12 minute read
Confronting My Broken Self
WORDS BY DENNIS ALLEN
It is no secret that we have our share of social problems here in the North. I don’t have to tell you about the problems we still face on a daily basis. In one way or another, we’ve all suffered from some type of abuse imposed upon us by either ourselves, our parents or primary caregivers. But you have to look at how this all started to help you understand it.
Before European contact, Inuit and Gwich’in people lived simple lives, roaming from here to there looking for food sources. We followed the seasons and learned how to make tools and shelter from the land and the animals. It’s almost like we were part of the land, and part of the water. We were so connected with the land that we actually became part of it. Elders even say the land is suffering nowadays because we don’t use it anymore.
But it was not always perfect either. There were times of famine and starvation. The caribou migrations would change and people would go for long periods without food. There was a huge migration from interior Alaska to the North Yukon Coast in the last part of the 1800s when disease began to wipe out the Inupiat. They called it, “the big death.” People had to flee their homeland and look elsewhere to live. That’s how a lot of the modern day Inuvialuit ended up in the Delta region. My dad always said he doesn’t speak Inuvialuktun, he speaks Inupiatun.
But back then people were more adaptable. They learned how to hunt different animals, fish in different lakes and eat different types of berries and plants. That’s one thing about our people; we knew how to make a living off any land.
And then when the whalers came North in the late 1800s, they picked up Alaskan Inupiat as guides, hunters and seamstresses. They would hire entire families and keep them on board the ship to help them hunt for meat, sew sails and general labour. A lot of the whalers also had children with Inupiat women. That’s why you see some blue-eyed Eskimos, curly-headed kids, even redheads. My mom’s grandfather was Swedish. His name was Peter Norberg and he came to Canada to look for gold. He got stuck in Old Crow and had kids with Dora Kwaattlati. One of them was my granny Caroline Moses.
A lot of the crews on the whaling ships were shanghaied off the streets of San Francisco. They even say they would go into rooming houses and drag people out of bed, even if they were passed out, and put them on the ship. The whaling industry was so lucrative that companies would stoop to any low to get guys to work for them. These were some of the first “white man” many Inupiat ever met. They were not doctors and lawyers, that’s for sure. They were more like hard-drinking street people. And that’s the next turn in the road.
It was this type of people who first introduced alcohol to our people. They taught them how to drink like they did, which was drink as much as you can, as fast as you can. No one ever taught them that white wine goes with chicken and red wine goes with beef. They taught us how to abuse alcohol. Not only that, but that’s where a lot of the kids came from too. Look in the mirror next time, see if you are part Russian, or Portuguese. You’d be surprised. You might even be related to Osama bin Laden.
That was just the beginning of our first contact with the outside world. What followed was a barrage of new ideas and ways of life. People began to become dependent on these new things and new ways of life that other people were bringing in. We learned how to make bannock, drink tea with sugar, have coffee in the morning and live in canvas tents. We learned how to use matches to make fire instead of rubbing two sticks together. Some of these things made our lives easier, but we lost a lot of our culture too. We actually traded our culture for convenience.
The North was like the Wild West. There was no law and people were taking advantage of the native people. They were either ripping them off for furs or paying them peanuts to work like a dog for nothing more than a cup full of tea. We didn’t know nothing about commerce or the value of a dollar. They say that even one old man was so starving for more whiskey that he sold five polar bear skins and his dog team for a barrel of cheap rum. Since he had no more dogs, he rolled that barrel for two days back to his igloo, where his wife and kids were getting hungry. He had to bum two dogs off his brother-in-law to go hunting seals.
When the RCMP heard about what was really happening on Herschel Island, they sent two cops there to settle the people down. Once the churches found out there were souls way the heck up North, they sent priests and ministers there to try and save them. But more often than not they were the ones who needed saving. They were either using cheap rubber boots from Hudson Bay or trying to bring chickens in 55 below. Most of them would have died if it wasn’t for native people.
My dad told me about one old man who came upon a priest who was lost. The old man could speak enough English to understand the priest. He asked the priest what the hell he was doing travelling around with bum dogs and no meat. The priest said he came to save him. The old man had to laugh. “Save me from what?” he asked, while he was loading his pipe.
Anyway, when the churches got here, now the government wanted to know who the hell all these people were and why no one told them about it. So they had to send in their administrators to tell everybody who’s the boss. Now you got the cops, priests and Indian agents, all fighting over who owns all these “souls.” After they finished fighting, they all agreed on one thing: they had to control all these people. They couldn’t have them running around the country, living like gypsies, eating raw meat and kids running around with no clothes. Because that’s not how “civilized” people live. And that’s when residential schools come in the picture.
In them days no one had any use for arithmetic or spelling. They counted on their fingers and could give a rat’s ass how to spell kugavik. All their education was delivered on the spot. You either learned how to set a fish net, or you starved. Pretty simple. That was all the education we needed. But the government had other ideas.
