Making Health Public

In a previous post, I discussed the intergenerational effects of violence and trauma, but today I’d like to dig a bit more into violence as a disease in communities. We often think of violence as something that one person does to another—and that is certainly accurate—but the individuals who commit that violence have often experienced it themselves. Like influenza spreads through a community from person-to-person, family-to-family, violence also spreads through the spaces we inhabit.

We model what we see and what we live and then pass on the love and pain we experience to others. Please be warned that some of what I’ll discuss may be upsetting or trigger memories of abuse that you may have suffered. Please be gentle with yourself.

Last week was both Columbus Day and Indigenous People’s Day in the United States. Thanksgiving is right around the corner. These days remind me of the stories I heard in school as a child about the “discovery” of America and the “first people” to come here. As an immigrant family, the stories of these holidays weren’t a part of our home life, but they certainly appeared at school each autumn. I remember being told to memorise a poem about Columbus in first grade and the narrative of the first thanksgiving appearing in each US history course I took.

While having time off from school and work is nice (I certainly enjoy that part of civil service), these days are also wonderful opportunities to talk about the health disparities we see between Native American/Alaska Native (AIAN) and other groups in the US. Native writers have spoken and written and researched this far better than I will here, but it’s important for all public health practitioners to discuss the ways that the health of the people who grew us and raised us shapes our own health.