Alkali Lake: "Sick as our secrets"

The Tyee, August 11, 2009

"We are only as sick as our secrets." If the people of Alkali Lake needed a slogan (and they don't), this would serve. I found it on a piece of paper pinned to the wall of the Pow-Wow Arbor, a wooden open-air structure where, every year for the past 33 years, the natives of Alkali Lake, B.C. have hosted an Alcoholics Anonymous Roundup.

Here, along with alcoholics from around the world, from as far away as Australia and Mexico and even China, the townspeople of Alkali Lake (or Esketemc, as they call it) gather to share 'secrets' of how alcohol almost destroyed them a half-century ago, and how they saved themselves. Both the secrets they relate in their stories -- brutally honest, confessional -- and the telling of them are parts of the healing, in a sobriety program that has caught the attention of problem drinkers everywhere.

Health director Irene Johnson, a small, squat woman who has her own history with booze, says this openness is key. "We've been in so much pain," she says, "that it's easier now to be honest about it rather than keep shoving it down, you know, getting sick and committing suicide."

'That's how easy it was to get alcohol'

The stories are pathetic, horrific and unnerving. Binge-drinking by children as young as eight, sexual abuse and physical assault, the despair of people dispossessed by residential schools and other agents of colonization. But this is not time or place for excuses or finger-pointing. Says Chief Charlene Belleau: "It's time to quit blaming the government, quit blaming the churches, quit blaming anybody for where we were at as people, if we're going to recover from 150 years of residential school policy and the pain that's been there for all of us."

The AA philosophy is to take responsibility. Still, it's hard not to apportion blame. One native woman tells of how as an eight-year-old girl, she and other children in Alkali Lake would steal money from their parents, mail it in an envelope to Williams Lake with instructions, and then wait for the white man's taxis to deliver bottles of wine promptly "at four-thirty on Tuesdays and Fridays, right to our door."

It was a modern variant of supplying firewater to the Indians, except this was wine, and these were adolescents, learning how to lose themselves in addiction even before their teens. "If you ever wonder why we because alcoholics in Esketemc, that's how easy it was to get alcohol," the woman said. "I was on Skid Row in my own home." Today, she is sober, has been for more than 20 years, but she still calls herself "an alcoholic." Dry or not, you’re an alcoholic for life. It's a burden that follows you to the grave.


At the AA Roundup

You don't get invited to the Alkali Lake Roundup unless you're an addict, or in the family of one, but two weeks ago I rented a car and went anyway, uninvited. I violated another rule by bringing recording equipment -- the tenets of AA, after all, emphasize anonymity. But I wanted to see (and record) the phenomenon of the Alkali Lake first-hand. Was it myth, or hard reality, or a little of both?

It's not hard to find the 'Powwow Arbor,' as they call the site of the annual AA Roundup. Just outside Williams Lake, you leave Highway 97 and exit on Dog Creek Road, and then you just follow the signs. You arrive at an open field, filled with teepees and RV's and small knots of people drinking coffee and soda. The focus of attention is the Arbor, a kind of open-air wooden corral with turf in the centre and elevated benches all around. Nearby is a sweat lodge, and a hill where alcoholics can fast and meditate.

I was an unexpected stranger, but I was not turned away. I told organizer Ken Johnson that I wanted to shoot video and record some audio tape, and he said okay. He pointed me to the coffee urn. What struck me immediately was how easily and effortlessly the natives and non-natives mixed, and how they shared the common candid language of addiction.

Mid-way through the afternoon, a pretty 16-year-old blonde girl from southern California takes the microphone and introduces herself. "I'm Helen and I'm an alcoholic/addict," she begins. The people sitting in the corral respond as one: "Hi Helen."

"I'm really really grateful to be here sober," Helen continues, with a confidence that belies her age. "I have 107 days today (APPLAUSE). It's the longest I've have been ever sober and it feels amazing... I should be dead right now. I always say I'm on borrowed time. I should be dead considering all the things I did. I'm so glad I'm alive, which is a huge change."

