Media.Knet.Ca

Five more stories from the Atkinson Series being hosted by the Toronto Star ....

Click here for the Dec 3 story that follows in the Toronto Star

Answering the cry for help - SOLUTIONS - For Canadian Aboriginals devastated by addiction, the key to recovery lies within their own communities. But they need assistance
Dec. 3, 2006 - MARIE WADDEN - ATKINSON FELLOW

A 60-year-old Aboriginal man bursts through the door of the Sagamok Youth Centre, startling the group that is seated around a flip chart.

"Help me, help me," he cries. "I've been drinking for a month, I haven't eaten. I can't sleep. Help me."

The 20 or so people in the room don't stir; it's as if they are watching a play. The man appeared right on cue. Everyone was just talking about the Ojibway reserve's drinking problem.

But the man's distress is very real. He weeps and reverts to speaking his native language, although one English word gets attention. When he says "detox," people spring into action.

"I'll call Orion Southwind," a workshop participant says, leaving the room to call the addictions worker.

"We'll take a 15-minute break," says Michael Bopp, co-founder of the Four Worlds Centre for Development Learning in Cochrane, Alta.

The 1,400 people in Sagamok Anishnawbek First Nations, a reserve 120 kilometres west of Sudbury, are involved in a daring social experiment that offers the best hope for the future of Aboriginal communities across this country.

Government policies have pushed Aboriginal Canadians to the edge of destruction, but there is time to turn the corner. The story of what's happening at Sagamok shows what can occur when Aboriginal people are trained and supported to lead their own recovery.

Just three years into its 10-year healing and community development plan, Sagamok can boast that 88 per cent of its employees are now sober, including the 30-year-old chief, Paul Eshkakogan. In 2003, those who helped to draw up the community plan estimated 70 per cent of males in Sagamok, 60 per cent of the females and 80 per cent of the youth abused alcohol or drugs.

"At first I was pretty skeptical about community planning," Eshkakogan says. "I think it was because of the amount of work that was involved. It was like looking at a mountain and saying, how are we ever going to get up there and start to address the work?"

But now he's sold on it.

"Things are improving," he says. "I can see it in the people. There is healing going on, there is growth. Even myself. Alcohol and drugs are not a part of my life anymore, nor my family's. Our focus is on the children. I think that's where this whole community healing has to start."

Thirty residents will soon graduate from the Moving Towards Wellness course, designed by Michael and Judy Bopp, and the graduates will in turn teach what they've learned to others in the community.

The Bopps have been honing their skills in community development for 30 years in the Third World and in North America's Aboriginal communities. They teamed up 20 years ago with Lakota leader Phil Lane Jr., a pioneer in Canada's Aboriginal addiction recovery movement, and have built a reputation as informed, compassionate people with practical solutions.

In 2001, they conducted a study of six Aboriginal communities that have lowered their addiction rates.

"We learned that communities heal when there's strong leadership supporting that process," says Michael Bopp, "and when personal, cultural, economic, political and social development are worked on at the same time."

The first part of the Bopps' course encourages people to learn what personal growth and healing is needed in their own lives. In the second part, they learn about conflict resolution and human relations. The third teaches what's needed for community development and nation building. The fourth teaches program development.

"When are the children least safe?" asks Bopp, back at his flipchart when the group returns from its unscheduled break.

"On cheque days," says Albert Eshkakogan without hesitation. "Whenever money comes into the community, children are less safe because their parents may go drinking."

"The band council sponsors events that sell alcohol to raise money," adds Violet Boissoneau. "We make children less safe then."

After more discussion, the group decides to recommend alcohol no longer be sold at community events. This recommendation will become band council policy.

"There's an attitude, certainly, in this community that things have been going on for so long, there's no use trying to do anything about it," local businessman Levi Southwind says. "Community development is development of people. It opens up our minds to realize that change is possible and puts us on a learning curve to see how that could be done."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`An important healing movement is growing. But like a plant, it needs strong roots'

Dr. Maggie Hodgson

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 

None of this would be happening if Southwind hadn't successfully applied five years ago for funding from an agency called the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. It was established in 1998 to help former students of Canada's residential schools heal from the legacy of physical, mental and sexual abuse.

The creation of the Healing Foundation is a triumph of Canadian public policy. Its dissolution, when the funding runs out in a few years time, will be a tragedy.

Dr. Gail Valaskakis, the foundation's research director, was raised on a reserve in Wisconsin before moving to Canada, where she served as a dean at Montreal's Concordia University and founded that city's Native Friendship Centre.

She told the Senate Committee on Mental Health and Addictions this year that the foundation needs more time to complete the important work it has started. She asked the federal government for a one-time $600 million endowment that, when invested, could fund the foundation's work for another couple of decades.

"We estimate that it takes a community an average of 10 years to reach out, dismantle denial, create safety and engage participants in the therapeutic healing process," she told the Senators. "The projects funded by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation have played a critical role in beginning the healing process."

