In this guest post, Dr. Margaret Moss talks about the health of
American Indians and how it has been shaped through historical
traumas related to US federal policy. Dr Moss is an enrolled
member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota and an
Associate Professor at the Yale School of Nursing. I first heard
about historical trauma, as an explanatory concept, about 10
years ago in my role as an academic. Without knowing the term, I
had seen and experienced it playing out in those I knew or
loved; nursed; or partnered in research with; and even in myself
during my ‘more than a few’ decades on this earth. Historical
trauma as a concept has been applied to groups such as those
surviving the Holocaust and their descendants, as well as to the
Japanese who suffered internment camps in the US during World
War ll and their descendants. For American Indians, “historical
trauma is defined as cumulative trauma over both the life span
and across generations that results from massive cataclysmic
events such as the Wou