The seven generations is an Indigenous principle: we are shaped by the seven generations who came before us, and how we live will shape the seven generations who come after us. In Therapeutic Shamanism it means two things together, taking responsibility for healing what we have inherited so that it is not passed on, and weighing every decision by its effect on people not yet born.
Where does the idea of the seven generations come from? #
From Indigenous North America, and above all from the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Confederacy), whose Great Law of Peace it is usually credited to. Oren Lyons, a Faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation, speaking as a Haudenosaunee chief on behalf of Indigenous Peoples at the United Nations in 1992, said that their leaders were instructed “to make every decision on behalf of the seventh generation to come”.1
The Haudenosaunee were farming people, who grew maize, beans and squash and lived in villages, so the principle comes from an agricultural society, not from nomadic hunter-gatherers.
The exact wording is questioned. The Great Law was passed down orally, and the written versions of it, such as the one the anthropologist Arthur C. Parker published in 1916, do not contain the familiar line about the seventh generation. What they do contain is an instruction to the chiefs to keep in view not only the present but the coming generations, “the unborn of the future Nation”. Lyons gives the seventh generation as a mandate the chiefs received; those who go by the written record point out that the popular phrasing is not found there.2
How is the principle understood in Therapeutic Shamanism? #
As running both ways in time. Indigenous cultures considered the impact of the seven generations who came before them, and acknowledged their influence on the seven generations who would follow. Nobody starts as a blank slate. Grief, shame, anger and trauma that were never resolved in our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents come down to us, often without our knowing their story.
The other half follows from the first. What we leave unresolved goes on down the line in turn. So these cultures saw it as a personal responsibility to address and resolve their own trauma, so as to prevent passing it down through the generations. Healing ourselves is never only a private matter: it is something done for the people who come after us.
This is credited here as Indigenous teaching. Therapeutic Shamanism draws on it, as it draws on many animist cultures, but it does not claim it as its own invention. See What are ancestral burdens and how are they passed down?
Why does it matter for how we decide and live? #
Because animist adults made decisions with the seven generations to come in mind. Among the qualities of a healthy Adult in animist cultures, alongside emotional fluency, using power to empower others and taking responsibility for their actions, was weighing the impact of a choice on people not yet born. That is a concept modern culture barely acknowledges, even for its own children and grandchildren, whilst it carries on damaging the planet they will inherit.
This is why the seven generations belongs with the Original Instructions, the animist template for living in right relationship with the other Peoples and with each other. Becoming an Adult in the animist sense means growing out of childish separateness and taking up a place, interdependently, in the human tribe and the wider web of life. See What does it mean to become a true Adult? and What is right relationship and reciprocity?
How does it connect with ancestral healing? #
Directly. If burdens travel down family lines, then working on what we carry is also work on behalf of the line. Choosing to work with an inherited burden, instead of passing it on to the next generation, is the seven generations put into practice.
The future side is not fixed either. In shamanic terms we live in a multiverse, in which several futures are possible at any moment, and the choices that land us in one rather than another are often made by unconscious patterns from past hurts, including the ancestral burdensAncestral burdens. Unresolved grief, shame, anger and trauma passed down the family line: never ours to begin with, but shaping us. Healed through recapitulation and disentanglement, becoming a ‘link-breaker’ so the burden stops here. Read the full answer we carry. So what we heal, or leave unhealed, has a bearing on the future as well as on the past. See How do we recognise and work with ancestral burdens?