Procession of teen recovering alcoholics

One by one, a procession of native teens then take the microphone. Trevor, in training with the Armed Forces and leaving soon for Afghanistan, says he will miss his parents. Irvin, in his teens and sober for six years (more applause), says "it's an awesome experience to see what life is really about instead of waking up in a ditch, or in somebody's car." Another young woman, her four-year-daughter standing next to her, can't stop crying as she talks about her frequent alcohol relapses. But with the help of the people around her, she says, better days are coming.

Listening to the stories is Patrick Haggerson, a therapist with the Betty Ford Institute in California, famous as the addiction treatment centre-of-choice for Hollywood celebrities. Haggerson comes to Alkali Lake once a month, both to teach and to learn. He's intrigued by how the community has integrated the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous with a number of native practices.

"Alkali Lake is an example of how they kind of blended the two paths, and that's of great interest to us... Even though it's a small community they have regular AA meetings every week, they have support services and social services, and they've eliminated a great many of their social problems or at least reduced them. They are able to get funding and bring in outside support like me. I mean, that to me is huge success."

Alkali Lake first came to the world's attention in the mid-1980s, with the release of a documentary called The Honour of All. In the natives' own voices, and with re-enactments of their own experiences, the film tells how the Reserve went from a nearly 100 per cent alcoholic rate to nearly 100 per cent sobriety, in a decade. They did it with hard-core social action, and relentless social pressure. Bootleggers were tracked down and their operations closed, alcoholics were given food vouchers instead of their social assistance cheques, and problem drinkers were told to go into treatment, or go to jail.

It was rough social engineering, and the two pioneers of the program, Andy and Phyllis Chelsea, met a lot of local resistance from their neighbors. But they prevailed and, bolstered by the international publicity generated by The Honour of All, the Chelseas toured the world and told the Alkali Lake story. They, and the town, became the poster children of the sobriety movement.

"It's never gonna go away"

Today, Andy Chelsea has given up his leading role in the program, and he's dismayed at the number of teenaged addicts on the Reserve. He believes that as the sobriety program became professionalized, it focused too much on individual addicts, instead of families. In short, he says, they forgot about the kids. When I ask if addiction is still a problem on the Reserve, it provokes a sardonic laugh. "Oh yeah, every kind of addiction... and it always will be. It's never gonna go away. If you want miracles I think Jesus better come down from up there and tell everybody you're not gonna drink ever again in your life. That's the only way it's gonna happen. But He's not gonna do that."

Chelsea guesses that the addiction rate in Alkali Lake today is "around 40 percent" but then quickly adds that this number includes drugs, and that the reserve's population has doubled in the last 30 years to about 700 people. He doesn't want to be seen as a nay-sayer. "No, it's not a magic formula. But it works. If it's going to save the lives of 10 people... it's worth it."

Patrick Haggerson says it's a mistake to play the percentages game where native addiction is concerned. "It's ridiculous. Go to Williams Lake and ask what is your percentage of alcoholism. They'd laugh at you... I don't think that is a realistic model to use for (measuring) success. It's better to look at the resources that are active in a community that supports sobriety."

What Alkali Lake offers is not only resources, but also continuity. Keith, a 62-year-old non-native man from Fraser Lake, says he has been coming here for the last ten years "to recharge my batteries and get my life in perspective." His friend Marty, from Kamloops, has been coming since 1978, and he talks with the vivid imagery used by many recovering alcoholics. "The door of heaven didn't open and bring me in; the door of hell opened and let me out... I hear on the inside now, and I'm very busy listening to myself."

The program is also inclusive. Recovering alcoholics are encouraged to bring their kids, even very young ones. It's important, say community leaders, that children not be shielded from the realities of addiction. "We always invite families," says Health Director Irene Johnson. "When I was growing up I felt there was no hope, nothing would ever get better, so the option was either suicide or stay drunk, because sooner or later i would die from it anyway. I don't want my granddaughter to have that hopeless feeling. So we invited whoever and they come here and they're part of us. We need to bring hope to our children."

Secrets and healing

It's important not to over-idealize Alkali Lake, however. The Reserve, like the rest of Canada's native population, has issues that are as serious as alcohol. Irene Johnson summarized the dilemma this way: "Okay, I'm sober. Now what?" There's still abuse, child abandonment, violence, poverty, alienation. Those problems are still there when the hangover passes and, if left unresolved, they can undermine the most rigorous sobriety programs.

Healing is hard. The next challenge for the natives of Alkali Lake, as with other native Canadians, is to reveal the deeply-held "secrets" of their residential school experience, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission begins its work of truth-telling. There is more there to recover from than sexual abuse by white priests and nuns -- the toxic legacy of the schools is permeating through the generations, and the stories are not easy to tell. Native leaders warn that communities need to be ready to deal with the consequences of disclosures of native-on-native abuse.

But Alkali Lake has taken the first important steps -- driving home the message that addiction, and the despair that comes with it, is a shared communal experience, as is the healing. Mildred, a native woman in her 40s, carried her own secret belief while she was drinking. "For a long time," she says, "I thought it (alcoholism) was only happening to me." Now she knows better.

Rwanda and the Devil: Letter to The Walrus

July/August 2009

Beyond Evil
Thank you for Alice Mukarurinda’s story of tragedy and reconciliation in Rwanda (“No Small Mercy,” May). It is perfectly understandable that she should tell her children that “the devil came to Rwanda,” but there is nothing supernatural about what happened fifteen years ago in Central Africa. It was less a story of divine good versus evil than a story of very human manipulation and fear, a descent into momentary madness. The fraction of the Hutu population that took up machetes against their countrymen (estimated at less than 20 percent) were, like Alice’s attacker, terrified by the approaching Rwandan Patriotic Front army of Paul Kagame, an army that would later exact its own UN-documented toll on Hutu civilians. This does not by any means excuse or diminish the horror of the 1994 genocide, but it does make it “our” story, not the devil’s. And it also helps to explain why reconciliation in Rwanda will be an excruciatingly difficult and lengthy process.

Claude Adams
Producer, Out of the Darkness
Surrey, BC

See the full Walrus article

"Word Makers of War"--A Plea for Pacifism

Think about this:

On Page 2 of Nicholson Baker's profoundly counter-intuitive book "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization" we find this, the opening lines of a pacifist play, Jeremiah, by Stefan Zweig:

"I had recognized the foe that I was to fight--fake heroism that prefers to send others to suffering and death, the cheap optimism of the conscienceless prophets, both political and military who, boldly promising victory, prolong the war, and behind them the hired chorus, the 'word makers of war' as Werfel has pilloried them in his beautiful poem."

Word makers of war. I love it, and seek out Franz Werfel and his poem. Werfel, a pacifist charged with treason, published a book of poems in 1919 entitled Der Gerichtag (The Day of Judgement) which contained a poem with this title. (Another possible translation is "Propagandists of War" but I like "word makers" better.) I think of jingoists and sabre-rattlers, and the purveyors of death myths, starting with Homer--"It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country."--and including Rupert Brooke --"There shall be/ In that rich earth a richer dust conceal'd."

Werfel's poem, clumsily translated, contains these lines:

"The fools are babbling and the overambitious are croaking
And they call manliness their old excrements.
Just so that the fat women are yearning for them,
The chest full of medals
Is vaulting into dawn."

Another more powerful poem, called "The War," was written in the first months of WW1:

"On a storm of false words.
The head wreathed by empty thunder,
Sleepless from lies,
Girded with deeds which only do themselves,
Bragging with sacrifices,
Unpleasing, terrible for Heaven--That's the way you are going down,
Time . . . "

And I think of the Christie Blatchfords of the world, filling the heads of infantrymen on the way to Afghanistan with "empty thunder" and praising the generals (and presumably, the politicians behind them) who lead our soldiers to war, and to death, on foreign soil. Word makers of war.