More than 1,300 healing projects have been kickstarted in Aboriginal communities across Canada thanks to the foundation.

Dr. Maggie Hodgson would like the Foundation's work to continue. She is the godmother of Canada's Aboriginal healing movement and living proof of the "power of one."

Thirteen years ago, the Nadleh Whuten Carrier First Nation woman from British Columbia was instrumental in creating National Addictions Awareness week, for which she received the Canadian Centre of Substance Abuse Award for Excellence. The daughter of poor alcoholics, Hodgson barely completed high school, yet has a couple of honourary university degrees and was among 1,000 women from around the world nominated for last year's Nobel Peace Prize because of her work in indigenous communities around the world.

In 1992, she founded the Healing Our Spirit Worldwide movement to promote addiction recovery in Aboriginal communities from here to Australia. Since its creation, five international conferences have taken place.

Hodgson is also co-founder of the Nechi Training, Research and Health Promotions Institute just outside of Edmonton, a centrepiece of Canada's Aboriginal sobriety movement.

"An important healing movement is growing," she says. "But like a plant, it needs strong roots. I don't think it's grown beyond my dreams. It's growing like it should."

Her latest project is a national day of healing and reconciliation, planned for May 26. She hopes it will be embraced by non-Aboriginal Canadians and help close what Saskatchewan sociologist Richard Thatcher calls "the profound distance between Aboriginal Canadians and the rest of the country."

The movement Hodgson has helped to build will go nowhere without support from non-Aboriginal Canadians and their governments. That is proving to be not so easy, even when there appears to be the best of intentions.

This past week, both the federal and British Columbia auditors-general criticized their governments' slow pace in negotiating treaties with Aborignal groups in that province, despite close to $1 billion being spent over the past 13 years.

But progress can be made with affirmative action. B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell has promised to raise the Aboriginal standard of living in B.C. — the lowest in the country along with Newfoundland and Labrador — to the provincial average by 2016.

And this past week, the B.C. and federal governments signed an agreement that is expected to inject $24 million a year into a First Nations health plan with the goal of extending life expectency by 2015. The life expectancy of Aboriginal Canadians is seven years less than that of the rest of the population.

"We have two choices," says Campbell.

"We can continue to build a culture of dependency and a culture of addiction, of denial and despair, or we can make every effort to create a culture of hope, a culture of education and opportunity. Let's build a house of hope."

In Sagamok, that hope is built into the 10-year healing and community development plan. But it's already three years old. There's a lot to do in the next seven years.

People are reminded of that whenever someone cries out for help, like the man who burst in through the door at the Sagamok Youth Centre.

+++++++++++++

Click here to see the Toronto Star Dec 3 story that follows ...

Family finally finds a saviour - Priests had caused much pain, but one turned out to be heaven-sent
Dec. 3, 2006 - MARIE WADDEN - ATKINSON FELLOW

Francis Penashue leans forward, watching the pomp and circumstance from the raised box seat usually reserved for the Lieutenant Governor.

The 65-year-old Innu man is seated in the box with five of his nine children.

His wife, Tshaukuesh (Elizabeth Penashue) is below, on the stage of the St. John's Arts and Culture Centre, poised to receive an honourary degree from Memorial University in the fall of 2005 for her environmental activism. Her son Jack stands beside her, ready to translate her acceptance speech into English.

Tshaukuesh has added some cultural touches to her academic dress — moccasins and a colorful red and navy Innu cap. Jack wears his University of Regina graduation gown.

This is a proud moment for a family that has suffered every social ill known to Aboriginals.

It might never have happened had the Penashues not been willing to go to a place where fighting alcoholism is the only thing they had in common with others, and where they had to trust another Roman Catholic priest.

Priests are the reason the Penashue family was broken in the first place. Time and again, Roman Catholic priests betrayed this family's trust. And yet a Roman Catholic priest pulled the Penashues out, one by one, from the dark hole into which they were sinking.

Jack Penashue was filled with so much rage when he first saw a priest at the Brentwood Recovery Home for alcoholics in Windsor, he thought he was going to kill him.

But Jack wasn't the first Penashue to seek help at Brentwood. It was Peter, the eldest. He was 26 in 1991.

"I woke up one morning, it was my son's sixth birthday. I was so sick, really hung over, and my wife had left me. All I could think was, how am I going to get her back and, where was I going to find money to buy my son a present? I was really about as far down as you can get."

Peter realized he was walking in his father's unsteady footsteps. Throughout childhood, Peter had been the fixer, the one who tried to keep his siblings and mother safe while his father drank.

Abenam Pone lives for moments like the one that brought Peter Penashue to his door. At that time, he ran Sheshatshiu's National Native Alcohol and Drug Addiction Program in Labrador.

