When I first read that my breath caught in my throat. Never before had I seen a non-Indigenous person so succinctly sum up the way that my people’s experience of genocide worked. First, remove the means for the people to independently look after and support themselves and their community. Next, force them to become dependent upon the very state that wants to destroy them. Withhold basic necessities. Wait.
This is the exact tactic Canada has used on Indigenous peoples for hundreds of years. So many of our nations have been forcefully displaced, so many of our children stolen from our arms and placed in residential schools or, more recently, in the arms of overworked social workers and violent foster parents, as if white abuse could ever be better than Indigenous love. These policies are not about what’s best for Indigenous peoples, despite repeated claims of faux concern from government officials. These policies are about what’s best for Canada. They are the reason Indigenous peoples have control over only 0.02 percent of our original lands—a meagre amount that is still, according to some Canadians, too much. Canadian success has always depended upon Indigenous destruction.
Just as genocide tends to use the same tactics to carry out its horrors, genocide also tends to produce similar effects in the lives of survivors. In Bezo’s study, he discusses the discrepancies between what could be called Ukraine’s successes and what could be called its failures, years after the Holodomor. For instance, Ukraine is one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies and is ranked fourth in the world for its adult literacy rate. Yet, out of forty-one countries, Ukraine has the highest percentage of eleven-, thirteen- and fifteen-year-olds who drink alcohol at least once a week. It has the second-highest number of eleven-year-olds who get drunk at least once a week, and the most eleven-year-olds who smoke at least once a week. It holds the unfortunate title of lowest life expectancy in Europe.
How can a country be doing so well economically and educationally and still be suffering so acutely? Something as traumatic as genocide doesn’t have a definitive ending point. Its horrors live on in the memories of those who survive, playing over and over with no reprieve. What are you supposed to do once you know the depths of human suffering? Once you’ve experienced the limits of human depravity and indifference? Once you’ve witnessed how easy it was for people, neighbours even, to see you and your family as less than human, to treat you as less than human, or to look the other way and let it happen? How do you take that knowledge and try to continue on the same way you did before? Everything has a different taste, a different tone. No amount of economic or educational success can change that.
And yet some seem to think it can. Here in Canada, Indigenous people exhibit many of the same behaviours as post-Holodomor Ukrainians, a fact Bezo acknowledges in his study. We have statistically higher levels of heavy drinking than non-Indigenous Canadians. We have a five- to ten-year lower life expectancy, depending on gender. Our rates of daily smoking are almost double that of non-Indigenous Canadians. The only thing Indigenous people in Canada and Ukrainians have in common—the only thing that could account for these eerily similar stats—are our respective experiences of genocide.
I’ve read so many angry comments degrading Indigenous people because we haven’t been as economically and educationally successful as Canadians who haven’t experienced genocide. Or because, according to these people, Jewish Holocaust survivors have overcome their genocide better than we have, so we must be inherently deficient. I’ve heard people say Indigenous people need to “get over” our genocide, as though it’s not still happening now in newer, more socially acceptable ways. Would making more money and being more literate make us more deserving of human compassion? It certainly wouldn’t remove our pain; after all, Ukraine’s economic and educational successes haven’t made its citizens’ intergenerational trauma magically disappear.
Epigenetics is the study of how a person’s actions and experiences can affect their genetic makeup, causing certain genes to become either active or dormant. It’s a term that was coined by scientists Lars Olov Bygren and Marcus Pembrey to describe the results they observed in four scientific studies they conducted, both separately and together, which could not otherwise be explained by modern genetics. Two of the studies were of Överkalix, a secluded Swedish community whose seasons of feast or famine were based almost entirely on the success of their barley and rye harvests. Bygren and Pembrey found that the granddaughters of women who were in the womb during famine seasons, and were therefore undernourished when their eggs were forming, had a significantly increased risk of early death compared with those whose grandmothers did not experience famine in utero. This finding supported an earlier study Bygren did on Överkalix, which found grandsons of men who experienced a feast season prior to puberty—the time when their sperm were developing—and therefore overate, were also significantly more likely to die an early death due to diabetes or heart failure. The scientists found similarly puzzling results when studying the effects of smoking: the sons of 166 English men who smoked before puberty were consistently fatter than the sons of men who either hadn’t smoked at all or had started smoking after puberty.
There was no scientific reason this should be the case—no DNA sequences had changed—yet it clearly was. The evidence was all there, suggesting that not only a person’s environment but also their individual decisions could alter the expression of their genes and thus influence the lives of their descendants.
Haudenosaunee have always believed in the principle of the seven generations. When you make a decision, you must consciously think about what effects that decision could have on your descendants seven generations in the future. This world does not belong to you; you are merely borrowing it from the coming faces. Epigenetics seems to replicate that philosophy on the genetic level. Your decisions and traumas are never solely yours alone, or even yours and your children’s. Your decisions and traumas mark every subsequent generation after you, creating ripples in the future that can’t always be anticipated and can never be controlled.
