Mike Myers: Effects of historical trauma linger in Indian Country

I was visiting my friend and some of his relatives yesterday and we were discussing the usual happenings on the rez and Indian country in general. Out of the blue my friend asked, “Do you know what the half-life of historical trauma is?” We all gave him a funny and he went on, “You know everything has a half-life, so why wouldn’t historical trauma?”

This set off a good discussion at the end of which we came to a consensus that if there was a half-life for historical trauma that it would be 500 years. Everyone felt that should be sufficient time to get over something. But the problem is there was not just one historically traumatizing event, there was one after the other beginning in 1493.

We agree that in North America it has abated somewhat and that there have been some minor events since the 1950s. But we felt that due to the relentless onslaught, and provided nothing massively traumatizing happens again, we might get over it by the year 2500.

Then I told them about the article in Indian Country Today where scientists estimate that there were some 50 million indigenous peoples murdered from 1493 to about 1610, and this massive amount of death coupled with the loss of Indigenous agricultural economies could trigger climate change.

One friend laughed and said, “See, they’ve come up with more thing to blame on us.”