Breaking the cycle: How one B.C. woman’s healing journey is being passed to her children
This article contains descriptions of trauma that may be triggering. Support for survivors and their families is available. Call the Indian Residential School Survivors Society at 1-800-721-0066 or 1-866-925-4419 for the 24-7 crisis line.
“My father never spoke of what happened,” Hanuse recalled while sitting on a seaside bench on a warm, sunny day. Lined with strands of silver, her thick black hair framed her face. “He said, ‘it was enough that I went through it. There’s no sense putting you through it, too.’” Before she was seven, Hanuse said her mother was nothing but kind. She remembered learning to make and fry bread with her. After that, things changed, becoming violent and turbulent.
The violence of intergenerational trauma was so prevalent in Port Hardy it was an unacknowledged, omnipresent norm. Before that point, Hanuse didn’t realize everything her mother had experienced – from residential school to violence from the community. She had been resentful and unwilling to need her mother.
It was when Hanuse’s youngest child, Elleanna Hunt – who uses they/them pronouns – gave an ultimatum that Hanuse made a life-changing decision.