ABSTRACT
In the 21st century, trauma has become a portmanteau—a catch-all concept that serves to read, diagnose, and ‘treat’ disparate bodily, psychological, and social harms to individuals and groups. I challenge us to look again at what trauma is. Here, I rework my earlier reading on our Indigenous encounter with trauma in my text Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights to extend my assessment of our intergenerational well-being in North America. Trauma articulates with globalised liberal humanitarianism as it ebbs and stalls in its logics of care. Trauma is inadequate as a theory for the scale of death and dissolution that racial capitalism occludes in programmes for individual subjective healing. I contend that trauma as a concept masks a deeply embedded racial capitalist motive for settler colonialism operationalised against Black, immigrant, and Indigenous peoples. Through the discourse of trauma and its attendant practices, Canada and the United States obscure their contradictory, overlapping projects—healing amid terrorising—while veiling their abandonment of any material and political means through which Indigenous peoples might reproduce their lives and relations. There is also an argument to acknowledge how Indigenous peoples look beyond the concept of trauma to seek life.
