Generational Healing and the Path

Weaving Trauma Through Families

A Message of Intergenerational Love

WORDS BY ELIZABETH HAWKSWORTH

I was probably six when I found out that I was Anishinaabe. It came on the heels of a typically 1980s first-grade classroom assignment to “find your Indian name.” We were told to make headdresses that would emblazon these made-up names across the headbands. My mother didn’t object to the assignment, but I remember she looked uncomfortable.

“We’re Indians, you know,” she said, as she helped me staple coloured construction paper feathers to the wildly patterned headband. “We’re Chippewa. You’re really Native, not just made up.”

That was as far as it went, and for years, I knew nothing about what being Native really meant. It was on my 18th birthday that my grandfather finally began to open up about his experiences. He’d gone to an Indian Day School in the London, Ontario area. He’d moved to the USA with his mother to escape further conscription into government- and church-run residential schools. He’d turned to alcoholism. That’s where I want to stop recounting what we typically look at as intergenerational trauma. Each Native family has pain running through the veins of each generation. We have had to parade our hurt in front of the white gaze for years just to prove that our colonized country does treat Indigenous people like second-class citizens. And in turn, Canadians see us as lazy drunks who can’t rise above what happened to us.

But there’s more to intergenerational trauma than pain. There’s also love.

My grandfather’s stories included a lot of hurt, but he also told me three different ways to skin a deer. He told me that our three medicines, sweetgrass, tobacco, and sage, were paramount to keeping the equilibrium with the Earth that our people have kept for generations. And he told me that my job, to carry on the culture, has been the job of the firstborn daughter of countless families in our nation. In short, he told me that our traditions and our healing ways are intergenerational, too, and that you need both sides of the story to truly teach Canadians who Natives are and why our culture matters.

These two sides are starting to make themselves known in popular culture. Recently, my girlfriend, who is white, and I took a trip to the movies to watch Frozen II. While I already loved the Frozen franchise, I was interested to see this particular sequel because I had learned that the filmmakers had conferenced with the Sámi people (an Indigenous people from northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia) on how best to present them in the context of colonial Norwegian culture.

I left the movie in tears, not because I was upset, but because I felt it was an amazing story of what intergenerational love truly is. Not only was I represented in the mixed Indigenous princesses (Elsa and Anna), the movie wove a story of true reconciliation and how intergenerational love is passed down and becomes a part of you. While their tagline is that “water has memory,” I would argue that blood is what has memory—memory of good and of bad.

Intergenerational trauma and love don’t only affect Indigenous communities. Countless communities and ethnicities experience this type of generational story. But, like my grandfather taught me and Frozen II underscored, it’s “the next right thing” that we do that matters. Trauma doesn’t heal on its own. Canada has a long way to go when it comes to starting that process. But if blood has memory, then my blood remembers more than trauma. It remembers the love of my ancestors, too.