CANADA
OZY
It wasn’t until Amy Bombay was an adult that she found out her grandparents had survived an abusive system — government-sponsored religious schools designed to assimilate thousands of indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture. Even though she grew up off the reserve, Bombay, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Dalhousie University, says she was scarred by the pain of the past brought on by a dark legacy of Canada’s residential schools. “Many parents would only talk about residential schools when they were drinking — and they would cry,” Bombay recalls. “That was the only time we’d hear about it.”
Recent studies on the science behind intergenerational trauma — between Holocaust survivors and their children, for instance — have discovered that trauma can be passed between generations. The epigenetic inheritance theory holds that environmental factors can affect the genes of future generations. Chemical tags acting like Post-its can latch onto our DNA, switching genes off and on. A research team at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital led by Rachel Yehuda, a leading expert on post-traumatic stress and epigenetics, concluded that some of these tags could be transferred across generations. When Yehuda researched mothers who were pregnant and in the World Trade Center during 9/11, she discovered that environmental fallout could even leave an imprint in utero.
There is an upside, however. “The idea that we can be transformed by our environment gives us powerful tools for resilience building,” says Yehuda. The plasticity of genes points toward the possibility of future transformation — though precisely how has yet to be determined. In the meantime, the Canadian Roots Exchange fosters cultural exchanges and dialogue between indigenous youth and high school students to promote understanding and reconciliation. Khmer Girls in Action, an all-female group in Long Beach, California, combats “historical forgetting” of the Cambodian genocide in the 1980s. By creating safe spaces for women to grieve and console one another and organizing public talks addressing the tragedy, collective healing is put into action.
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