YUUYARAK, BY HAROLD NAPOLEON Yuuyarak by Harold Napoleon

Yuuyarak by Harold Napoleon

Napoleon is a Yup'ik man who has experienced the effects of intergenerational trauma in very dramatic and personal ways. Since I can only give a very brief, and therefore may be misleading, account review Napoleon here, I encourage anyone interested to read the full account for yourself. However, the summary should be informative, as an example for those less familiar with the concepts of historical and intergenerational trauma.

Focusing on the Yup'ik people in southwest Alaska, Napoleon explains a series of epidemics at the turn of the twentieth century, especially if he calls the "Great Death" brought enormous personal and cultural losses in this area. Napoleon said that about 60% of the population perished. At the same time, the missionaries taught that the traditional view Yupik the spiritual world was satanic and evil, and indeed angalkuqs seemed helpless in the face of introduced diseases. The teacher forbade children to speak their native language in school and taught them to be ashamed of their Yup'ik culture and its rituals. According to Napoleon, this generation has stoically and quietly, keeping their pain and anger at myself. They behaved in a modest, compliant and complacent ways, adopting a fatalistic Outlook, they do not want to face or deal with problems in the family or village. Part of their legacy to succeeding generations was suppressed emotions, confusion, and feelings of powerlessness. Through the mid-twentieth century, the loss continued as the people's control of their land, self, and hunting and fishing erosion (Napoleon 1996).

Napoleon believed that a significant number of those who survived the Great's death affected the symptoms of what today we would call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and while suffering the condition that they surrendered their old culture more readily, what they ...