'Learn the power of the invincible summer'

Historic trauma and grief play a role in everyone's lives and can greatly affect people and a community, and for many Native American communities historic trauma has a significant impact and presence, the Rev. Patrick Beretta told a group at Fort Belknap Indian Reservation this week.

"The longer you don't deal with your pain, the longer it lasts," Beretta said. "If you don't deal with the historic pains of the past, the historic wounds of the past, they are going to perpetuate themselves ... in suicide, in drug use, in wreckless behavior."

Fort Belknap resident Snuffy Main requested Beretta, a Catholic priest from Butte, to come speak to the Fort Belknap Indian Community about trauma and grief and to help people in the community heal.

Main said at Tuesday's presentation that Fort Belknap has had a lot of tragedy in the past year, with a rash of suicides by youth in the area. He added that many people in the community are hurting, and it is important to focus on healing the pain many are feeling. He visited with Beretta while he was in Butte with his wife, Main said, and thought Beretta could help the Fort Belknap community learn about the healing process. 

Beretta made a similar presentation last month for the Fort Peck community, by request of the Montana Health Care Foundation, Beretta said. He said that preparing for the presentation he did a lot of studying specifically about Native American history and culture, as well as the trauma Native American communities have faced over the centuries.

While in Fort Peck, a number of young women who attended the event wore shirts recognizing the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, he said. He added that the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous people is a terrible tragedy Native American communities face.

"You have all these tragedies, that perpetuate from one wound," he said. "Once you have been broken, broken hearted, truly broken hearted, once you have been broken hearted you can either take the course of becoming permanently damaged and never come out of it or you can chose to become, what I call, a vessel of transcendence. A vessel of hope, where the Creator uses you in order to bring meaning to the wounds of others, to heal."

Beretta said in an interview that he is originally from Europe, with an Irish mother and an Italian father. He said he was born in Paris and lived in France for a number of years as well as Ireland and Italy. In the late 1980s he moved to the United States, first living in southern California. He said he lived there for 25 years before moving to Butte, as a parish priest. He added that Butte, just as Fort Belknap, has also had a rash of suicides recently.

"It has to be tackled. You don't ignore the wounds of the past, because they continue visiting you," he said. "... You realize that pain is a great revealer of truth. We self-discover through pain, we understand the meaning of life through pain, we understand the sense of hope through pain. You learn to let pain or your wounds teach you some great secrets and mysteries of life."

Generational trauma on the reservations

While traveling from Great Falls to Fort Peck, he said, he made it a point to also stop at every historic marker and read about the local area and its history.

"The markers to me had such sadness, just speaking about the relentless suffering of the Native American communities of this area," he said.

He read about the smallpox epidemics in the 1830s, which killed many Native people, Union Wars of the 1860s, the extermination of the great bison herd in the 1870s and finally the great famine in the 1880s that followed the extermination of the bison.

"I was so surrounded by sadness because of what I was reading, and coming from Europe, I was ashamed, as a European I was ashamed to have been part of the people who inflicted so much pain on the Native American community," Beretta said.

"I really got a sense that this land is still weeping from the wounds of the past; it's weeping in silence, but it's weeping," he added.

He said the land in the area is sacred, especially for the people who call it their home or heritage. The land being sacred doesn't mean it is a graveyard, he said.

"It means you're living in an emotional birthplace," Beretta said. "It's that the wounds of the past have become part of who we are."

He said the Alaskans Natives have a saying relating to sacred land, which says people are all born of the great unrest, all born from great wounds of the past.

Beretta said he also saw, from personal experience, what trauma or an old wound can do to a person if it is not being cared for. He said his cousins in Europe lost their daughter tragically at a young age, and over time he observed them falling apart, absolutely incapable of recovering their peace or recovering their personal happiness.

"They gave up on life, they gave up on any kind of happiness, from that night when she died for the rest of their lives," he said, adding that many people are a similar way, unable to grow from their pain.

"The stoic tries to master pain," he said, "but the mystic, the spiritual journey person, learns from the pain."

He added that people can attempt to mask their pain, through prescribed medication or drugs or alcohol abuse, but the longer a person or a culture doesn't face their pain, the more it will perpetuate itself.