Pone had received help from the Brentwood Recovery home when he lived in Windsor. He came triumphantly back to Sheshatshiu in the 1980s — sober, eager to run the "alcohol centre," referring people to treatment programs, running A.A. meetings and showing by example what sobriety has to offer.

"I wanted to go to Brentwood because that's where Abenam got sober," Peter recalls. "They didn't have a bed for me, so I begged Abenam to get me out of Sheshatshiu before the weekend. I knew I'd fall back into the drinking scene if I didn't go right away and who knows how long I might have stayed like that and what more damage I'd do?"

Pone and the staff at Brentwood know there's only a small window to pull addicts through when they look for help. If the window isn't open, it may be years before they'll try again. Penashue was in by the weekend.

Penashue returned from Brentwood sober and has stayed sober, serving for a time as president of the Innu Nation. He inspired other members of the family to get help.

Peter's father, Francis, was the only child of one of Sheshatshiu's most respected hunters, Kanituakuet, who never drank, never stopped believing and practising the Innu religion (although he adapted some Catholic beliefs), but a man who didn't keep his son close enough to him after his wife's premature death.

A priest persuaded Kanituakuet that Francis would be better off going to school than travelling and hunting for months at a time with his father.

Francis was left behind with the priest, who was a strict disciplinarian. Francis was once strapped so hard with a piece of birch firewood that he couldn't use his right hand for a month.

Then the young boy was sent to Mount Cashel Orphanage in St. John's to finish his education. (It has since been demolished because of its legacy of clerical sexual abuse.) There, he and another Innu boy hid in a closet when they got homesick and whispered together in their own language.

By the priest's reckoning, Francis was a success, an English-speaker ready to help his people deal with the culture that surrounded them after they gave up their nomadism to live in houses in 1963. Francis became the chief, a foreign concept to most Aboriginals at that time.

That's when he began to binge drink to cope with stress and rage. Alcohol released so much anger inside him, his wife and children — five boys and four girls — scattered for cover wherever they could find shelter

"Sometimes people turned us away," his wife remembers, "because they were afraid of Francis."

Tshaukuesh drank too in the early years of the marriage. She says she stopped when her husband's violence escalated and she needed sobriety to stay alive.

A younger priest offered to shelter her boys while their father drank. She didn't find out until years later how he picked them off one by one, seeking sexual favors, terrifying them into paralysis to get what he wanted.

"I'd hear him coming and would pretend I was asleep, or I'd lock myself into the bathroom. Then I'd feel guilty because he would take one of my younger brothers," Jack remembers.

This living nightmare led Jack down a self-destructive path that began with binge drinking and ended with frequent suicide attempts.

"I drank javex once, I hated myself so much," he says. "I cut my wrists, took pills, even tried to shoot myself a couple of times. But people kept rescuing me."

As recently as 1988, a priest betrayed this family's trust once again by seducing one of the younger boys.

It's remarkable that three years after that, Peter was able to trust a priest to cure his alcoholism. He was desperate.

The priest is Father Paul Charbonneau, who founded the Brentwood Recovery Home in 1964. He's a short, powerful-looking man, even now, at 83. Charbonneau learned how to change addicts because he wanted to help their children. He was the child of addicts and knows how they suffer.

"The children of addicts live in fear," he says. "When I first started out as a young priest in my parish, I could tell in Grade 4, 5, 6 — these kids come from an alcoholic home. You'd see them, their faces, their eyes. They'd be almost like dead inside. They wouldn't be alive at school. They'd be someplace else, afraid to go home. The whole atmosphere in an alcoholic home is generally one of terror, one of physical abuse, often sexual abuse. It's just horrible."

The Brentwood Recovery Home has moved from a two-storey house in the centre of Windsor to a sprawling series of buildings on the city's outskirts that were once used as a casino and nightclub complex.

It's a busy place that helps 100 or more addicts at a time. There's no receptionist to greet visitors in the large lobby; this is a stripped down kind of place without a lot of the frills and concern for privacy that characterize other addiction centres. Former clients — or "alumni" as the recovered addicts are called — come and go, looking for help to prevent a relapse or for a way to help newcomers.

The "alumni" provide talk therapy, the main catalyst used here to change peoples' destructive behaviour.

"It's consciousness-raising," explains Don Russell, the centre's executive director. "It's the talking about the shame and the hurt that helps. We're not talking about how much booze or drugs we've had or used. That's only five per cent of the problem."

Francis Penashue says he learned a lot while he was here, but it was the prodding of a former alcoholic that got through to him.

"He used to ask me, do you love your children? I said yes," Francis remembers. "And he said, no, you do not. And he said I was never at any of my children's birthday parties, but I always said I was."

This man continued to confront Francis in the same way whenever they were in a group together.

"He said, Francis, when the birthday was going on, were you there with friends? And I said yes. What he meant was, when my son had a birthday I used to get in a few dozen beers and call my friends and have a party to celebrate my son. That was mean because I was not there. I had a party for myself and my friends. We frightened the children."

