Trails of Tears, and Hope
"Collective trauma" takes a ferocious toll on human societies—yet there are pathways to healing.
by Craig Lambert
The hamlet of Alkali Lake, about 100 miles north of Vancouver, is home to one of a handful of surviving Shuswap bands of Native Americans in British Columbia. Nearby villages include Dog Creek, 70 Mile House, Horsefly, and Likely. In many ways, the history of the 400 Indians living there resembles that of many other indigenous peoples.
Photograph by Craig Lambert
Sousan Abadian
Starting in the 1850s, thousands of Euro-Canadian miners and settlers began pouring into the Shuswap territory, eager to take the Indians’ ancestral land. The tribe made easy prey. Diseases that Europeans had introduced during the previous half-century of contact had already reduced their numbers by two-thirds. In 1860, the Canadian government started seizing the native peoples’ lands for the settlers, herding the Indians onto much smaller reserves that shrank steadily over the decades. Beginning in 1891, the government forcibly removed Shuswap children from their families for three generations and enrolled them in the Williams Lake Residential Boarding School, 20 miles away, run by Christian missionaries. Its pedagogy involved harsh punishments for speaking the Shuswap language, as well as relentless indoctrination about the inferiority of Indians’ culture and heritage. Conditions there, according to a University of British Columbia anthropologist, included hunger, spoiled food, whippings and beatings, public humiliations, and sexual abuse.
By the 1960s, the tribe’s social and cultural fabric had unraveled. Unemployment was so high, the vast majority of residents subsisted on government payments. Child abuse and neglect, suicide, domestic violence, and hunger were epidemic. Drinking binges had become the dominant social activity. Tribal members sometimes found on their doorsteps the corpses of fellow Indians who had frozen overnight after collapsing in a drunken stupor. Children often quaffed alongside their parents at parties that roared through the weekend and spilled over into the following week. Not drinking meant exiling oneself from community life. By 1972, one researcher estimated that 93 percent of the Alkali Lake population aged 16 and older were heavy drinkers. Locally, they were known as “the Indians of Alcohol Lake.”
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >
