Alcohol is cited as a significant factor in so many crimes in rural Alaska that it seems reasonable to think prohibition could reduce staggering rates of domestic violence, child abuse, sexual assault and suicide. But the costs to individuals tells a different story.
For three decades, alcohol has anchored the debate about the future of rural Alaska. That liquor and homebrew spread havoc in villages across the state is undeniable, but the evidence seems clear that the effort to stamp out booze with an Alaska version of Prohibition hasn't stopped the abuse, or the misery that often surfaces in its wake.
This almost total dependence on others further undermines the already depressed spirit of many Native people. And the only way it can end is if we take back the responsibility of feeding, clothing and housing our people.Native village of PaimiutAt least twice, his parole has come close to ending, but he has been caught drinking and his parole has been extended.
Still, Hooper Bay remained a small, isolated place where life was a lot like it had always been. There were still only 307 people living there in 1950. The airport was built in 1954.. A new school got built. The Public Health Service established a clinic. The Alaska Village Electric Cooperative brought power. The Alaska State Housing Authority began building homes for villagers.
Parts of the city have sewer and water, and other parts are being connected to the system. There is a high-speed broadband provider so even those still hauling waterhave speedy Internet access. By many standards, life in the community is better than ever. Certainly it is much easier than in Smith's day. And yet there are many there who drink to escape, even though it is illegal to have alcohol in the village.
. The fire was blamed on unsupervised children crawling underneath the elevated structure and starting a fire.." Edwards does almost no narration in the film. She simply points a camera at people and lets them talk. The youngsters talk about their desires for Chuck E. Cheese and McDonald's and their favorites movies:"Scooby Doo" and"We Are Marshall."The elders who appear in the film talk about how times are changing, but.
Most people in Hooper Bay believe alcohol is bad. Residents long ago voted their community dry. Importing, selling, possessing or making alcohol is illegal. The state of things in Sitka is in just as bad and disgraceful a state as can be imagined. There is no law or order of any kind and no means to enforce either. In the town every other house is a clandestine distillery; and in the Indian village every habituation is one. The prohibition of liquor importation has no other result, so far, but that of changing drunkards of ordinary stamp, Indians as well as white and half-breeds, into actual raving maniacs.
The legacy of this history can be seen in Hooper Bay today. People there believe drinking is wrong, Hoelscher said; even the drunks tell him that. But people actively try to keep others from quitting. What did happen was the creation of a new class of criminals: bootleggers. Some number of them were just poor people responding to financial realities. Alaska State Troopers say a bottle of booze bought for $10 in Anchorage can be resold for $150 in a rural area."I don't think these are bad people," Hoelscher said. Some of them are just trying hard to make a buck. Some want to self-medicate against the trying realities of life.
The only model for drinking in the village is binge drinking, he said. There is a legitimate fear that if alcohol was legally allowed in, there might be even more binge drinking. Hoelscher is himself a non-drinker, as are his wife and family. A lot of Alaskans, both non-Native and Native, have been happy to buy into this stereotype for years. Harold Napoleon is in some ways among them. He believes Alaska Natives lack the gene to properly break down alcohol.
Ehlers is one of the few people in the world whose research is devoted entirely to studying alcohol use by American Indians and Alaska Natives. She is in the middle of a five-year,One thing she has found -- which also supports the genetic studies concluding Natives aren't predisposed to alcohol problems -- is that Natives who start drinking as adults suffer far fewer problems with alcohol than those who start as teenagers.
When Napoleon started drinking is unclear. Repeated attempts to arrange an interview to sit down with him to discuss the issues raised in this story failed, though he remains a public player in Alaska Native politics. In May he appeared at a tribal summit in Anchorage to discuss the problems women face in rural Alaska.
There are some indications in rural Alaska that, at most, harsher crackdowns serve only to shift business from smugglers to makers of homebrew. Prisoners aren't sitting around at the comparing wine yeasts: the yeasts that create pruno probably come from starters that circulate through prisons, which in turn come from yeast naturally occurring on some foods."
They are, however, expected to argue that David lacked the premeditation necessary for a first-degree murder charge because he was intoxicated. The so-called"" against the most serious of criminal charges is used with some regularity in Alaska. That relationship encourages people to grab at easy solutions --"throw the bums in jail" -- or equally simple answers --"it's just those drunk Natives."
While Wood worked at the University of Alaska Anchorage Justice Center, he tried repeatedly to get Alaska State Troopers to stop flagging public crime reports from the rural areas of the state with the tag"alcohol is believed to be a factor." Wood believed that by doing so, troopers were helping to fuel the belief that alcohol -- not people -- are responsible for crime.
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