After three months of talking and listening to other addicts, Penashue was finally able to empathize with his wife and children and leave Brentwood sober.

It's hard to imagine becoming so deadened to the feelings of others, but that's the nature of addiction. Father Charbonneau believes there's emotional trauma in the addict's childhood that damages their ability to trust anyone, especially for emotional needs. Addicts are selfish and spend their time pursuing gratification through alcohol, drugs, gambling, food or sex.

"They don't trust anybody because they hate honesty," he says. "They don't live by it and they just feel everybody is the enemy, even the wife, and they almost become evil because they can't experience love."

The children of addicts sometimes become addicts themselves.

"Many children of addicts go on drugs or booze to kill some of the pain," he says. "They join groups that do the same because they feel a little secure in a group since they can't really feel secure or at peace in their own family."

This explains the cycle of addiction in traumatized Aboriginal communities and the growing popularity of gangs among their youth.

Most of Brentwood's clients are non-Aboriginal. Aboriginal people prefer to attend treatment centres where there is a program that incorporates their spiritual and traditional beliefs. These treatment programs also work very well. But Brentwood was somehow right for the Penashues, and is also used by members of the nearby Walpole Island First Nations reserve.

Father Charbonneau says there is value in getting Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal clients to work through their problems together.

"If they're still blaming the white man or the government, they're into self-pity and they won't make that breakthrough," he says, "but when they're involved with the white person in recovery, then they have to trust this one and trust that one. And they can make the breakthrough individually and as a group, which is so basic to being spiritual because self-pity, blaming others, is really what alcoholism is all about."

Francis Penashue is worried about a son and grandson who still binge drink. He knows where to send them when they're ready to change. In the meantime, it's time to celebrate what has been accomplished.

After convocation ends and all the pictures are taken, the Penashues invite friends to join them at a steak restaurant. Tables are pushed together and restaurant staff place a bottle of red wine on each table. The wine sits there, all through the meal, uncorked.

+++++++++++++++

Click here for the Toronto Star Dec 3 story that follows ...

NWT answers the wake-up call - Chalmers report sparks a renewed commitment to solving addiction problems
Dec. 3, 2006 - MARIE WADDEN - ATKINSON FELLOW

A lonely young boy pulling his family's belongings on a sled through a Northwest Territories village has inspired Dr. Jennifer Chalmers to write compellingly about the deplorable state of addiction services there.

"I was out for a drive and saw this five-year-old child," she recalls, "pulling a sled along a muddy path with two TVs, boxes, towels, some toys on it. When I offered to help, he said `I'm moving, we were kicked out of our house.' There was no sign of his parents."

She is the lead author of A State of Emergency; A Report on the Delivery of Addiction Services in the NWT that was published in 2002 and updated this year with a progress report on what the government has done.

Chalmers has received the ultimate compliment for her work: Instead of shelving her reports, the NWT government is using them to set policy. Members of the legislature frequently refer to the "Chalmers' Report" whenever they rise to speak about drug or alcohol abuse problems.

There's a lot of talk inside and outside the NWT legislature about addiction and Chalmers explains why in her preface:

"The greatest problem facing the people of the Northwest Territories is addiction to substances such as alcohol, nicotine, marijuana and problem gambling. ... Improved economic opportunities as the result of oil, gas and mineral exploration have done little to decrease the incidence of addictions."

Chalmers was shocked to find that despite all that was known about the need for addiction services in 2002, only three per cent of the Territories' Health and Social Services budget was spent on treatment and prevention.

"You can't go to a band council meeting, a school meeting, the RCMP and not hear about the problems with the youth in terms of alcohol and drug use," she says. "If you ask for support from any community agency for anything to do with addictions, mental health, substance abuse, everyone will sign up. You'll have 10 people right away. So the overwhelming demand and the urgency has been there."

Chalmers first began working in the NWT 16 years ago, when the Gwich'in Tribal Council hired her to set up a program to motivate addicts to stop hurting their families and bring reconciliation between parents and children (called a family treatment program). She has maintained a close relationship with Gwich'in communities, helping to devise suicide prevention strategies, providing trauma and grief counselling, even providing mental health services from a tent in remote hunting camps.

She has earned the trust of the Territories' Aboriginal population (approximately 20,000 people in 32 communities spread out over an area the size of India. There are an equal number of non-Aboriginals, mostly living in the capital, Yellowknife).

It's no wonder they trust her. She's one of the best in the business.

Chalmers, who has Mohawk and Micmac ancestry, has four university degrees in psychology and did her doctorate at the prestigious Adler School of Psychology in Chicago. She has done post-graduate training in substance abuse, group therapy, child psychology and is a member of all the right professional associations in the U.S. and Canada.

Her State of Emergency report has been instrumental in reversing the trend of cuts that severely damaged addiction services in the mid `90s.

