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The history of alcoholism and suicide in Alaska goes back to the time of first contact with outsiders. When westerners first contacted Alaska Native tribes, tho

by japhyr 7y ago

The history of alcoholism and suicide in Alaska goes back to the time of first contact with outsiders. When westerners first contacted Alaska Native tribes, those "explorers" tended to be people who were after valuable furs, and missionaries. These people were usually a mix of Russians from the west and Americans from the south. The outsiders brought with them diseases like tuberculosis and influenza, and these diseases were devastating. In many villages, up to 70% of the population died in the span of a few generations. It's hard to imagine how hard this would be to live through. I live in a town of 10,000 and I imagine waking up at some point to only have 3,000 people around, not because people move but because all of those people we knew were dead. That wasn't all, though. Almost all of the missionaries blamed the survivors for what happened. They said their people died because they worshipped the devil. They took the surviving children away, telling parents they weren't fit to raise their own children. They banned the use of Native languages, and all aspects of Native culture such as dancing, regalia, ceremonies, and more. All of this has led to despair and a disconnect with a rich culture that existed for ~10,000 years before this. Life for Native people before contact was not perfect. But this is the root of alcoholism and suicide in Alaska, and in many areas with indigenous populations around the world. If you're interested in learning more about this history, I recommend Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being by Harold Napoleon [0], and Chills and Fever: Health and Disease in the Early History of Alaska by Robert Fortuine [1]. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Yuuyaraq-Human-Being-Harold-Napoleon/dp/187796221X/ https://www.amazon.com/Yuuyaraq-Human-Being-Harold-Napoleon/... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Chills-Fever-Health-Disease-History/dp/0912006587 https://www.amazon.com/Chills-Fever-Health-Disease-History/d...

