The Source of the Wound
GSSW Prof. Ramona Beltrán explores historical trauma and healing in award-winning animated short film
“They took us.”
Those are the stark words of Navajo/Diné elder Helen Waukazoo, who shares her story of being taken to an Indian boarding school in a new animated short film produced by University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work Associate Professor Ramona Beltrán.
Beltrán produced the film, Source of the Wound, as a way to teach the concept of historical trauma in the online MSW@Denver course Macro Social Work Theory and Practice. Historical trauma is a collective, cumulative, intergenerational wounding that results from catastrophic events, such as the forced removal, relocation and boarding schools experienced by Native and Indigenous peoples, Beltrán explains in the film. She describes how science is showing that experiences in our environment can alter the genetic material surrounding our DNA and that these changes can be passed down through generations.
But, Beltrán notes in the film, “We actually have our own mechanisms to interrupt that intergenerational transmission of trauma in a way that gets at the source of the wound. Narrative is one of the ways that we interrupt that direct line of the trauma to the outcome. And story for Indigenous people is in our way of being. So we dance, we pray and we speak and retell our stories, and we create things new.”
Thus, the film emphasizes the strength and resilience of Native and Indigenous people. “No matter what they said to me, I knew who I was,” Waukazoo says in the film as a seed she plants with her father blossoms into an abundant flower garden. “You’ll never forget what happened, but you’ll be in charge of that healing.”
Healing is the focus of much of Beltrán’s scholarship. In a related project, the Our Stories, Our Medicine Archive, Beltrán is creating a community-based participatory archive that centers traditional Indigenous knowledge with the aim of reducing the health impacts of historical and intergenerational trauma in Indigenous and Latinx communities.
Watch The Source of the Wound. Note that this film includes intense content related to historical trauma.