Trauma Informed Practice
Introduction & Understanding Trauma
Introduction
This toolkit equips service providers—especially those working with Indigenous communities—with knowledge and strategies for creating trauma-informed workplaces. It supports staff, leadership, and community members in fostering safety, trust, and compassion while reducing the risk of re-traumatization.
Implementing trauma-informed change is an ongoing process of reflection, evaluation, and reform. Within Indigenous organizations, it’s vital to acknowledge the continuing effects of trauma, particularly the intergenerational impacts of colonization, and to integrate culturally appropriate approaches to human resources and service delivery.
Indigenous Workplace Considerations
Keep an Elder available for spiritual and emotional support.
Consult Elders regularly to ensure cultural appropriateness.
Promote cultural harmony through ceremony, which can release emotions and build resilience.
Recognize that lived, vicarious, and intergenerational trauma can affect the workplace.
Train all staff on culturally appropriate responses in Indigenous contexts.
A trauma-informed workplace is one where people feel safe seeking help, staff are confident in offering support or referrals, and services reflect an understanding of trauma’s psychological, neurological, biological, social, and spiritual effects. Core values include authenticity, compassion, and respect, which can improve safety, well-being, and productivity.
What is Trauma?
Trauma is a lasting emotional response to a distressing event that overwhelms a person’s ability to cope. It can result from a single incident or repeated experiences and often affects a person’s sense of safety, self-worth, and ability to form relationships.
Trauma can:
Cause shame and feelings of powerlessness.
Lead to negative coping behaviours.
Become a central organizing force in someone’s life—sometimes consciously blocked, other times surfacing unexpectedly.
"Everyone has a right to have a future that is not dictated by the past."
– KLINIC
Intergenerational Trauma
Trauma can be passed from survivors to their descendants. Residential Schools are a clear example.
Residential Schools
The purpose of these schools, run by churches and the Canadian government, was to assimilate Indigenous children into mainstream Canadian society by severing their ties to family, culture, and language. Over 130 schools operated, affecting about 150,000 children; the last closed in 1996.
Harms caused:
Stripping away traditional clothing, hair, language, and identity.
Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
Alienation, shame, and anger that persisted across generations.
Normalization of abuse, especially towards girls, creating lifelong impacts.
Impacts:
Individual: Isolation, shame, self-hatred, internalized racism, fear of authority, low self-esteem, substance abuse, suicidal behaviour, aggression.
Family: Unresolved grief, parenting difficulties, family violence, loss of stories, traditions, and identity.
Community & Culture: Loss of language and connectedness, loss of Elder guidance, suicide, communal violence, dependence on outside systems, breakdown of communal child-rearing.