slothtrop 7y ago
> But this is the root of alcoholism and suicide in Alaska More accurately, conditions today ripe for alcoholism and suicide may be borne out events following contact. There's similar issues in Canada, Siberia.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Is the problem of alcoholism worse in Siberia than it is in the rest of Russia, where it is already pretty bad?
kortilla 7y ago
That’s the lazy “blame the violent colonialists” approach though. There’s a very high suicide rate amongst Greenland natives as well. Perhaps it’s because so much culture was surrounded around food gathering? Modern technology coming around and wiping out the need for most of your tribe to hunt and gather is going to have a big impact on cultures like that.
- ianleeclark 7y ago
  > That’s the lazy “blame the violent colonialists” approach though. Crazy to think that hundreds of years of violence and extraction had nothing to do with this, and it's just due to cultural faults. There's no world in which their legacy of oppression wouldn't affect their present day material conditions. > Modern technology coming around and wiping out the need for most of your tribe to hunt and gather is going to have a big impact on cultures like that. Culture isn't static, it evolves over time. It's not just "their time to die out," or whatever the subtext of a statement like this is.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    It's certainly not impossible that we've blinded ourselves to other problems by being so quick to blame all of their woes on colonialism however. The real world is rarely so simple. I find it a bit condescending when we try to pin all of the blame on western influence in the past, when these people are quite capable of fucking up their own lives without your help thank you very much. The idea that the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle was idyllic and perfectly in harmony with nature is also a myth.
    - jolotriage 7y ago
      Loss of sense of history/direction with a tremendous wealth/income disparity leads to this type of disillusionment imo.
    - dhhdhdsbdb 7y ago
      The amazing book 1491 calls this Holmbergs mistake: that the indigenous people lined in a static world and didn't have the agency to make their own mistakes.
ColanR 7y ago
What you're recounting seems (from the article) to be the Canadian government's side of the story. The 12th paragraph of the article begins the Inuit's description of what happened. > Most Inuit look back very differently on this period. Their version begins shortly after World War II, when the US and Canada jointly established a line of radar stations across the Arctic in order to spy on the Soviets and monitor the skies for potential attacks via the North Pole. The Canadian government, keen to prevent the US from claiming sovereignty over this potentially mineral- and natural gas–rich area, hastily established towns and forced the Inuit to settle in them. Older Inuit told me they remember armed police officers arriving at their camps unannounced and ordering everyone to leave. Sled dogs—even healthy ones—were slaughtered before their owners’ eyes. > The government concedes that thousands of Inuit children, some as young as five, were sent to boarding, or “residential,” schools, where they were cut off from their families, given Christian names and ID numbers, punished for speaking their native Inuktitut language, required to wear Western clothes, and taught a Canadian curriculum that had no relevance to the world they’d been born into. Many were also beaten and raped by their teachers. Some went to the schools willingly, but many reluctant parents, informed that if they didn’t send their children off, they’d be denied government welfare benefits or credit from fur traders, surrendered them in tears. > Memories of these horrors haunt the lives of older Inuit today. [...]
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  Canada's FNMI (First Nations, Metis, Inuit) relations have been really screwed up for a long time, and the current Federal government has not improved things by trying to steamroll a pipeline through traditional lands in BC (despite talking a big game about reconciliation during their election campaign). Meanwhile the newly-elected conservative provincial government in Ontario immediately backed away from plans to include content about residential schools in the public school curriculum, which was to be written in collaboration with people who actually lived through it, see: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-education-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-trc-1.4739297 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-education-tru... Anyway, if you're interested in more about what FNMI life is like in Canada, the APTN First Contact show is a pretty great place to start: https://aptn.ca/firstcontact/video/season-1/ https://aptn.ca/firstcontact/video/season-1/
Circuits 7y ago
It is rather disgusting the effects on a culture which has been torn and conquered by another outside culture. The question now, how do we deal with the present situation regardless of what happened in the past? The fact of the matter is, there is no going back. Honestly, I believe any attempts at salvaging that past is only going to hinder progress for those living in the present.
TimTheTinker 7y ago
> Almost all of the missionaries blamed the survivors for what happened. They said their people died because they worshipped the devil. They took the surviving children away, telling parents they weren't fit to raise their own children. They banned the use of Native languages, and all aspects of Native culture such as dancing, regalia, ceremonies, and more. All of this has led to despair and a disconnect with a rich culture that existed for ~10,000 years before this. Do you have any citations for this? I have read a lot of missionary stories, and have friends and family who have been or are missionaries themselves, and have never heard of anything so heinous. That's exactly the opposite of what missionaries are supposed to be; it sounds more like a particularly brutal form of western imperialism and exploitation than anything else.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  I mean... to be fair, when you read a missionary story, you're reading the missionary's own account of how things went down. Not saying it's always this bad, but you're unlikely to see a lot of self-criticism if you don't have the account from the other side of those interactions. I'm not really sure about Alaska in particular, but the Catholic Church for example was definitely complicit in the attempted cultural genocide undertaking by the Canadian government against indigenous peoples (and resists issuing a formal apology for that role, even to this day: https://globalnews.ca/news/4110276/canada-residential-school-pope-francis-church-apology/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4110276/canada-residential-school...).
- fwip 7y ago
  It's not hard to find these accounts. Here's the top link I found when googling 'first nations canada banned language': https://www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-peoples-canada-and-indian-residential-schools/chapter-4/language-loss https://www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-people... Here's another source from The Guardian (not my favorite paper, but generally publishes true things): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/02/canada-indigenous-schools-cultural-genocide-report https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/02/canada-indigen... - "Children inducted into residential schools were forbidden from speaking their native languages and subjected to routine physical abuse, inadequate nutrition and neglect. Sexual abuse was common, according to the survivors who testified at commission hearings throughout the country." Edit: The history of missionaries is inextricably linked with the history of Western imperialism and exploitation. These accounts are by no means limited to the Canada or even the Americas - there are many accounts of the brutal treatment of indigenous people in Africa, Australia and Oceania committed by missionaries.
dang 7y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21070110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21070110.

by japhyr 7y ago

slothtrop 7y ago

> But this is the root of alcoholism and suicide in Alaska More accurately, conditions today ripe for alcoholism and suicide may be borne out events following contact. There's similar issues in Canada, Siberia.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Is the problem of alcoholism worse in Siberia than it is in the rest of Russia, where it is already pretty bad?

kortilla 7y ago

That’s the lazy “blame the violent colonialists” approach though. There’s a very high suicide rate amongst Greenland natives as well. Perhaps it’s because so much culture was surrounded around food gathering? Modern technology coming around and wiping out the need for most of your tribe to hunt and gather is going to have a big impact on cultures like that.

ianleeclark 7y ago
> That’s the lazy “blame the violent colonialists” approach though. Crazy to think that hundreds of years of violence and extraction had nothing to do with this, and it's just due to cultural faults. There's no world in which their legacy of oppression wouldn't affect their present day material conditions. > Modern technology coming around and wiping out the need for most of your tribe to hunt and gather is going to have a big impact on cultures like that. Culture isn't static, it evolves over time. It's not just "their time to die out," or whatever the subtext of a statement like this is.
- jandrese 7y ago
  It's certainly not impossible that we've blinded ourselves to other problems by being so quick to blame all of their woes on colonialism however. The real world is rarely so simple. I find it a bit condescending when we try to pin all of the blame on western influence in the past, when these people are quite capable of fucking up their own lives without your help thank you very much. The idea that the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle was idyllic and perfectly in harmony with nature is also a myth.
  - jolotriage 7y ago
    Loss of sense of history/direction with a tremendous wealth/income disparity leads to this type of disillusionment imo.
  - dhhdhdsbdb 7y ago
    The amazing book 1491 calls this Holmbergs mistake: that the indigenous people lined in a static world and didn't have the agency to make their own mistakes.