The government couldn’t very well send teachers to every outpost camp throughout the North and teach every kid about Dick and Jane. Instead, they figured the best way to educate all these kids was to bring them all together in one place. But the parents couldn’t very well pack up and move a thousand miles away. What would they eat? Where would they live? They couldn’t pack up all their stuff and move into Aklavik, for example, where something like six or seven hundred kids were living in two different residential schools. Not only that, but the parents had to either send their kids away, or the government would take away their family allowance, a small sum of money given to each family every month to help with grub. So the parents had no choice to send their kids to school, hundreds of miles away. And sometimes, those kids never did come home. That was the beginning of what they call social unravelling; the fabric of the family and community began to unravel.
In the old days, a man’s wealth was measured by how big of a family he had. If he had a whole herd of kids, then the guy was well off. He had all the help he needed to gather as much food as he needed, and would even stash food all over the place. And his daughters did as much work as a man, could sew clothing and do any amount of chores. And when they were old enough to marry, the son-in-law would come into the family. And if he was a good hunter, then, you get the picture. Not only did you have a free labour force, but you had a family and love. What more could you ask for? It was utopic. By the way, utopic (you-toe-pick) means perfect.
I don’t know about you, but when I’m away from my kids for any amount of time, I start to miss them, and I get heartbroken in a sense. I’ve been with my kids since the day they were born. They are my entire world. Everything I do, I do it for them. I don’t think I’m any different from any parent, from any era, and any part of the world. It’s just human nature to want to nurture and love your children.
When children were taken away from their families to attend the residential schools, it left not only a physical void, but a spiritual and emotional void. Parents had no more roles in raising their kids. They were basically left at home, alone, with nothing to do in a sense. Remember those rough and tumble sailors I told you about, the hard drinkers, this is where their legacy comes in. Because that’s what people began to do. To kill the pain of their loss and loneliness, people began to drink, and the social and family fabric began to unravel even more.
Most of these kids were shipped hundreds of miles away from their homes. Parents in those days couldn’t just go to Canadian North and present their Pivut Pass and get a ticket to see their kids. The only mode of transport was either dog team or kayak. Pretty hard to get away for the weekend. The North at that time was still a very isolated place. Air travel was prohibitive because of cost and infrastructure issues. There simply were no airports or ready supplies of fuel. In some cases, parents didn’t see their kids for years. There are even stories of parents not seeing their kids for so long that they didn’t recognize them when they came home. Can you see what I’m getting at?
Kids need love and nurturing to be good parents themselves. We need our parents to instill a sense of belonging. We need them every day to tell us they love and care for us. We need them to hold and hug us and make us feel wanted and loved. When we are deprived of that, we tend to search for it in other ways. For a lot of us, we found it in alcohol. Some found it in drugs. Others found it in gambling. There are any amount of ways to kill pain. I’m sure you know a few yourself.
What the residential school system did was raise a whole generation of people who had no idea how to raise a family. They were never shown love because the meagre staff could simply not love the children like a parent could have. Not only did the children lose their parents, but they lost their culture and way of life. Not to mention their mother language, which rooted them in many ways. I don’t mean to blame residential schools, or anyone for that matter, but you have to understand why so many people are in a sense “lost.” It’s no wonder we turned to substance abuse to cope. What we ended up with was both the parent and the child just coping and surviving.
It took years and years of pain and suffering for many people to quit drinking or drugging. We have to hit rock bottom before we really have a good look at ourselves. We have to be so damned scared of losing what we have, or not getting what we want, to quit. And even when we do quit drinking or drugging, we replace it with another substance or activity. Because accepting the truth is just so darned painful. Our egos have been so blown out of proportion that we have absolutely no sense of how much our ego controls us. We actually believe we are doing the right thing, whether it is killing us or not. I know in my case I just jumped from addiction to addiction, looking for the perfect combination to kill my own pain. Though we never really experienced the residential school system, we were still part and parcel to all that change the North was going through.
It took me years and years to accept that I was powerless over alcohol and that my life was unmanageable. I used to get so wasted, sitting up all alone with a bottle in front of me, telling myself that I was on top of the world. When really, I was at the bottom. That’s how powerful alcoholism and addiction is; you actually believe you are in control when, in fact, your world is crumbling around you.
When I was finally desperate enough to ask for help, I was on the edge of death. If not physically, then certainly spiritually and emotionally. I was an empty vessel. A shell of a man. But I found freedom in the paradox of recovery. A paradox is something that doesn’t make sense. Let me tell you about it.
Imagine you are in a street fight and you are losing, badly. The guy is literally kicking the snot out of you. You are going to die if he does not stop. You raise your hand and softly say, “I quit, you win.” And he stops and walks away. Who won? You did. Because you did not die, or end up with a swollen face and busted teeth. You actually won by giving up. That’s how it is with addiction. I had to say “you win,” to actually live.
But that was just the first part. Then I had to admit that my life was unmanageable. I had to look in the mirror and see the shell of a man, with the bruised and busted face, and say to myself, buddy, your life is unmanageable. You cannot manage your own life on your own, with your own thinking. Because you screw it up, every time. You’re going to need help. And that was another roadblock for me, ‘cause I’d never been taught how to ask for help. I just saw people trying to figure things out on their own. And most times, it ended in disaster. Much like my life was, a pile of problems I had no idea how to fix. Of myself, I was nothing. I had to seek a power greater than myself that would restore me to sanity. I had to seek God.