The NWT government had decided to close three of its four residential treatment centres because the emphasis was shifting throughout North America from treating addicts at residential centres to outpatient clinics.

Unfortunately, the government didn't reinvest what it saved. Spending on addiction services went from $14-$15 million in 1994-1995 to just $3 million by 2001. The slow deterioration caused by the cuts rendered the whole system useless by the time Chalmers conducted her evaluation.

"The whole system of addictions' services lacks credibility from the client's perspective, the government perspective, from the health care sector, and from the community perspective," she wrote in her report.

Like the false fronts or facades in TV westerns, Chalmers and her colleagues found community services that were just shells, giving the appearance that something was happening when really, nothing was. The community addiction programs, her report stated, were underfunded, housed in poor facilities and staffed by demoralized people, 37 per cent of whom had no education or qualifications for their jobs.

What was happening was a huge disservice, Chalmers wrote, to the Aboriginal population most in need of social healing.

When the State of Emergency report came out, there was widespread acceptance of its findings. No one defended the system that was in place, not even the newly elected Minister of Health and Social Services, Michael Miltenberger. He agreed to tear down the feeble foundation of his department's addiction programming and rebuild it from scratch.

"Our health indicators tell us alcohol consumption is two times the national average, smoking, family violence, sexually transmitted infections ... they're all linked together," he says. "So a major development like the Mackenzie Valley pipeline, if we're not properly prepared, will exacerbate the already bad indicators."

And so he got to work, spending the increased budget his department was given, allocating $7 million a year for addiction and mental health services.

"We laid out a comprehensive plan to restructure the entire social services and health care system," he says, "and made addictions and mental health a core service."

Miltenberg has followed Chalmers guidelines and 48 recommendations, almost to the letter.

Seventy-seven new jobs have been created for workers in the mental health and addictions sphere (counsellors, community wellness workers and clinical supervisors).

There have been 20 graduates from a program called "community wellness," surely one of the toughest jobs in a troubled community. The workers run alcohol, drug abuse and suicide prevention programs and are called out when there's been a suicide to help coordinate the community's response, particularly to prevent a cluster of suicides that often follow.

Twenty-five new nurses have finished their training from Aurora College in Yellowknife, making Chalmers' dream of a "northern health workforce" more of a reality.

All of this has been accomplished in a little less than four years.

"The rebuilding has begun," Chalmers writes in her progress report.

"Overall, the implementation of recommendations to re-build the system of addictions is a good one," she writes.

Chalmers describes a social system that has been wakened from sleep and is now dynamic, changing to accommodate the recommendations she made in 2002. But she warns against complacency.

"The current funding of community-based services is a huge step in the right direction," she reports, "and ongoing investments are needed to further develop and solidify these investments in the mental health and addiction core service."

The new addiction and mental health workers, for example, earn half the pay of their other Canadian counterparts, who themselves receive less than their worth, according to Chalmers.

"The work is very undervalued, extremely undervalued, so people don't stay in it," she says. "In fact, much bias was heard with respect to how job descriptions are reviewed (they say) `people do not need a degree or that pay ... to talk with people who have addictions."

The message Chalmers has sent to the government is to seize the moment and build on all the good will she found.

"The passion and devotion to addressing the mental health, addiction, and family violence problems is limitless right across the NWT," she notes. "People and groups at the community level realize there are no quick fix solutions, no miracle programs and few complete answers in dealing with the magnitude, and complexity of addiction and mental health problems."

+++++++++++

Click here for the following story in the Dec 2 issue of the Toronto Star

Something to Crow about - Canada's most remote Aboriginal community has kept tradition alive and its good health intact
Dec. 2, 2006 - MARIE WADDEN - ATKINSON FELLOW

The pride and joy of Canada's most remote and healthiest Aboriginal community is plain to see on its website.

www.Oldcrow.ca shows photos of this year's high school graduates — four young men and two young women — outside the school. The young men wear their caps and gowns with flair; one has his arms crossed and his head cocked as though challenging the world to defeat him.

Sunshine reflects the healthy sheen on the long dark hair of the female graduates. One has her arm around an elderly Gwichin man.

Six high school graduates from a community of 300 may not seem like a big accomplishment. But think of the challenges.

Old Crow is in the Yukon and has no roads connecting it to anywhere else. It's 200 kilometres above the Arctic Circle and closer to the Alaskan border than to any place in Canada. If you think of Canada having four corners, Old Crow is the most northwestern corner.

After university, many of these graduates will want to go home because, despite its remoteness, Old Crow is a good place to live.

There hasn't been a suicide in Old Crow since 1996. That death might not even have been a suicide.

"It was a person with a mental disorder," Chief Joe Linklater explains, "and we might have prevented it had we been able to act more quickly."

