Healing generations of trauma

Its been more than 20 years since Micheal Auger moved from his home on Treaty 8 territory to Vancouver in order to further his career in the film industry and to get some space from the lasting impact residential school has had on his home community and his family.

The residential school his family members attended, St. Brunos, is a 10-minute drive from the Driftpile Cree Nation, where Auger grew up, near Joussard, Alta. While the schools physical structure no longer stands, Auger, 59, says the harm the facility caused continues to affect survivors and their families.

Augers maternal grandparents, his mother and several of her siblings attended the institution. Their trauma became his own, he says.

But Auger, who left the Driftpile Cree Nation with his wife Petie Chalifoux, adds he is optimistic that survivors and those suffering from intergenerational trauma, like himself, can heal.

This is his story, in his own words. 

I'm the youngest of six siblings. We were raised by a single mother Rose Auger. She passed on in 2006. I was also raised by my grandparents.

Being the youngest, I only heard bits and pieces. I think, like most families, the grandparents certainly didn't talk much about residential school and, if they did, they were talking in Cree amongst each other.

My grandfather built the house we lived in. This house had a wood stove in the living room and then a wood stove in the kitchen for cooking. The thing I remember vividly, even at an early age, were the paintings of Jesus on the wall. It confused me. But I never asked. I never tried to inquire, like, who was this guy and why was he on our walls in our house? That always stuck with me.

We had dogs, we had gardens. My grandfather kept horses. After he retired from logging, he started to fix vehicles. He built the garage and he built the woodshed. 

I saw many members of my family succumbing to alcohol. A couple of uncles in particular were really struggling. They were drinking a lot. They were violent with each other and violent with other people in the community and within the family. So there was this kind of trauma emerging at a relatively young age. I would see fights and just stuff that no kid should see. Being unaware of why or how this came to be, you know, you just sort of accept it. I certainly remember the feelings of being afraid.

I was right on the cusp [of being sent to residential school]. Of course, I'm grateful I didn't go, but the public school I went to wasn't much better. We had teachers who were just as racist and would say just as horrible things.

Our relatives who did go to residential schools, what they were exposed to is just horrific. The echoes of those [experiences] are very, very powerful and not to be discounted. And there are many people within even Indigenous communities who minimize and discount and ignore, but at some point the effects show up: they show up in poverty, they show up in violence, they show up in addictions of all kinds. 

I witnessed one of my uncles be extremely violent with his own wife and then threaten violence to his siblings and his parents my grandparents. That was probably one of the most traumatizing direct experiences I had. I was like, five, six, maybe seven years old. He was a very angry person. He obviously was using alcohol to try to self-medicate at a certain point his anger was not contained and he would take it out on people he loved and people who loved him. That's one of the real horrors of the intergenerational effects.

I was sexually abused multiple times as a kid. And that's the personal trauma, the personal experience that I struggled with the most, and it affected my relationships with everybody.

I've looked at it long and hard over the last couple of decades trying to understand my own inherited trauma and how it affected me and how it affected my life. I went to counselling.

When I was still relatively young, five or six years old, my mom travelled with a group called White Roots of Peace and she took me along. It was like her spiritual awakening. She travelled to different nations and we kind of made our way around the continent. A Sioux medicine man from South Dakota came up to our place and he passed some ceremonies on to my mom and my uncle. That was a lifesaver for many of us. We entered the sweat lodge and had different ceremonies that really allowed us a lot of comfort, safety and understanding. That was a big part of a long journey of healing. 

I stayed away from drugs and alcohol. I could have easily slid into those same addictions. So what I tried to do was turn them into positive addictions like fitness. Even though I struggled and I quit high school a couple of times, I would go back to do my best. I scraped through high school by the skin of my teeth and then went on to college.

I have two older kids who are now in their early 30s and I recently had a baby boy who's going to be two very soon. Its been an incredible new level of learning because I didn't have a father. When my other kids were born, and I was young, I was so clueless. I mean, of course I love them and I did everything I could to be the best that I could, but I struggled.

With our little guy, I feel like I'm a good dad now. Any parent loves all their kids the same, but it's like my older kids had a different parent than what this guy has now. It shows the level of healing that you're doing when you can see that difference in yourself.

I went to college in Edmonton right out of high school. I went to university in Calgary. Eventually I moved to Vancouver. On the surface it was because of the film work, my career. But in fact, a large part of it was that Vancouver was a place that was far enough away from the direct traumas and the direct effects of colonization and residential school that reverberate in our home community still addictions and violence and all kinds of unhealthy things.

[My partner and I] go home and we love our people. We have our relatives who are there and they choose to stay there. We have many relatives who don't drink and who work in the community and are doing their best on the ground there to make a difference. 

We're here, in Vancouver, to make a better life for ourselves. But sometimes we would like to be back in the community. That's just a choice we made that we are now becoming much more clear about. And because we have our little guy, we want him to know the land that we grew up in the river, the lake, the forest and we want him to know his relatives much more than he currently does.

We go back as much as possible. We wish our community was healthier so that, you know, he wouldn't be exposed to the things that are still going on. 

I actually do believe that a person can fully and completely heal.

A goal of residential schools was to disempower us, to take away our power: our power to live a good life, to take care of our families, take care of ourselves, take care of our land. In order to do that, they targeted the families to disempower us as a community, as a nation, as people, as rightful and true owners of these lands.

I find it's not so much about what I physically do and what I do externally, but it's how I empower myself within my own heart, within my own mind, within my own consciousness, my own psyche. I feel like that's how we're going to recover, and I believe we certainly can recover fully.

You go through a stage where you feel like you have to get people to love you in order to feel love. Our elders used to say the answers are within. Wise people across the globe, all humanity, probably says the same thing. That just means that you love yourself. Youve got to love yourself.

There's so much good knowledge out there. I'm not just talking Indigenous knowledge keepers and elders and ceremonialists. I opened myself up to the world. I couldn't afford to go to workshops, but whatever I could find online in terms of those little nuggets of wisdom that people would share, I would think about them and then piece it together. You find your way, you do whatever it takes. That's the conscious commitment. 

I made a conscious decision many years ago now that I'm just going to approach life as a journey of learning. This has allowed me to look at healing as a lifelong thing. But it doesn't mean the pain and the suffering is lifelong. In fact, there comes a time where that really does disappear.

I see more and more bright lights. I see more and more people who are truly and sincerely healing.

There are many second generation, third generation survivors who still need a lot of healing, and I just hope and pray and send love to everybody that they take those steps.