Intergenerational Trauma

"Trauma is often defined as emotionally and physically distressing experiences that challenge an individual’s ability to cope. The concept of cultural trauma complicates the definition of trauma, as it moves beyond the individual experiences to include how a traumatic event can reformulate a whole group’s memories and identities. Intergenerational trauma—also known as historical trauma—occurs when trauma is not addressed in previous generations; as a result, trauma is passed on through generations within families and communities."

- Nkauj Iab Yang and Quyen Dinh ,
Intergenerational Trauma and Southeast Asian American Youth in California

Untitled [erasures], Quenton Baker

More From The Artist

"You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. 'Floods' is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory - what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our 'flooding'."

Toni Morrison
The Site of Memory

"Historical trauma is a form of trauma unique to American Indian/Alaska Native communities. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart defines it as cumulative trauma – collective and compounding emotional and psychic wounding – both over the life span and across generations. It comes from shared historic experiences by American Indian/Alaska Native people of genocide, colonial oppression, displacement, forced assimilation, broken treaties, resource restrictions, suppression of language and culture, and boarding schools. Its effects are compounded by continued experiences into modern times of discrimination and poverty."

Native American Center for Excellence
Environmental Scan Summary Report

"As noted by critical refugee scholars (Espiritu, 2014; Espiritu & Duong, 2018), the generation who come of age post-war face the 'fractures caused by these traumas live on in the forms of silences and erasures in published forms of history as well as within the families who survived these traumas'".

Jia Grace Liang
Vietnamese American Women Public School Administrators Leading for Social Justice and Equity 

They were baffled that what had happened more than century ago could still hurt me, although the same individuals recited proudly their family genealogies back ten and eleven generations. I couldn't do the same. I could go back only three or four generations. If Ghanaians wondered why so many from the Americas crossed the water to cry about slave ancestors, it was not because Ghanaians honored their ancestors any less but because of the shame associated with slave origins. To revere your forbears was one thing; to speak openly of slave descent was a different matter altogether. Silence was the only reasonable position to be assumed by a descendant of slaves. Yet each year ten thousand African American tourists traveled to Ghana and none of them failed to visit the slave dungeons. Ghanaians wondered what kind of people boasted of slave ancestry. Or made such a big show of emotions."

Saidiya Hartman
Lose Your Mother