Understanding Enables Us to Rise Above

Something tragic happened in our people’s history, something happened to our grandparents, to our great grandparents. Something shameful, violent, and traumatizing. It was so shameful that no one dared talked about it because it would bring up all those old memories and hurtful feelings of shame, anger, sadness, guilt and fear. So they learned to “stuff those old feelings” but those feelings would show up in our behaviour, in our words, in our actions toward one another.

It affected every fiber of our communities. The way we treated each other, the way we taught our kids, the way we governed ourselves and most importantly the way we saw life. We learned how to be distrustful, to be dependant, to be powerless, to be angry.

It is still alive in our communities, yet it has been so long that we have lived like this that we think “it’s just normal”. A lot of us were born into this life so we think “that’s just the way it is”.

People aren’t aware of it, once we are aware of where the dysfunction came from then we can make a choice, a choice of whether we want to continue to keep passing these behaviours down to our children or to stop it and create more healthy ones for them.

"Understanding enables us to rise above the issue and take control of our future" - Louise Hay

image: http://punkoryan.com/2010/07/12/red-deer-residential-school-memorial