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].
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. [...]
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-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:
> 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.
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-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.
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...).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Guess we'll never know because of all the rape and pillage.
I'll never understand how people come to so deeply fetishize the subjective that they're entirely willing to cast off the shackles of the objective.
How is it not western supremacist thinking? This is simply the other side of the "all of the advances of the modern world are the result of superior western society", all of the problems of the world are the result of superior western society.
To be brutally honest, I find it more condescending when people try to downplay the brutality and devastation colonialism enacted on the various native populations while trying to claim it was the victims of colonialism that were truly at fault.
Generally speaking, wiping out large amounts of any population whether intentional or not is probably going to have negative multigenerational effects.
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.
> 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.
It's extremely easy to see other groups of people who suffered the same thing, and have extremely low suicide rates. At which point you could create the same post-hoc explanation for the opposite outcome, about how hundreds of years of violence created very tough and mentally strong people.
> which point you could create the same post-hoc explanation for the opposite outcome, about how hundreds of years of violence created very tough and mentally strong people.
This is pure ideology: we were actually helping them when we were chopping their children's hands off in the congo when they didn't produce enough.
You quoted me, then made a very insincere and uncharitable implication of what I said.
I don't have any ideology, I was just pointing out how post-hoc explanations always fit the data. But that you could take other examples and come to opposite conclusions.
Cultural whiplash takes many forms. This kind of dualist thinking minimises one take to promote another. Shouldn't we be able to consider two (Or more) things to have merit at the same time?
In the words of Bender, you want me to do two things??
>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.
I think this is actually an interesting point. One I hadn't considered before. I doubt it really explains it, but it wouldn't surprise me if this was a contributing factor.
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/...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Chills-Fever-Health-Disease-History/d...