OPINION: Intergenerational trauma continues to affect communities 

After 13 years of working as a psychiatrist, first in northern California, and later New Zealand, I moved to Kayenta, a small community in a remote part of the Navajo Nation in Northern Arizona.

Things in Kayenta were a lot worse than any of my previous experiences working with under-served, marginalized people, and it wasn’t clear why. Most of the women who came to see me at the Indian Health Services clinic were victims of domestic violence. There were many suicides, alcohol abuse was common, as was diabetes.

Soon after arriving in Kayenta, I read about intergenerational or historical trauma, also known as the "soul wound." It involves unhealed traumas, passed down from generation to generation, resulting in epidemic rates of depression, suicide, homicide, domestic violence and illnesses. After giving a talk to the Kayenta community on this issue, people said, “Why haven’t we heard this before,” and, “Someone is finally telling our side of the story.”

Our small community had many homicides. In 2016, just before Christmas, a mother killed her two sons, fourth and sixth graders, and then herself. I no longer lived on the reservation at that time, but as soon as possible went to Kayenta to try to help the community deal with this devastating event. While visiting the class of one of the boys who had died, I asked them why they thought the mother had done that. “She was stressed,” came the immediate response from one little girl.

The children confirmed that no one, neither school personnel or their parents, had talked to them after the initial crisis team contact directly following his death. After individually talking to each child about how they felt, most of the children’s moods seemed lighter, happier.

Unfortunately, I was not allowed a few months later to see the children again because parents felt they had lost focus on their schoolwork for a week following the first visit. Failure to process your feelings can lead to lasting emotional scars. Possibly these parents had never learned to process their feelings, and now this was being passed down to their children.

The issue of intergenerational trauma is widespread in Native American tribes and where ever Indigenous peoples have been oppressed, and tackling it can be daunting. The academic and clinical community has been working on this for 30 years, and many tribes have worked on it for years as well, yet it remains virtually unknown in many places on and off reservations. In 30 years of asking my Native patients if they have heard of it, only three said yes.

In 2014, after a summer in which six people had been killed in Kayenta, we held a community meeting. After an explanation of intergenerational trauma, people began, one by one, to tell stories about what their families had gone through. At the very end of the meeting, a woman stood up and said that six weeks ago her 22 year- old son had been shot and killed on her front porch. Since then she hadn’t been able to quit thinking about what she could have done to prevent his death. Looking first at one side of the room and then the other, she said, “But now I know that you are my brothers, and you are my sisters, and I am not alone.”

The damage of intergenerational trauma continues to afflict Native communities, with epidemic rates of suicide, domestic violence, substance abuse and illnesses. The way forward doesn’t have to be complicated — simple efforts like community education and sharing stories can help begin the process of healing.

Donna Schindler, M.D., has spent the past three decades working on intergenerational trauma with Native populations in the U.S. She lives in Santa Fe.