establish a new set of social norms. By the mid 1980s, sobriety had become the rule, as it remains today. The 1986 film The Honour of All: The Story of Alkali Lake documents this astonishingly rapid transformation of a devastated people into a model for other native communities throughout North America.
The social catastrophe that ravaged the Shuswap band embodies an extreme form of “collective trauma,” says Sousan Abadian, A.M. ’87, M.P.A. ’88, Ph.D. ’99, who has spent time at Alkali Lake and in dozens of other indigenous communities in New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Minnesota, Alberta, British Columbia, and Manitoba since she began studying this phenomenon in 1994. In her doctoral dissertation, Abadian used that term for the pervasive consequences communities suffer when powerful external forces violate their physical and/or sociocultural integrity. Such forces can be as random as a one-day tsunami or as systematic as the Holocaust; collective traumas can kill millions in war or genocide or enslave generations. The phenomenon can be a fairly short-lived event with lasting consequences, such as the Rwandan genocide of 1994, or it can extend over centuries—as with American Indians, whose numbers dropped from an estimated 10 million before Columbus landed to 250,000 by the turn of the twentieth century; disease brought by Europeans, and sometimes intentionally spread by colonizers, claimed the vast majority of those native lives. Though Abadian’s concepts are applicable to a broad array of scenarios, from antebellum slavery in the U.S. South to the disappearing aborigines of Australia, she has focused her empirical research on American Indians. “I don’t like to compare traumas,” she said, speaking to tribal leaders and members of the Mashantucket Pequot Nation in Connecticut last June, “because whether you are drowning in five feet of water or 10 feet, you are still drowning. But the kinds of traumas that native North American peoples have experienced are among the worst; the fact that they have survived at all speaks to their resilience.” In a later interview, Abadian, a multidisciplinary independent scholar who is writing a book on collective trauma and its healing in American Indian communities and other postcolonial societies, notes, “The most extreme types of collective trauma are sociocultural: it’s not just an aggregation of individual traumas, but disruption of the fundamental institutions of society, and of its ‘immune system’ that can restore people and repair a culture. Whenever I go to a dinner party in Cambridge and talk about my work, the response almost always is, ‘Well, my people were traumatized, too, and we’re doing fine now. The Germans, Japanese, and Koreans were traumatized during World War II and the Korean War, so why were they able to get on their feet, and not native peoples?’ ” 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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