One thing he admires about the Native American culture, he said, is the people's ability to recognize the sacred in the most unexpected events of life. He added that the Native people have a beautiful tradition of a vision quest, a right of passage for young people within the community, where a person is sent out of the community into the wilderness, fasting, to find themselves and to encounter the Creator. It is a transformation for people, he said, and the journey of healing is a similar journey.

"The truth that comes from trauma, you don't resolve it, because there is no resolution," he said. "You integrate it." 

When people experience tragedy, they can ask why things happen, but people don't realize they can find more peace in comfort in the silence, Beretta said.

"There is no peace in 'why.' There is a lot of helplessness in 'why,' but sometimes it's just the silence of it, you can get a lot more peace," he said.

Native Americans have an extraordinary ability from the past with their culture and their resilience and he wants them to be able to recapture it, he said. It may take awhile, but the history is so rich and the Native people have a great ability to be clear and transparent, he is sure they will be able to be vibrant in the future. 

"There is a sense of shame, there is a sense of sadness, but there is also a great since of love, there's something very, very lovable about both the community at Fort Peck and here, and I feel a certain sense of closeness," he said.

Beretta's research into historical trauma

He said to investigate how to heal from historic trauma, he looked at people who have succeeded in the past. He researched the great plague of Europe in the 1340s and the Irish famine of the 1840s.

In the 1340s, most of western Europe was wiped out from the Bubonic Plague, depending on the region killing between a quarter to three-quarters of the population, he said. But people were still able to recover.

"Imagine what that does to you, people actually recovered from that," Beretta said.

In the 1840s, the island nation of Ireland, within a generation-and-a-half, went from a population size of more than 9 million people to about 3 million people, he said. He added that it is hard to imagine what people had to do to recover from a loss so great.

While he was in California, a friend of his who was a doctor told him that before people had modern medicine they were still able to get well, people and cultures are resilient and recovered from tragedy. He said inside of each and every person, they have the ability to survive, which people have always been able to tap into.

People have survived so much, Beretta said. People have survived the ice ages, the great famines, the Holocaust, the world wars and great epidemics before, he said. People's ancestors have all survived and have passed down their genetic resilience.

Beretta said medicine is an important tool to be used where it is needed, and if people do struggle with depression or have suicidal thoughts they should seek out help. But the overarching issue surrounding suicide and depression is not a lack of medication, he said, it's a loss of culture, a loss of philosophy, a loss of the meaning of life and joyfulness, and those issues cannot be fixed with medication.

He said he visits people in the hospital who have attempted to commit suicide and often feels an overwhelming gloom hanging in the air, a darkness hanging in the air. He said he immediately calls the person's parents or guardians or loved ones and tells them they need to lighten the mood of the room. A person who was so depressed they were willing to take their own life doesn't need a dreary hospital room, a room filled with silence, they need light, flowers, music, open windows, smiles and laughter, he said. 

"If you want that young person to be well again, that's the way to go," he said. "Not this gloom, not this sadness, not this not talking." 

He said when he goes to see people who have attempted to commit suicide he also often talks to them about sports, relationships, games, hobbies, everything, but them attempting suicide. He added that he does it to attempt to open a window for them to see things differently, get their minds out of the dark place where they were and shine light on the importance of their lives.

"I don't walk out until I see them laughing, then I know the window is open and after that it's up to them," he said.

Pain can also be used to help others

Beretta said people should not expect to always be happy or to always be feeling good. Feeling good is not what healing is about. Healing is about harmony, and acknowledging a person's pain and learning to use it constructively.

People who have experienced trauma are people who understand trauma and can help others heal, a vessel of hope, he said. People can become an instrument of compassion and become a healer for the community. He added that it doesn't take too many people, just a few. But if people look to help others heal, the impact can be huge on a community.

Beretta quoted American poet Walt Whitman: "I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person."

"If you experience just joy, you're going to be very, very disappointed," he said. "... If you are only expecting sadness, you're going to lose hope very quickly and lose the meaning in your pain." 

It is about harmony, and people can use their pain to build a better world, he said.

He said French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus wrote, "In the midst of winter, I found there was within me, an invincible summer."

Beretta said without the brokenness, without the pain, people can never discover their own invincible summers.

"It doesn't take too many people to change a culture. It takes a few people to invite others to discover the invincible summer that we all have inside of us," he said. "I have no greater prayer for this community and my community than to learn the power of the invincible summer."