The Multi-generational Transmission Process and Trauma
Sometime around 1979-80, my grandmother Aileen sat down with my mother to discuss the Roberts side of the family, my father’s maternal line. They let me sit in. I watched as my mother took judicious notes from “Grandmama’s” oral tradition. I had a “Nana,” Miriam, who was my mother’s mother. They were strictly White Europeans. My father’s mother told us what she could remember about her maternal side. The Roberts family melded back into the Rogers family of the early Cherokee Nation in Georgia.
In retrospect, my grandmother was an anxious person who expressed that anxiety in a myriad of ways, but one was severe eczema and psoriasis. She would scratch when her anxiety rose. While telling us about “Mary Rogers, who walked the Trail of Tears,” she would scratch. Mary was Aileen’s great aunt and my third great aunt, or third grandaunt. Aileen was an angry person, as was my dad, and I seem to have “inherited” that undesirable trait. We all have our battles. However, some of that multi-generational pain underwent some level of healing when my grandmother taught me how to make potato soup. You see, Aileen came from a direct, matrilineal line of Wild Potato clan women. Though I’ve tweaked the recipe a bit, I still make potato soup, especially during the winter months. It is healing in its own way.
My 2025 book, Cherokee Afternoon, the first in a three-book series, features Mary and a family portrait, if you will, of what her experience traveling the Cherokee Trail of Tears might have been like. It is a reflection of my anger, cancer trauma, and a host of other things rolled into one. Intergenerational trauma is real. We carry it, and it expresses itself in different ways for different family members. Yet, writing Cherokee Afternoon and its successors, Cherokee Sunset and Cherokee Moondance, has helped heal some of the generational injury.
At some point years ago, it became clear to me that one of my main functions was to restore our family’s Cherokee legacy. I have a wonderful Cherokee Nation community that helps me do that. While many Cherokees don’t speak much in terms of “medicine,” I do. Mine is my writing, particularly my fiction. It heals me when other things cannot. As my father would sometimes say, “It’s good for what ails me.” It helps me address the trauma I’m carrying by taking away the pain, at least temporarily. We all carry something.
What are you carrying during these anxious and difficult times?
And what, dear friend, is your medicine?
Bryan
**Photo of part of an actual “road” that some of our Cherokee ancestors were forced to travel during Indian removal. (Courtesy of Alexis Watt, Cherokee Nation)