This is remarkable considering the suicide rate in many other Aboriginal communities is many times higher than the Canadian average. No agency is keeping count, but in northern Ontario there's fear it may be 40 times higher.

One academic study always cited on the subject of Canada's high Aboriginal suicide rate was conducted in B.C. by professors Chris Lalonde and Michael Chandler. The professors looked for the factors that made communities with low suicide rates different from more troubled communities. They learned that the healthiest communities are the most self-governing. The less Ottawa, the less suicide.

Old Crow has had self-government since 1995. That's also when Linklater was elected to lead the community at the age of 30.

"We've learned more about governance in the past 11 years than all our years under the Indian Act," he says. "We've come a huge distance in a short while, especially when you consider the Territorial government is 70 years old, and the Canadian government is 140 years old. I'm proud of what we've accomplished."

Linklater has a lot of help. He's leads a very inclusive governing system. His small band council, just four elected members, administers the community's services. Policy is set by the Elders Council, a Tribal court and the General Assembly.

You can get a surprising amount of business done this way.

"We held a general assembly this weekend," Linklater says, "and 40-50 people attended. We passed 24 resolutions in three hours. There was no yelling or screaming. We got consensus and compromise."

Self-government must also lower addiction rates. Old Crow is so comfortable with its social health, it is considering dropping a 15-year-old ban on the consumption and possession of alcohol.

You wouldn't tamper with something that's not broken, so why consider abolishing a law that seems to be keeping everyone sober?

"There's more alcohol here now than there was 15 years ago," says Linklater.

Bootleggers have been able to get alcohol and drugs past the RCMP even in this remote place.

Drinking and drug use are not big problems in the community, but Linklater is afraid if the bootleggers are not put out of business they may use their connections to start smuggling worse things.

Not everyone in town is comfortable with lifting the alcohol ban. When Linklater tried to strike a committee to make recommendations, he couldn't find anyone who was neutral. There are strong feelings all around.

So an independent facilitator is to be hired to chair community meetings until a consensus is reached.

Linklater says he likes a beer from time to time, but won't drink in the community as long as it's illegal. There are others like him who feel Old Crow has enough going for it to make moderate drinking possible.

They might be right.

Old Crow hasn't suffered the same losses as most other Canadian Aboriginal communities. The habitat of the Porcupine River caribou herd, the community's main food source, has not been destroyed by a hydro electric project or a logging operation. Old Crow's isolation has been its saving grace. The people still have their land.

On the town's website, the radiant pictures of the 2006 graduating ceremony provide insight into the source of the chief's confidence about its future.

Elders in floor-length black and red Gwichin gowns, embroidered with traditional emblems, dance and clap as they lead the students into the community hall for the graduation ceremony.

The students are shown with their caps and gowns set aside, relaxing in soft caribou-skin dresses and vests, embroidered in the Gwichin tradition.

Saskatchewan sociologist Dr. Richard Thatcher says Aboriginal students who are grounded in their culture and raised to be comfortable outside of it have the best chance to avoid addiction and other social problems. Bicultural youth have greater choices.

Children in Old Crow learn the same curriculum as other students in B.C., but there are lots of additions, like the Gwitchin language and traditions.

"The school is an integral part of the community life and many of the local people work with the students. This is especially true of the elders who spend a lot of time teaching the pupils legends, how to trap, fish and hunt," the website explains.

Chief Linklater wants to strengthen the students' grasp of math and the sciences with more instruction on the land.

"We'll study biology while out trapping the animals," he says, "and physics by looking at the property of snow. Our environment is a living laboratory."

The challenges his students face have been turned into opportunities.

This year's graduates — Wade Kaye, Amanda and Travis Frost, Malinda Bruce, Robert Linklater and Floyd McGinnis — had to leave home after Grade 9 to attend high school in Whitehorse, 600 kilometres south.

For three years, they lived away from their families, returning only in the summer.

But their families never left them. Old Crow is one big extended family and Gwichin families in Whitehorse support the the students so they won't get too homesick.

The chief is not saying where he stands on Resolution 11-2005, the alcohol ban, but you just have to read between the lines. It's not on his short list of reasons Old Crow is so healthy.

"Strength of culture would be one reason we're a healthy community," he says. "The strength of the Gwichin language is another. Third, our strong sense of community — everybody looks out for one another. And finally, we all feel ownership of what's going on because we have self-government."

Linklater believes his community is on the right course, where alcoholism and other addictions will not be an issue in another generation even if the prohibition is lifted.

There is, however, another potential threat.

The United States has been talking about developing oil and gas projects in the sensitive calving and wintering grounds of the Porcupine Caribou herd.

If these projects go ahead and the caribou herd is affected, the Gwichin of Old Crow may suffer the kind of trauma that has harmed so many other Aboriginal people.

For now they're doing everything under their control to prepare their children for whatever the future holds.