ColanR 7y ago

What you're recounting seems (from the article) to be the Canadian government's side of the story. The 12th paragraph of the article begins the Inuit's description of what happened. > Most Inuit look back very differently on this period. Their version begins shortly after World War II, when the US and Canada jointly established a line of radar stations across the Arctic in order to spy on the Soviets and monitor the skies for potential attacks via the North Pole. The Canadian government, keen to prevent the US from claiming sovereignty over this potentially mineral- and natural gas–rich area, hastily established towns and forced the Inuit to settle in them. Older Inuit told me they remember armed police officers arriving at their camps unannounced and ordering everyone to leave. Sled dogs—even healthy ones—were slaughtered before their owners’ eyes. > The government concedes that thousands of Inuit children, some as young as five, were sent to boarding, or “residential,” schools, where they were cut off from their families, given Christian names and ID numbers, punished for speaking their native Inuktitut language, required to wear Western clothes, and taught a Canadian curriculum that had no relevance to the world they’d been born into. Many were also beaten and raped by their teachers. Some went to the schools willingly, but many reluctant parents, informed that if they didn’t send their children off, they’d be denied government welfare benefits or credit from fur traders, surrendered them in tears. > Memories of these horrors haunt the lives of older Inuit today. [...]

mikepurvis 7y ago
Canada's FNMI (First Nations, Metis, Inuit) relations have been really screwed up for a long time, and the current Federal government has not improved things by trying to steamroll a pipeline through traditional lands in BC (despite talking a big game about reconciliation during their election campaign). Meanwhile the newly-elected conservative provincial government in Ontario immediately backed away from plans to include content about residential schools in the public school curriculum, which was to be written in collaboration with people who actually lived through it, see: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-education-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-trc-1.4739297 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-education-tru... Anyway, if you're interested in more about what FNMI life is like in Canada, the APTN First Contact show is a pretty great place to start: https://aptn.ca/firstcontact/video/season-1/ https://aptn.ca/firstcontact/video/season-1/

Circuits 7y ago

It is rather disgusting the effects on a culture which has been torn and conquered by another outside culture. The question now, how do we deal with the present situation regardless of what happened in the past? The fact of the matter is, there is no going back. Honestly, I believe any attempts at salvaging that past is only going to hinder progress for those living in the present.

TimTheTinker 7y ago

> Almost all of the missionaries blamed the survivors for what happened. They said their people died because they worshipped the devil. They took the surviving children away, telling parents they weren't fit to raise their own children. They banned the use of Native languages, and all aspects of Native culture such as dancing, regalia, ceremonies, and more. All of this has led to despair and a disconnect with a rich culture that existed for ~10,000 years before this. Do you have any citations for this? I have read a lot of missionary stories, and have friends and family who have been or are missionaries themselves, and have never heard of anything so heinous. That's exactly the opposite of what missionaries are supposed to be; it sounds more like a particularly brutal form of western imperialism and exploitation than anything else.

mikepurvis 7y ago
I mean... to be fair, when you read a missionary story, you're reading the missionary's own account of how things went down. Not saying it's always this bad, but you're unlikely to see a lot of self-criticism if you don't have the account from the other side of those interactions. I'm not really sure about Alaska in particular, but the Catholic Church for example was definitely complicit in the attempted cultural genocide undertaking by the Canadian government against indigenous peoples (and resists issuing a formal apology for that role, even to this day: https://globalnews.ca/news/4110276/canada-residential-school-pope-francis-church-apology/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4110276/canada-residential-school...).
fwip 7y ago
It's not hard to find these accounts. Here's the top link I found when googling 'first nations canada banned language': https://www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-peoples-canada-and-indian-residential-schools/chapter-4/language-loss https://www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-people... Here's another source from The Guardian (not my favorite paper, but generally publishes true things): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/02/canada-indigenous-schools-cultural-genocide-report https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/02/canada-indigen... - "Children inducted into residential schools were forbidden from speaking their native languages and subjected to routine physical abuse, inadequate nutrition and neglect. Sexual abuse was common, according to the survivors who testified at commission hearings throughout the country." Edit: The history of missionaries is inextricably linked with the history of Western imperialism and exploitation. These accounts are by no means limited to the Canada or even the Americas - there are many accounts of the brutal treatment of indigenous people in Africa, Australia and Oceania committed by missionaries.

dang 7y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21070110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21070110.