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March-April 2008
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Events that are more intense, last longer, affect a greater proportion of a community, and damage vital reparative institutions are deadlier, she says. “After the Holocaust, for example, Jewish immigrants to the United States still had synagogues, rabbis, and their Torah. Jews residing in places like North America and the Middle East provided a comparatively stable refuge that preserved essential Jewish traditions and eventually fueled postwar Jewish healing and renewal processes. “But native peoples had no equivalent of an ‘America’ to which they could escape and create a new base—ironically, North American governments were their tormentors,” Abadian continues. “Here, as a result, the collective traumas of colonization affected nearly 100 percent of indigenous peoples. Healthy child-rearing practices were disrupted or warped by involuntary boarding schools. Native spiritual practices and traditions were banished, and missionaries often replaced them with foreign religious forms that tore apart the community’s social cohesion. It is like an epidemic hitting a society when its doctors and healers have been exterminated. No one escaped the ravage.” Abadian’s theory of collective trauma is “a very illuminating and unexplored way of looking at the problems of Native Americans,” says Lamont University Professor Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics, who calls himself “fortunate” to have advised her dissertation at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG). “Sousan has a huge combination of imagination, intelligence, and concern for empirical data. The literature on trauma is quite well developed and has been extensively used in other contexts, and the problems of Native Americans are also well recognized. The connection of the two is where her work has made a difference.” Although Abadian’s theories have not yet been applied to development studies around the world, “There are enormous prospects of that happening,” says Sen, noting their relevance to posttraumatic conditions in impoverished regions like Rwanda, South Africa, and in the area around Assam and Manipur in northeast India, where intercommunity civil wars have led to social collapse and a high prevalence of alcoholism, drug use, and AIDS. “Those are three examples,” Sen declares. “I can give a hundred others. It is pioneering, highly original work that can be used to understand traumas elsewhere.” Take regions of chronic international conflict, for example. From 1999 until 2001, an informal group of 16 scholar-practitioners met each Thursday morning at the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution (PICAR) in Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. The group, which included people native to “hot spots” like Sudan, Israel, Colombia, and Sri Lanka, sought to discover why attempts to resolve international conflicts so often failed, to identify what was lacking in the field of conflict resolution, and to investigate the role trauma plays in perpetuating conflict. “Sousan was a beam of light for us,” says Donna Hicks, an associate of the Weatherhead Center who was deputy director of PICAR for nine years. “Our goal was to look at all the research on trauma—but Sousan had done that already. She directed the discussions for months. At the end of this grappling, we realized that this was the direction conflict resolution had to go in—the direction of healing trauma. It wasn’t something anyone was talking about at the time—it was too hot to touch. People don’t want to expose emotional wounds.”
Such wounds are both deep and widely shared in a traumatized society, and, in Abadian’s analysis, they are typically the fundamental reason why such cultures cannot develop economically, socially, or politically until they address collective trauma and begin to heal it. “[D]efeating a people has as much to do with destroying their sense of purpose—their confidence in their world-view and meaning system—as it does with physical conquest,” Abadian writes, adding that traumatic stressors “engender in the victim characteristic feelings of deep violation and hopeless impotence in the face of violation.” One severe example is the description of the profoundly traumatized Ojibwa of Grassy Narrows in northwestern Ontario, quoted by Yale sociologist Kai Erickson in his seminal 1994 book on social traumas, A New Species of Trouble:
This degree of demoralization involves a loss of identity as a people. “Most Native Americans have to piece together their Indian-ness from many different sources. I know a female Indian who took an Indian studies class at Stanford and learned more about the history of Fort Peck [a tribal reservation in northeastern Montana] than she had by living there!” says Dennis Norman, faculty chair of the Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP) and associate professor of psychology in the department of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS); Norman himself is of Cheyenne, Choctaw, and Anglo extraction. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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