How is intergenerational trauma depicted in "Goodbye Snauq" by Lee Maracle?

Intergenerational trauma is discussed and shown via the narrator's response to the decision made by the Squamish Nation to sell its rights to Snauq to the Canadian government. She is certainly traumatized by the decision, feeling so depressed by the news that she seeks comfort in alcohol and gets very drunk. She tries to think about the benefits of such a large sum of money for the Squamish people, but she is not comforted. She considers her Ta'ah (who seems to be her grandmother or mother) and how her Ta'ah would watch out for her "children" to make sure they wouldn't get in trouble with the white law. She thinks of a

group of men gathered around a whisky keg, their children raped by settlers: they drank until they perished. It was our first run at suicide, and I wondered what inspired their descendants to want to participate in the new society in any way.

Surely, the trauma experienced by Ta'ah and by these men and their children was awful. The narrator remembers Khahtsahlano, who died in 1967, and who had watched Snauq—appropriately renamed False Creek—become polluted and disgusting. He was certainly traumatized by watching the white people, the colonizers, ruin this area that had once been so vital to the Squamish Nation's way of life. In addition, there had been a "smallpox epidemic [that] all but decimated the Tsleil Watuth people," another indigenous group that frequented the area. Swanamia, Khahtsahlano's wife, had been forced to weigh the value of each precious family object and decide which ones she could take as the Squamish were forced from the land. She "could not bear to look back" at the settlement from the boat, but soon everyone realized that Snauq's longhouses were on fire and that the "men who set the fires were cheering." Once the Squamish reached the new area that was to be their home, Swanamia "watched as the men in her house fought for an acceptable response. Some private part of her knew they wanted to grieve, but there is no ceremony to grieve the loss of a village."

The trauma caused by the white colonizers' treatment of the indigenous people that they infected and ran off the land, by their absolute callous indifference to the losses sustained by these groups, is felt and passed down through the generations. Just as the men, generations before, did not know how to deal with their traumatized emotions, neither does the narrator; she tries to "stem the rage" she feels with wine. "The burning of Snauq touched off a history of disentitlement and prohibition that was incomprehensible and impossible for Swanamia to manage," and we see the narrator herself continue to struggle with this same history.

How is reconciliation portrayed in "Goodbye Snauq" by Lee Maracle?

At first, of course, the narrator cannot reconcile herself to the decision made by the Squamish Nation to relinquish its rights to Snauq for the fee of $92 million. She understands the incredible amount of money this is and how much good it can do for her community, and yet she gets drunk in an attempt to subdue the "rage" that she feels when she gets the letter conveying this news.

The narrator describes an Indigenous man whom she reveres, Khahtsahlano, and how "He was a serious rememberer who paid attention to the oracy of his past, the changing present, and the possibility of a future story." She conceives of her forebears' traumatic experience at the hands of white colonizers as a story, a story that might have an ending that is more hopeful than its beginning.

So, in the end, when she awakens after having fainted in front of her students, she says, "We need to finish this story," as though this "finishing" of the narrative would somehow provide something like reconciliation or closure. She realizes that "Indigenous people will never be able to acquire the place other nations hold," that they "can only negotiate the best ... deal possible." She feels, in one sense, that she has "no choice," though she did choose the people "who made the deal" for Snauq, and there is some agency in that. She realizes that, regardless of anything else, Snauq is lost, and she recognizes, "We must say goodbye."

Reconciliation is discussed in the story insomuch as the narrator must reconcile herself—by settling or submitting—to this idea, that the Squamish decision-makers got the "best ... deal possible" and that while "Canada's behaviour toward [the Squamish] ... struggles for maturity ... [she can] accord [herself] a place." She says,

This place is still at the bottom, as the last people to be afforded a place at the banquet table where the guests have been partaking for over five hundred years; but still there it is, the chair empty and hoping I will feel inclined to sit in it.... Today, I am entitled to dream.

While it hardly seems as though real justice has been served, the narrator does reach some level of reconciliation with the events that have traumatized both her and the generations of Indigenous peoples who came before her here.