Residential school, holocaust effects similar

Page 1

The psychiatric profession seems to be coming to some dramatic conclusions as it attempts to deal with mental health issues in Indigenous communities.

Three days of discussion at Montreal's Jewish General Hospital, sponsored by McGill University's Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry, revealed that mainstream medical practitioners are realizing they're going to have to confront the painful realities of colonial history before they can begin to effectively treat Indigenous people and communities.

Psychiatric practitioners and professors from across Canada and around the world spoke at the conference.

Moderator Lawrence Kirmayer, the director of the social and transcultural psychiatry division at McGill University's medical school, pointed out that statistical studies have shown that Indigenous communities have lower rates of psychiatric problems when they control their own government functions - the more control, the lower the rate of suffering.

The most contentious presentation was made by an Australian professor who has studied health problems in Indigenous people in his country.

Professor Ernest Hunter, a psychiatrist who is professor of public health (mental health) in the department of social and preventive medicine at the University of Queensland has studied the behavior of medical professionals during the Nazi years. He looked at physicians who collaborated with the Nazis as well as those who were victims and those who were in a position to speak up against the medical experimentation and the death camps but chose not to.

Having also studied mental health problems in Indigenous communities in Australia, he has seen similarities between the mental suffering of Indigenous people and holocaust victims.

As he delivered his paper - . . . the deep sleep of forgetfulness: Reflecting on Disremembering - to a lecture hall filled close to capacity with his peers, Hunter felt the need to explain why he was making that comparison.

"To consider the holocaust and the experiences of Australia's Indigenous population in the same study seemed reckless. Well, that's how I felt in 1991 after returning from Yad Va-Shem (holocaust memorial) in Jerusalem where I'd been studying medical professionals as perpetrators during the Nazi years and where I'd begun to consider the relationship between doctors and Indigenous Australians," he said. "At that time I felt that associating these issues was unfair and unlikely to gain a sympathetic hearing amongst my medical peers. Well, that proved to be true; sensitivity was very close to the surface. In this paper I return to the original project - to consider medical professionals as perpetrators, bystanders and victims of the trauma of the holocaust and colonization. I argue that this history is critical to understanding the social and political context of professional work with these traumatized populations, and that to not do so may lead to complicity in rationalizing and trivializing the harm done."

Hunter argued the treatment of Indigenous peoples by colonizers in his country, a treatment that was similar to that received by Indigenous peoples in Canada, was extremely harmful and has created a legacy of psychological trauma that must be addressed. He said failure to come to grips with the type of harm done has and could continue to prevent physicians from successfully treating that trauma.

He cited several disturbing studies to make his audience take the subject seriously.

"I begin by considering the concept of genocide in Australia. Over the last decade this term has come into common use in Indigenous country, often with reference to the 1948 convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide in which subclause 2 e) includes forcibly transferring children of a group to another group," he said. "Thus, in Bringing Them Home, a recent Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report on the removal of Indigenous children from their homes, the commissoners say the Australian practice of Indigenous child removal involved both systematic racial discrimination and genocide as defined by international law. It continued to be practised as official policy long after it was clearly prohibited by treaties to which Australia had voluntarily subscribed.

"Well, allegations of genocide are now so common that there's a danger, ironically, of trivialization and denial. If these accusations are to be taken seriously, where are the trials? Can we really talk of genocide in living memory and not prosecute? Is it too late?"

To make the point that denial is playing a harmful role he asked a series of questions to underline the point that not taking the allegations of genocide seriously is yet another symptom of the problems that continue to plague Indigenous peoples.

He asked if it was too late to prosecute accused Nazi war criminals, knowing full well there is a high-profile war crimes case pending in Australia at this moment and concluded that it isn't too late.

"Is it because the accused is above accountability?" he asked, rhetorically, before reminding the audience that war crimes trials have been conducted in the international court in the Haig regarding more recent events in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.

"Is it because the accused would insist that they were following orders and had good intentions? Well, remember Nuremberg, (where the court) dismissed such evasions in laying the foundation for crimes against humanity," he said.

He noted that the international community of nation-states was motivated by the disgust and horror experienced when troops freed the surviving prisoners from the death camps.

"The genocide convention, which was signed in Paris in December, 1948, the day after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, emerged in response to the events of the Second World War," he said.

But even then, some nation-states were wary of putting too many teeth into the international conventions because ofthe programs they were using as they dealt with the assimilation of Indigenous peoples.

"Many signatories were concerned about trouble in their own colonial backyards," he said. "Minority rights received no mention in either the charter of the United Nations or the Universal Declaration and were not seriously considered for several decades."

Hunter said research has shown that irrational, unexamined racial biases were demonstrated by doctors, politicians and bureaucrats who designed the Lock hospitals and lazerets (segregated hospitals) established to house Aboriginal people in Australia who were thought - wrongly - to be responsible for outbreaks of sexually transmitted diseases.

"How can the events now, that have been extensively documented, be overlooked? Well, despite this documented bloody history, many geneticists, anthropologists and psychiatrists have slipped from this dream into the deep sleep of forgetfulness," he said. "Forgetfulness or disremembering. In Australia, a cult of disremembering is how (one academic) describes the great Australian silence by which the surviving Indigenous people of this land had disappeared from the consciousness of most Australians until recent decades. Silence certainly about the abysmal state of Indigenous health, something of which the medical profession should be ashamed."

He said it is important for all sides that there be "acknowledgement, restitution and reparation.

"A decade ago our prime minister acknowledged. He said, 'It was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their families,'" Hunter said. "Restitution is restoration of that which can be returned, and in Australia it involved engaging with Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders around their just claims for land and resources. To date, this has been contested at nearly every turn. Reparation - compensaton for that which can never be given back - will ultimately be the most difficult and important matter."

Hunter ended by reminding his colleagues that Indigenous peoples didn't ask for the enormous complications that the horrors of colonialism have inflicted on their world. He cautioned his peers to avoid blaming the victims by not being willing to listen to the patients and not striving to understand their pain from their point of view rather than from a western or European point of view.

"Doctors can contribute to blaming the victim. They may do so because they are unwilling to deal with it or are unaware. Perpetrators have their remedy, it's called amnesia. Bystanders may surface only fitfully from the deep sleep of forgetfulness. The people that we work with, our patients, the victims, must live with this today and forever. Unlocking memory in the service of healing demands respect and both professional and personal reflection."