The notion that we inherit the legacy of our ancestors, not just their wealth and facial features, but their good luck and hard knocks, is hardly new. The idea that we carry a family curse and shoulder the burdens of the past has been part of our human mythology for as long as we’ve been able to think. The great devastations of the Bronze Age, when civilisations collapsed; the endless ethnic cleansings across continents and centuries; the earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis and floods; the great plagues and pandemics – all get wrapped into the drumbeat of ritual and story we try to pass down. But only in recent decades have psychologists trained in the scientific method begun analysing the impact of history’s traumas on subsequent generations. Only this century have we begun to tally the true, transgenerational toll of these historic debacles, and considered a way to heal.
The most famously studied are the children of Europe’s Holocaust survivors, who suffer higher risk of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder than their generational peers. But they are hardly alone. Studies have ranged across the African-American descendants of slaves; the Japanese descendants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; descendants of the genocide in Rwanda….
One of the leading experts in transgenerational trauma is Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, a clinical social work researcher at the University of New Mexico, and member of the Lakota tribe. Her 2000 paper on carrying historical trauma is now considered a cornerstone of the field. After Sitting Bull, a leader of the Lakota resistance, was killed in cold blood in 1890 at the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, hundreds of his followers fled in fear to nearby Wounded Knee, where they were massacred, their bodies thrown into a mass grave. ‘This massacre has reverberated through the hearts and minds of Lakota survivors and their descendants,’ Brave Heart writes. And the trauma went on, with Native American children dispatched to boarding schools, sometimes more than 1,000 miles away from families and tribal communities. In these facilities, children were beaten, shackled and chained to bedposts. Conditions were so overcrowded that, between 1936 and 1941, a tuberculosis epidemic killed more than a third of the Lakota population over one year of age.
Brave Heart defines historical trauma of the sort experienced by Native Americans as ‘cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma’. The intergenerational response to this kind of trauma includes depression, self-destructive behaviour, psychic numbing, anger and elevated mortality rates from suicide and cardiovascular diseases. Lakota mortality rates for heart disease are, to this day, almost twice the rate for the general United States population; suicide rates are more than double the national average.