++++++++++++

Click here for the following story in the Dec 2 issue of the Toronto Star

`Dry' town just a myth - Inuit community caught between bootleggers and alcohol laws that aren't working
Dec. 2, 2006 - MARIE WADDEN - ATKINSON FELLOW

Two young men swing a large unmarked cardboard box into a pickup truck parked in front of the Air Inuit hangar in Kuujjuaq, on the western shore of Ungava Bay in northern Quebec.

"We'll have to drink quick," one of them jokes, "before it gets stolen." The contents of this box, flown here from a Montreal dépanneur (convenience store) 1,500 kilometres away, were hard to come by: four cases of beer and a large bottle of Johnnie Walker.

No retail sales of alcohol are allowed in this Inuit community, so the only way to get it for home consumption is to order it from one of several Montreal stores licensed to supply it.

These men paid $259 for 48 beers and a 40-ounce bottle of whiskey, plus $103 for air freight. Last year, $1 million worth of alcohol was flown from Montreal to Kuujjuaq, population 2,000.

West of Kuujjuaq, in Iqaluit, Nunavut, residents have to apply for a permit to get alcohol that is brought in by air from Rankin Inlet, 1,300 kilometres away. Absurdly, if you want to drink in Rankin Inlet, it has to be flown in from Iqaluit.

Alcohol is flying around in planes across the North because the Inuit feel uneasy about making it too accessible on the ground. Yet lots of alcohol is still available and continues to cause untold misery.

At the centre of this apparent madness are communities besieged by alcohol, drugs and gambling with no idea how to control it.

Aboriginal communities' experiences trying to keep out alcohol has been so mixed, many have decided to give up trying altogether. Kuujjuaq is one of those. The emphasis in Canadian public policy has been on making people sober rather than on preventing addiction.

For years, prohibition was considered the solution to addiction in aboriginal communities, leading to myths of "dry communities." There's no such thing.

So-called "dry" communities are created when band councils pass a resolution prohibiting the possession and consumption of alcohol, but they have not been successful at enforcing these bans. That failure has created an industry for bootlegging and drug smuggling.

In Old Crow — the Vuntut Gwitchin community in the Yukon and the most remote aboriginal town in Canada — alcohol has been banned for 15 years. Old Crow is also one of the most socially healthy aboriginal communities, but Chief Joe Linklater credits that to self-government (also achieved 15 years ago), not the alcohol ban.

In fact, he says there's more alcohol in the town now then ever before and that has led him to consider removing the ban to put the bootleggers out of business. "I want to stop this criminal element from growing any stronger," he says. "Who knows what else they'll bring in here if they're not stopped?"

Linklater is frustrated the police haven't been able to keep drugs and alcohol out of remote fly-in communities like his, but the RCMP head of aboriginal policing says there are limits to what the police can do.

"Technically, we don't have the authority to search luggage for alcohol because it's not an illegal product," says RCMP director general Doug Reti, who coincidentally is from Old Crow but now lives in Ottawa. "We have to have grounds to conduct such a search."

Kuujjuaq is revisiting its ban on retail alcohol sales too, not to take business away from bootleggers but from those Montreal dépanneurs. "Some of the benefits from these alcohol sales should come locally," says Kuujjuaq's 36-year-old mayor Larry Watt.

Watt has invited Kuujjuaq's non-profit organizations to compete for a permit to sell alcohol. The applicant will have to invest the money earned back into the town, as the community's only bar does now. Sales of alcohol at the bar are invested in recreational programs.

The RCMP's Reti says, ban or no ban, where there's a thirst for alcohol, a way will be found to get it. He has confiscated gas cans full of whiskey and old video recorders with flasks hidden inside. He believes tackling the causes of addiction is more effective than stepping up enforcement.

One of the most famous "dry" communities is Alkali Lake in British Columbia. It's a triumph because it is still largely "dry" — not because there is no access to alcohol (it's sold in neighbouring Williams Lake), but because the slide into addiction was halted in 1972, before it became an ingrained part of the reserve's social life.

The story of how this came about is told in a powerful film called The Honour of All featuring former chief Andy Chelsea and his wife Phyllis.

Phyllis was the first to sober up, then Andy, who became chief and appointed Phyllis as welfare officer. Welfare cheques were replaced with food vouchers to prevent people from buying alcohol.

For nearly a decade, the Chelseas and others took tough action against the drinkers, visiting them in their homes, confronting them about their behaviour. The sobriety movement slowly snowballed to include almost everyone on the reserve.

Today, the Chelseas are in their 60s and living in extreme poverty on the Alkali Lake reserve. Recently, one of their sons needed help from an alcohol treatment program and they are bitter there has been so little economic opportunity for themselves and their children.

"Living on the reserve is the same as residential school," Andy Chelsea says. "Nothing's changed. It's still controlled, but now chief and council are the priests and nuns, and the principal of the whole thing is the Department of Indian Affairs. You're still not allowed to develop any land. You're not allowed to go against the principal's policies."

