I’d like to begin with 10 statements about healing from trauma and shame:

  1. Everybody has trauma that impacts our responses, perceptions, and behavior. It’s ok. It doesn’t mean you are a lesser person.
  2. It just means you are a survivor. We are all survivors of brutal colonial systems that continue to inflict harm upon the world.
  3. Trauma, like colonization, is an ongoing experience that brings the past into the present in ways that can be difficult to grasp.
  4. Trauma does not heal itself; you must do the work to heal it.
  5. To start to heal trauma, we must understand it, normalize it, and make it visible.
  6. You can’t fully heal if you are ignoring, avoiding, or hiding from trauma.
  7. Shame is often the reason that we don’t face trauma.
  8. In the field of ILR, and in Indigenous communities overall, there is so much shame around language and cultural loss.
  9. Colonization is a deep trap that nurtures feelings of LESS in all of us. Nobody is LESS because of trauma, shame, or loss.
  10. The antidote to feeling LESS isn’t to be MORE or know MORE. The antidote to feeling LESS is to feel WHOLE.

I believe orienting towards wholeness is critical for ILR practitioners. We must stop fearing the difficult conversations and the uncomfortable interactions. So, what does wholeness look like? Wholeness comes from space to be fully yourself, having places where you set down vigilance, and relationships where you feel safe, and can get help. Wholeness includes things we usually hide like our traumas, shame, fears, and anxieties. Wholeness happens in relationships where you experience kindness, compassion, and belonging. Language revitalization can provide those things, and it also cannot. We may find ourselves in safe, nurturing relationships or in risky, high-stress relationships, often moving back and forth between them, or having them exist in the same space, with multifaceted experiences and emotions happening simultaneously, as we seek ways to revitalize Indigenous languages in the context of hostile systems, with other people who also carry trauma and shame, and who cope with it in a multitude of ways. All this complexity can feel heavy and confusing, but what it really means is just that we are human beings. Be accountable to your mistakes, but don’t shame yourself because of them. Give yourself some grace to be a whole person and look for other people who are willing to do the same.

The research is abundantly clear that one must walk an uncomfortable path through trauma and shame to arrive at healing. This means there is an important distinction that one must learn to make inside one’s own internal experience between safety and comfort. The necessary journey is uncomfortable, but it can’t happen if you feel unsafe. Learning to make that distinction requires a lot of practice and help from other people. If all this sounds overwhelming, what can you do about it? In my experience, every single ILR practitioner can benefit immensely from working with a mental health professional. It’s the absolute number one thing you can do for yourself and those around you when it comes to healing. I’ve heard 1000 reasons why people don’t go to therapy, and I made all those excuses for years. It needs to be somebody you trust and, in my opinion, someone with trauma responsive training, but it gives you a place, and a relationship, where you can practice wholeness safely.