What does this mean for those who experienced starvation, malnutrition and other forms of trauma in residential schools? What does this mean for their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren? Historian of food, health and colonialism Ian Mosby and assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto Tracey Galloway have looked at some of these ramifications in their article “ ‘Hunger Was Never Absent’: How Residential School Diets Shaped Current Patterns of Diabetes among Indigenous Peoples in Canada.” The quote in the title comes from residential school survivor Russell Moses, who used it to describe his years in Brantford, Ontario’s Mohawk Institute. One can see why he said this—and also why survivors referred to the school as “the Mush Hole”—when looking at its menu on any given day:
Breakfast consisted of “two slices of bread with either jam or honey as the dressing, oatmeal with worms or corn meal porridge, which was minimal in quantity and appalling in quality.” For lunch, it was “water as the beverage…one and a half slices of dry bread, and the main course consisted of a ‘rotten soup’…(i.e., scraps of beef, vegetables, some in a state of decay).” For supper, “students were given two slices of bread and jam, fried potatoes, no meat [and] a bun baked by the girls.” Moses even recalled hungry children “eating from the swill barrel, picking out soggy bits of food that was intended for the pigs.”
Moses’s experience was hardly the exception. As Mosby and Galloway note, hunger was so prevalent inside residential schools that, between 1948 and 1952, more than a thousand malnourished students from six residential schools were used as subjects for nutrition experiments. Instead of being helped, these children were treated as perfect specimens for scientific inquiry. Their pain was measured and mapped, theorized about and eventually immortalized in cold, clinical reports.
I wonder what these scientists told themselves when they conducted their experiments, how they rationalized their complicity. Whether they thought about these children while eating their breakfast in
the morning, or breaking from work for lunch. Whether they considered themselves lucky to find so many starving Indigenous children to experiment on. Whether they were, in some ways, thankful Canada both mandated and drastically underfunded residential schools, because it made finding malnourished test subjects that much easier. Or whether they ignored these types of thoughts altogether, because coming face to face with what they meant would shatter everything they believed about their country, about themselves.
The physiological effects of starving affect a person for the rest of their life. Mosby and Galloway cite studies that show that childhood hunger often causes stunted height, which in turn can cause an increased tendency towards obesity as well as higher rates of developing type 2 diabetes. Metabolic changes occur, as well, which means that even when a child is no longer starving, hunger has essentially trained the body to continue to accumulate more fat regardless. Given these sorts of impacts on residential school survivors, combined with what we are learning about the ways epigenetics passes these experiences on, how can we possibly expect survivors’ descendants to be much better off? To “get over” a genocide that has marked their very genes, and their children’s genes, and their children’s genes?
My paternal grandmother, Melita Elliott, did not attend the Mush Hole. A well-off Mohawk family from my community sent their kids to get educated in the United States, then, when they came back to Six Nations, they opened schools themselves, offering an alternative to the residential school. That’s where my grandmother went—to a numbered school. She was the only child in her family who went. Her siblings weren’t so lucky.
I know very little about my paternal grandfather, Arthur Elliott. But I know there are Elliotts who did attend the Mush Hole. I saw their names on a graduation list during a tour. I felt like I was going to vomit.
My father, thankfully, did not attend the Mush Hole. His mother moved their entire family to Buffalo, New York, to make sure he and his siblings would be safe. I can’t imagine the fear or resolve it would take to make such a decision, if one can call it a decision. My grandmother could either become a refugee on her own people’s lands or watch the Mush Hole swallow her children one by one.
Mosby and Galloway write, “We can now be fairly certain that the elevated risk of obesity, early-onset insulin resistance and diabetes observed among Indigenous peoples in Canada arises, in part at least, from the prolonged malnutrition experienced by many residential school survivors.” My father has diabetes. One of his sisters and one of his brothers have diabetes. Their mother had diabetes. I haven’t developed diabetes yet, but I often feel it’s only a matter of time before my insulin levels drop and my diagnosis comes in. It’s my genetic inheritance.
My kid’s, too.
The ways Indigenous peoples deal with our trauma, whether with alcohol or violence or Chips Ahoy! cookies, get pathologized under colonialism. Instead of looking at the horrors Canada has inflicted upon us and linking them to our current health issues, Canada has chosen to blame our biology, as though those very genes they’re blaming weren’t marked by genocide, too. This is how a once thriving, healthy population comes to be “inherently unhealthy.” It wasn’t the genocide that centuries of Canadian officials enacted upon us that was the problem; it was how we reacted to that genocide. It was our fault, our bodies’ faults.
Abusers rarely take responsibility for themselves. They prefer to blame their victims for their actions.
The first time I made Hamburger Helper it was because my mother was in the hospital. She usually cooked every day, but she was either too depressed or too manic for Dad to tolerate anymore, so he had her committed. He was selling satellite dish subscriptions door to door at the time. He came home tired, too tired to worry about cooking. I was eleven or twelve. Old enough to figure it out.
