Jef­frey Math­ias
Com­mu­nity Cen­tered Inte­gra­tive Prac­tice
Grad­u­ate School of Social Work
Uni­ver­sity of Washington

This is a blog to house my reflec­tion pieces writ­ten for His­tor­i­cal Trauma, a class offered in UW’s grad­u­ate School of Social Work.

“The con­cept of his­tor­i­cal trauma has served as both a descrip­tion of trauma responses among oppressed peo­ples and a causal expla­na­tion for them. Asso­ci­ated his­tor­i­cal events tend to be pro­foundly destruc­tive at a phys­i­cal and/or emo­tional level and are gen­er­ally expe­ri­enced by many peo­ple in a com­mu­nity (Brave Heart, 1999a, 1999b, 2000; Brave Heart & DeBruyn, 1998). His­tor­i­cal trauma is col­lec­tive in that many mem­bers of a com­mu­nity view the events as acute losses and expe­ri­ence cor­re­spond­ing trauma reac­tions. It is under­stood as com­pound­ing inso­much as events occur­ring at dif­fer­ent time peri­ods (often across gen­er­a­tions) come to be seen as parts of a sin­gle trau­matic tra­jec­tory. Pre­vi­ous schol­ars have sug­gested that the effects of these his­tor­i­cally trau­matic events are trans­mit­ted inter­gen­er­a­tionally as descen­dents con­tinue to iden­tify emo­tion­ally with ances­tral suf­fer­ing (Brave Heart, 1999a, 1999b). Thus, although the events involved may have occurred over the course of many years and gen­er­a­tions, they con­tinue to have clear impacts on con­tem­po­rary indi­vid­ual and famil­ial health, men­tal health, and iden­tity.” –Tessa Evans Campbell