----------------------------------------------------------------

`Alcohol in any form is

a deterrent for our people

to go forward'

Jacob Partridge, Inuit elder

-----------------------------------------------------------------

The result, the Chelseas say, is a generation of disillusioned aboriginal youth, who choose to escape reality with alcohol and drugs.

At the root of the aboriginal alcohol problem is binge drinking — consuming more than five alcoholic beverages at a time. Compared to other Canadians, a higher percentage of aboriginals abstain completely from alcohol. However, there are twice as many problem drinkers in aboriginal communities as in the general population — 35 per cent compared to 17.

"Studies around the world show that fights and violence, suicide, family and employment problems, accidents and injuries are usually the result of binge drinking," says Marja Karhonen of the National Aboriginal Health Organization's Ajunnginiq Centre.

In his book Fighting Firewater Fiction, Saskatchewan sociologist Richard Thatcher argues aboriginals have no genetic predisposition for alcohol addiction. He believes the emphasis must be switched from encouraging total abstinence among aboriginal youth to teaching safer ways to drink.

Aboriginal Canadians such as Dr. Maggie Hodgson, co-founder of Alberta's Nechi Training Research and Health Promotions Institute, say moderate drinking is not possible at this time and total abstinence must still be the message promoted in aboriginal communities.

Total abstinence is certainly the philosophy behind Canada's National Native Alcohol and Drug Addiction Program. It was created 25 years ago by Health Canada with the mandate to hire one addiction worker for every 500 residents on First Nations reserves. Workers needed just one qualification — sobriety.

Despite receiving low pay and little training, these aboriginal workers have saved thousands of lives.

The NNADAP program has been credited with reducing alcohol abuse rates in many First Nations communities, from highs of 95 per cent to half that today. Unfortunately, it wasn't available to the Inuit for many years and this has set back their sobriety movement.

Today there are 700 aboriginal community workers and another 700 aboriginals working at NNADAP's 50 treatment centres, including 10 centres that help youths recover from solvent abuse. NNADAP is a triumph of Canadian public policy, but prevention programs remain the weakest link in the chain. Until the investment is made to promote healthier lives, aboriginal communities need greater guidance on how best to handle the flow of drugs and alcohol.

This confusion is being played out in Kuujjuaq, as a group of residents worry their efforts to reopen the town's only addiction treatment centre will be wasted if alcohol becomes more readily available.

The centre was closed because its programs were considered ineffective. Jacob Partridge, an Inuit elder, has been hired to make the treatment centre more culturally and spiritually suitable for Inuit.

His original vision was to build a new centre on the edge of town containing three buildings representing three Inuit housing types, each with a different service, including relapse prevention. Lack of funding means he has to make do with the current 60-year-old building, so small it can only treat nine addicts at a time.

David Forrest, the volunteer chair of the new treatment centre, remains optimistic that even in its modest form, it will have an impact.

"We are going to put the Inuit way of doing things into the treatment centre," Forrest says, "and adapt exiting protocols to Inuit philosophy. I'm very excited about it. It's pretty neat."

Partridge worries about the mixed message to residents when the town's leadership is prepared to put profit before prevention. "For me, alcohol in any form is a deterrent for our people to go forward," he says. "The bar should be closed as well."

Canada can learn from a social experiment underway in Australia that is making alcohol hard to get, as well as investing in raising the aboriginal standard of living.

Noel Pearson, an aboriginal lawyer and founder of the Cape York Institute on Policy and Leadership, has persuaded Australia's federal government and private sector to invest heavily in education, housing and community development in three aboriginal communities that have agreed to take part.

In return, the communities have set up strict alcohol management plans that ban consumption of alcohol in the home and permit tough enforcement of these bans. Pearson was surprised at the resistance put up by non-aboriginals.

"The people who were most intimately acquainted with problems in these communities — the teachers who didn't have kids in their classrooms, the nurses who dealt with the broken bones, the policemen who pick up the drunks — thought their ability to have wine and beer in their fridges was a greater imperative than trying to tackle this raging social problem," he says.

Although the changes are barely a year old, Pearson sees positive results.

"Keeping alcohol and binge-drinking circles out of the homes and out of the villages has achieved the most positive results," he says.

In Canada, meanwhile, many aboriginal communities continue to slide backwards because community healing and development has not been made a national priority.

Forrest, a non-aboriginal businessman in Kuujjuaq, used to binge drink with Inuit friends he has made over 30 years. Since becoming sober, he sees the community in a new light.

"Sometimes when I land here in the plane, I can feel the pain of the people," he says. "We're faced with it every day, through the suicides, through the senseless violence that occurs and through the lack of hope we see in peoples' eyes."

Partridge is also concerned. "Even though it would look like a good idea to get all these millions of dollars into the community," Partridge concludes, "who's going to get the addicts healed, who's going to get them out of it?"