This paper reviews some recent research on the mental health of the First Nations, Inuit, and Metis of Canada. We summarize evidence for the social origins of mental health problems and illustrate the ongoing responses of individuals and communities to the legacy of colonization. Cultural discontinuity and oppression have been linked to high rates of depression, alcoholism, suicide, and violence in many communities, with the greatest impact on youth. Despite these challenges, many communities have done well, and research is needed to identify the factors that promote wellness. Cultural psychiatry can contribute to rethinking mental health services and health promotion for indigenous populations and communities.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/070674370004500702

The mental health of Aboriginal peoples: transformations of identity and community.

Objective: To identify issues and concepts to guide the development of culturally appropriate mental health promotion strategies with Aboriginal populations and communities in Canada.Methods: We review recent literature examining the links between the history of colonialism and government interventions (including the residential school system, out-adoption, and centralised bureaucratic control) and the mental health of Canadian Aboriginal peoples.Results: There are high rates of social problems, demoralisation, depression, substance abuse, suicide and other mental health problems in many, though not all, Aboriginal communities. Although direct causal links are difficult to demonstrate with quantitative methods, there is clear and compelling evidence that the long history of cultural oppression and marginalisation has contributed to the high levels of mental health problems found in many communities. There is evidence that strengthening ethnocultural identity, community integration and political empowermen...

http://web.mnstate.edu/robertsb/306/Healing%20traditions%20culture,community%20and%20mental%20health%20promotion%20with%20Canadian%20Aboriginal%20Peoples.pdf

Healing traditions: culture, community and mental health promotion with Canadian Aboriginal peoples

Appendix A: Excerpts from Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

Recent years have seen the rise of historical trauma as a construct to describe the impact of colonization, cultural suppression, and historical oppression of Indigenous peoples in North America (e.g., Native Americans in the United States, Aboriginal peoples in Canada). The discourses of psychiatry and psychology contribute to the conflation of disparate forms of violence by emphasizing presumptively universal aspects of trauma response. Many proponents of this construct have made explicit analogies to the Holocaust as a way to understand the transgenerational effects of genocide. However, the social, cultural, and psychological contexts of the Holocaust and of post-colonial Indigenous “survivance” differ in many striking ways. Indeed, the comparison suggests that the persistent suffering of Indigenous peoples in the Americas reflects not so much past trauma as ongoing structural violence. The comparative study of genocide and other forms of massive, organized violence can do much to illuminate both common mechanisms and distinctive features, and trace the looping effects from political processes to individual experience and back again. The ethics and pragmatics of individual and collective healing, restitution, resilience, and recovery can be understood in terms of the self-vindicating loops between politics, structural violence, public discourse, and embodied experience.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1363461514536358

Rethinking Historical Trauma

https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1200&context=aprci

The determinants of First Nation and Inuit health: a critical population health approach.

With the growing strength of minority voices in recent decades has come much impassioned discussion of residential schools, the institutions where attendance by Native children was compulsory as recently as the 1960s. Former students have come forward in increasing numbers to describe the psychological and physical abuse they suffered in these schools, and many view the system as an experiment in cultural genocide. In this first comprehensive history of these institutions, J.R. Miller explores the motives of all three agents in the story. He looks at the separate experiences and agendas of the government officials who authorized the schools, the missionaries who taught in them, and the students who attended them. Starting with the foundations of residential schooling in seventeenth-century New France, Miller traces the modern version of the institution that was created in the 1880s, and, finally, describes the phasing-out of the schools in the 1960s. He looks at instruction, work and recreation, care and abuse, and the growing resistance to the system on the part of students and their families. Based on extensive interviews as well as archival research, Miller's history is particularly rich in Native accounts of the school system. This book is an absolute first in its comprehensive treatment of this subject. J.R. Miller has written a new chapter in the history of relations between indigenous and immigrant peoples in Canada. Co-winner of the 1996 Saskatchewan Book Award for nonfiction. Winner of the 1996 John Wesley Dafoe Foundation competition for Distinguished Writing by Canadians Named an 'Outstanding Book on the subject of human rights in North America' by the Gustavus Myer Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America.

Shingwauk's Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools

Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens : A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada

Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada

One of Canada's longest unresolved issues is the historical and present-day failure of the country's governments to recognize treaties made between Aboriginal peoples and the Crown. Compact, Contract, Covenant is renowned historian of Native-newcomer relations J.R. Miller's exploration and explanation of more than four centuries of treaty-making. The first historical account of treaty-making in Canada, Miller untangles the complicated threads of treaties, pacts, and arrangements with the Hudson's Bay Company and the Crown, as well as modern treaties to provide a remarkably clear and comprehensive overview of this little-understood and vitally important relationship. Covering everything from pre-contact Aboriginal treaties to contemporary agreements in Nunavut and recent treaties negotiated under the British Columbia Treaty Process, Miller emphasizes both Native and non-Native motivations in negotiating, the impact of treaties on the peoples involved, and the lessons that are relevant to Native-newcomer relations today. Accessible and informative, Compact, Contract, Covenant is a much-needed history of the evolution of treaty-making and will be required reading for decades to come.

Compact, Contract, Covenant: Aboriginal Treaty-Making in Canada

The recent Supreme Court of Canada decision in Regina v. Marshall regarding the treaty rights of the Mi'kmaq dramatically underscored our need to understand the history of treaty relationships between Canada's First Nations and the Crown. The numbered treaties covering Canada's prairie provinces represent the culmination of the country's pre-modern treaty-making era, which ended in the early twentieth century. Sizable portions of the territories covered by six of these accords are located within the boundaries of Saskatchewan. "Bounty and Benevolence" offers a unique perspective and examination of the history of treaty making in this province. Frank Tough, Jim Miller, and Arthur Ray draw on a wide range of documentary sources to provide a rich and complex interpretation of the process that led to these historic agreements. The authors explain how Saskatchewan treaties were shaped by long-standing First Nations-Hudson's Bay Company diplomatic and economic understandings, treaty practices developed in eastern Canada before the 1870s, and the changing economic and political realities of western Canada during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tough, Miller, and Ray also show why these same forces were responsible for creating some of the misunderstandings and disputes that subsequently arose between the First Nations and government officials regarding the interpretation and implementation of the accords. "Bounty and Benevolence" offers new insights into this crucial dimension of Canadian history, making it of interest to the general reader as well as specialists in the field of First Nations history.

J. R. Miller

Papers

Shingwauk's Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools

Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens : A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada

Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada

Compact, Contract, Covenant: Aboriginal Treaty-Making in Canada

Bounty and benevolence : a history of Saskatchewan treaties