Intergenerational Trauma and Moral Injury
Trauma passes through generations. Not just through behavior, though that is one carrier. Through biology, through the stories families tell and don’t tell, through the silences, through the wounds that were never tended.
The boarding school system designed to “kill the Indian, save the man” did not merely harm the children who were taken. Those children grew up. They had children. The violence they absorbed — being beaten, stripped of language, cut off from ceremony, severed from land — became the only model of family they knew. The historical trauma is the wound; the intergenerational transmission is how it keeps bleeding.
The wound travels both directions
Here is the harder truth, the one that settler descendants need to sit with:
The colonizers were also wounded by what they did.
Those who perpetrated the violence, who participated in the imperial project of genocide, enslavement, and extraction — they hurt their own descendants too. Not equally. Not comparably to those who were targeted. But the moral injury of participating in atrocity leaves its mark. It lives in the body. It shapes the culture. It creates a spiritual sickness that does not heal itself.
“A curse can only be transformed. Only colonized people colonize people. It’s not just the Inuit that needs to heal, not just the colonized. The colonizers need even more healing than we do.”
Moral injury is the term for what happens when your actions violate your own moral code — or what happens when you are raised inside a system that violates it continuously on your behalf.
What this means for white-identified men
The violence that built this society — genocide, enslavement, ecological destruction — was carried out partly by ancestors. You did not choose this. You did not do it. And it is yours to reckon with.
Not to carry as guilt. Guilt is a closed loop. Reckoning is active — it requires facing the truth, grieving it, and joining the work of repair.
See: Ancestral Recovery — Roots Deeper Than Whiteness
The healing is communal
Western, individualistic therapy models are not adequate to this wound. The healing required is communal: grief shared together, stories witnessed in community, land-based practices that reconnect the body to what it was severed from.
You cannot recover from historical trauma in a therapy office alone. The wound was social. The healing is social.