Trauma, child development, healing and resilience: A review of literature with focus on Indigenous peoples and communities

Historical trauma refers specifically to the inter-generational impact of colonization on Indigenous peoples. In the 1990s, the mental health issues suffered by Indigenous people in Canada were first conceptualized as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Later researchers briefly began developing the concept of ‘residential school survivor syndrome,’ but then settled on the term historical trauma to create a definition that included the larger historical contributing processes. The most recent definition includes four aspects:
1. “Colonial injury to Indigenous peoples by European settlers who ‘perpetrated’ conquest, subjugation, and dispossession;
2. Collective experience of these injuries by entire Indigenous communities whose identities, ideals, and interactions were radically altered as a consequence;
3. Cumulative effects from these injuries as the consequences of subjugation, oppression, and marginalization have ‘snowballed’ throughout ever-shifting historical sequences of adverse policies and practices by dominant settler societies; and
4. Cross-generational impacts of these injuries as legacies of risk and vulnerability were passed from ancestors to descendants in unremitting fashion until ‘healing’ interrupts these deleterious processes.”1