Charles Nelson, a cognitive neuroscientist, has carried out research in Bangladesh and reports that ‘the level of poverty is mind-boggling’ (Hamzelou 2016). He notes that a family of five often lives in a single room; kitchens and bathrooms are communal for an entire compound; latrines flood during the long monsoon season; people cook with wood or coal and the pollution is, as Nelson puts it, ‘unbelievable’. What is more, dirt blows everywhere from unpaved tracks, and the sewers are open. Nelson states emphatically, ‘the polite way to put it is that stool gets into everything … virtually all the children have chronic diarrhoea, which leads to malnourishment and stunting; up to 30 per cent of the mothers are visibly depressed, and high levels of domestic violence exist’. Nelson made a rule that his team must not cry in front of the children. They witnessed tiny babies left to cry in their sodden cribs, and were informed that they were rarely picked up and held (Hamzelou 2016). Neuroimaging research is now underway in a new centre constructed at great expense in Dhaka designed to track the brain development of these children.
Colonisation and historical trauma
This final example makes clear how lasting the impact can be on individuals and groups when systematic efforts are made by invasive forces to overtake and transform groups of people en masse. Canada is home to roughly 1.2 million individuals who endorsed the category ‘Aboriginal’ in the 2006 Canadian census. The majority of these people live in communities that continue to contend with the devastating legacy of settler colonialism, including entrenched poverty and invidious discrimination manifested in so-called ‘mental health’ problems of many kinds. These include substance dependence, depression, violence, and extraordinarily high rates of suicide, especially among young people, estimated in some Inuit communities to be six times the rate in other parts of Canada (Kral 2012).
Independently, mental health professionals and individuals living in First Nations communities have consistently associated these high rates of pathology with the experiences of colonisation that commenced five centuries ago. A concept of ‘historical trauma’ has been adopted to call attention to the collective, cumulative, and intergenerational psychosocial effects that resulted from past colonial subjugation and persist in abated form to the present day (Niezen 2013).
Among the early travesties was the introduction of infectious disease. The mortality rate from infectious disease as a whole was extraordinarily high – on Haida Gwaii, for example, it is documented that between 1700 and 1900, smallpox, measles, dysentery, TB, influenza, and other communicable diseases wiped out many thousands of people. The Haida Nation, with whom Franz Boas worked for some time, went from an estimated population of 20,000 prior to 1770 to less than 600 by the end of the nineteenth century (Kil’iljuss (Barb Wilson) 2009). The full effects of population decimation are rarely fully appreciated: given the climate and an economy based on hunting, the ability of those that survived to procure food is in effect destroyed, and hence individuals ‘with the dubious good fortune of living through the initial sickness die of hunger’ (Daschuk 2013, 12).
This massive population destruction was followed by extensive efforts to ‘whiten’ the Indians, among which was the establishment of residential schools created expressly to ‘kill the Indian and save the child’. Young children were rounded up by school administrators, members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and agents attached to the despised Bureau of Indian Affairs to be sent great distances from their homes, in order to be housed in institutions where they were not permitted to speak their own languages or participate in anything regarded as cultural practice (Carr 2013). Today, the residential schools, the last of which were closed down only in the 1990s, are regarded among First Nations and Inuit communities as the primary source of their current malaise. It recently came to light as part of the ongoing Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, that repeated sexual abuse took place in these schools, one of which was characterised by an investigating Supreme Court Justice as practising ‘institutionalised paedophilia’ (Carr 2013, 19). Systematic nutritional medical experimentation was also practised on some of the students resulting in malnutrition in many, and death for many more. TB was rampant, and few attempts were made to curb it. In one notorious school, the death rate of children was apparently 75 per cent in the first 16 years of the school’s operation (Carr 2013; Niezen 2013). The majority of individuals who grew up in these conditions, now middle-aged and older, have until very recently been unwilling to ruminate about their younger lives, but many freely admit to being unable to adequately parent their own children.
Despite major changes for the better in recent years, racism and discrimination continue to be blatantly evident against First Nations. Shocking poverty persists on many reservations, a good number of which have no running water and where toxic contamination is frequently present; schools on reservations are poorly provided for compared with schools elsewhere in Canada, the education gap has increased in recent years between First Nations children and other Canadians (Friesen 2013), and alcohol and drug abuse and violence against women and children is extraordinarily high.
Not all reservations exhibit high rates of illness and suicide. Some survivors report that they enjoyed school, and others became devout Christians – a conversion that apparently assisted in their survival. Clearly, differences among First Nations are of the utmost importance when attempting to account for malaise. Also, ongoing land claim settlements have improved the lot of some First Nation communities, but settlements have not been made with the majority of communities. Furthermore, the establishment of healing programmes and suicide prevention gatherings conducted by First Nations themselves, that make use of indigenous healing practices together with biomedicine, exist in certain communities and receive some government support. Such changes are regarded as a positive form of empowerment by many First Nations leaders, but are not as yet broadly entrenched (Niezen 2013).
First Nations received a formal apology from the Prime Minister of Canada two years ago but since that time the budgets of 12 government-funded programmes for First Nations have been cut, and nine of these programmes are now closed (Bennett 2013). And suicide rates, substance abuse, and the disappearance and death of young First Nation women continue to be extraordinarily high (Leblanc 2014). If the concept of ‘historical trauma’ is to be taken seriously, then a great deal more than an apology and a reconciliation commission are needed to counter the crudely racist attempts to obliterate the Indian – the effects of which are being played out among third and fourth post-colonial generations. It is not known if intergenerational transmission of DNA modifications has contributed to this situation. Very understandably, First Nations individuals are reluctant to donate tissue for post-mortem analysis; but obviously demonstration of epigenetic changes are not required to verify the extent and depth of this ongoing abuse that a good number of survivors of residential schools and their offspring describe as genocide (Niezen 2013).
Conclusions
The concept of ‘environment’ has taken centre stage in the era of the Anthropocene. It is recognised that genes rarely determine who we are, as was formerly believed to be the case but, rather, that the human genome ceaselessly responds to environmental stimuli that impinge on it, with a lifelong influence on individual development, health and wellbeing. This recognition is designated as the post-genomic era, and the molecular mechanisms that facilitate interactions among environments external and internal to the human body are steadily being elucidated in the burgeoning field of epigenetics. These molecular insights are of enormous significance, but the majority of epigeneticists, although they acknowledge the contributory effects of environment writ large on human bodies, nevertheless deliberately miniaturise the environment and delineate the target of investigation as proximal and/or internal to the body. This practice of scaling down the environment has been described by social scientists as neo-reductionistic.
The illustrative examples set out above make clear how social, political and economic variables impinge on the lived experience of individuals, families and communities,