No one had taught me to cook, so all I had were the instructions on the box. I had no idea I was supposed to thaw the ground beef, so I plopped the frozen chunk in the frying pan and turned on the stove. As soon as the bottom was done I flipped it over, patiently scraped the cooked portion away with a wooden spoon, waited for the bottom to cook again, then repeated the process until everything was brown and broken apart. It took almost a half-hour.
I added the water, the noodles, the flavoured powder, hoping that dinner would taste like Mom had made it. She was often an inattentive cook, either serving crunchy, uncooked noodles or noodles boiled to mush, so the bar wasn’t exactly high. But Mom’s love and attention were what my siblings and I hungered for most, anyway, and that was never something I could recreate for them in her absence, no matter how hard I tried.
In My Conversations with Canadians, Stō:lo writer and Indigenous literary icon Lee Maracle shares a reaction she had to an Indigenous dance performance called Agua/Water. Though in front of her eyes there was dancing, she says, “In my mind, I watched my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers, hauling McClary stoves across mountain passes, digging clams whose beds were dying, poisoned by toxic waste that was not to be cleaned up for over a hundred years. I watched them feed children consumed with disease and I grieved as I imagined who we might have been if, when the interlopers came, we had been invited back to the table they appropriated from our Ta’ahs.” When I think back to that first time I cooked for my family, I think of Maracle’s words. The food that night was edible, so technically it was fine. But I wonder what the first meal I cooked would have been if poverty, violence, mental illness and trauma hadn’t kept my family in a sort of permanent survival mode. Would my mother have had the time to teach me how to thaw ground beef? Would she have taught me how to make a salad, a simple task that still, for some reason, intimidates me? Would my father have known how to hunt? How to properly skin a deer and tan a hide? Would he have known better than to plant an entire field of fruits and vegetables—white corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries—on the land across the creek from our trailer, where it flooded every year without fail, destroying all but the hardiest, most stubborn plants?
Would my grandmother have taught me how to properly make frybread, told me how sticky the dough should be, how long it should be left under the yellow, bubbling oil? Would my aunts have taught me how to plant the three sisters in traditional Haudenosaunee mounds? The corn steady and strong in the middle, beans stealthily climbing its stalks, and the squash spread out around them both, protecting them from weeds and pests? Those three crops alone had enough nutritional value to sustain our people on a vegetarian diet. Would we all be lean, strong and healthy if we still lived on that today?
Maybe if circumstances were different, if history were different, if trauma hadn’t tattooed itself across my genes, I would be able to move around my kitchen with ease, knowing exactly what foods I should cook for my family and exactly how to cook them. Maybe I’d know the land the way my ancestors wanted me to know it, care for it tenderly, lovingly, the way a child is supposed to care for their mother.
Maybe I wouldn’t rely on sugary food to see me through my battles with anxiety and depression, forever chasing the temporary bliss of that first sweet bite.
My mother loved Smartfood white cheddar popcorn with the same dangerous ferocity she loved my father. Any time she had an extra couple bucks, she’d pick up a big bag, which she ate fast and furious. Once she swallowed a handful of kernels so quickly she started choking, and rather than stop eating so she could get her throat clear she threw another handful of popcorn in her mouth.
“What are you doing!” my siblings and I yelled. “Stop eating! You’re choking!”
We were incredulous, not sure whether to laugh at the absurdity or cover our mouths in horror. We ended up laughing, as my family tends to do. Even my mother laughed once she’d stopped coughing. My siblings and I still bring this memory up from time to time. “What was Mom thinking?” we ask one another, delirious with laughter, our eyes leaking tears.
How do we break down this cycle of intergenerational trauma and ill health? By making enough money to afford healthy food,
and by ensuring our children become wealthy enough to afford healthy food, too? By moving to well-off neighbourhoods in populated cities, where food insecurity isn’t an issue? Capitalism forever positions itself as the solution to the problem of capitalism. Colonialism forever positions itself as the solution to the problem of colonialism. As though shovelling more of what we’re currently choking on into our mouths would ever actually help us.
I wanted to end this essay with hope, but for a long time I wasn’t sure how. My experiences with food have been dysfunctional, and though I can identify that dysfunction, I still haven’t figured out how to change it. How can I offer hope for others when I can’t find it for myself? When we’re facing a colonial history that has altered our very DNA?
Recently I read a Facebook post from nêhiyaw writer, activist and self-described philosopher queen Erica Violet Lee, who said, “If historical trauma is strong enough to alter our DNA and remain in our bones for generations, then there is no question in my mind that the love of our ancestors is in our DNA and our bones as well. The memory of that love is strong enough that it still exists in us, and in the plants that we have always cared for.”
Food that carries the love of our ancestors can be medicine—a medicine that offers something much stronger than whatever temporary feelings of control or relief I’ve experienced bingeing on triple-chocolate cookies. Corn, beans and squash were once all my people really needed. They were so essential to our everyday lives that we referred to them as our sisters. We would preserve each plant’s seeds and pass them on to our children, knowing that with this gift, they would be able to provide the same nutritious food for their families that we provided for them. This was an act of absolute, undiminished intergenerational love. And if intergenerational trauma can alter DNA, why can’t intergenerational love?
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground Page 10