Healing a Wounded Past
Centuries of genocide, cultural destruction and prejudice have left Native Americans an ongoing legacy of serious health problems. Indian nurses can play a crucial role in helping patients begin the process of healing from historical trauma.
By Louise Kaegi
Lea Warrington, RN, BSN, gives a presentation on historical trauma to nursing students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
"Just being born American Indian brought me into the legacy of harm and poor health," asserts Roxanne Struthers, RN, PhD, CTN, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing in Minneapolis and president-elect of the National Alaska Native American Indian Nurses Association (NANAINA).
"I have seen in my family the effects of disease-TB and other epidemics with no resistance and little or no treatment. And not only disease [but also cultural loss]. My mother's first language was Ojibwe; she was beaten when she spoke it, then her only language, at a rural reservation school. Later, she would not allow us to speak it at home. Now as a nurse, all the diseases I encounter every day [in Indian patients]-alcoholism, drug dependence, diabetes, overeating-I see as parallel to my own life. Some younger nurses may not be as aware of this at first, but it will resonate when they hear the history."
John Lowe, RN, PhD
"That's when I started to see-and later I started to hear more," recollects Lillian Rice, a Forest County Potawotami Tribe Native practitioner and alcohol/drug counselor, born in backwoods Star Lake, Wis., and now living in Minneapolis. Then only 17 years old (in 1949), she linked the negative behavior of a close family member sinking into alcoholism with what she had heard earlier as a child from her grandmother. The grandmother had told of TB epidemics and children's deaths, of scarlet fever quarantining with confiscation of Native ceremonial paraphernalia, of relocation without treatment or recompense, of going back home and finding the old estate burnt down by the U.S. government. Other family members brought forth painful memories from boarding school days of horsewhipping and humiliation.
"That's when I decided to become a healer," says Rice, who leads women's sweat lodges and women's spiritual gatherings. "After raising my five children and getting into chemical dependency work, I made a decision with a promise to the Great Spirit to be there for [indian] women in honor of my grandmother."