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And here is Chris Hedges, reviewing a new book, The Photographer, in the New York Times Review of Books:

"It is impossible to know war if you do not stand with the mass of the powerless caught in its maw. All narratives of war told through the lens of the combatants carry with them the seduction of violence. But once you cross to the other side, to stand in fear with the helpless and the weak, you confront the moral depravity of industrial slaughter and the scourge that is war itself. Few books achieve this clarity. 'The Photographer' is one . . .

"The disparity between what we are told or what we believe about war and war itself is so vast that those who come back, like (author Didier) Lefebvre, are often rendered speechless. What do you say to those who advocate war as an instrument to liberate the women of Afghanistan or bring democracy to Iraq? . . . How do you explain that the very proposition of war as an instrument of virtue is absurd?"

Maybe we would have more clarity and honesty about war as "an instrument of virtue" if the word makers, the writers and combat correspondents, embedded themselves with the powerless, rather than with the soldiers. Alas, embedding with the victims isn't sexy, and it exposes one to the real mortal danger of war.

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The virtuous war, the good war, is a pervasive myth. WW 2 was "good." Vietnam was "bad." (All lost wars are bad.) Equally pervasive is the myth that war is necessary.

Here is an excerpt from Drew Gilpin Faust's "This Republic of Suffering; Death and the American Civil War". A war, by the way, that left 620,000 men dead on the battlefields, more than the combined dead of the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, WW1, WW2 and the Korean War.

"Death created the modern American union--not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments . . . Americans had to identify--find, invent, create--the means and mechanisms to manage more than half a million dead: their deaths, their bodies, their loss. How they accomplished this task reshaped their individual lives--and deaths--at the same time that it redefined their nation and their culture.

"The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking."

Note the message behind these sweeping sentences: War creates a sense of nationhood. Is this true? It's an unsettling thought: Nationhood at a cost of half a million lives. And what kind of nation does this blood-flood produce? A nation of graves? A nation, perhaps, that embraces war as a viable instrument of nation-building? Destruction as a means of creation. "To save the village, it was necessary to destroy it." It's the kind of logic one wants to run away from.

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Notes from the breadline . . .

OK, so I'm not on the breadline. Yet. But I wanted to get your attention. I don't stand in line for free bread. I still buy my peasant bread for $12 a loaf from Floran, my Transylvanian baker in Kitsilano. But I ration myself to one slice a day. Things are getting tough. I'm into my sixth month of unemployment. My allotment of UI cheques runs out next month. I'm down to my last 8K in savings. Yesterday, for the first time ever, I bought a lottery ticket. I lost. I wake up every morning at six in a funk. How many days have I got left before the entire superstructure of my life comes crashing down? Okay, that's melodramatic. I'm in a semi-dream state, and in that state, everything is ragged. But the dread of joblessness is beginning to consume me. As Slappy White said: "The trouble with unemployment is that the minute you wake up in the morning you're on the job."

First, a little bit about myself. I'm 60 and in great health. I'm presentable. I have a resume to die for. Check it out. I have hair, I look okay in a suit, and I know which fork to use at a dinner table. There are a dozen things I can do well, for money (and benefits.) But I'm not doing them. What's that all about? My savings are running out and my credit cards are maxed and that Sour Hour between six and seven in the morning is getting worse. The walls are closing in. I'm getting defensive. (Notice how I emphasized my "great" health after I told you I'm 60.)

Have another look at the picture above. I believe that's Justice in the breadline. Justice is going begging. It's the damned unfairness of it all. I feel myself shrinking. "Unemployment," said Mason Cooley, "diminishes people." I put on my ego in the morning and it doesn't fit anymore. The other day I was helping my son Gabriel mow a neighbor's lawn--he's trying to start a gardening business--and I thought: "Hey, maybe I could do this, for eight bucks an hour." From Visiting Professor to the common vetch (a garden weed) in five years; how the worm has turned.

So I went to Poynter Online, and read Colleen's Help Column. And one of her many pieces of Advice to the Jobless is "Keep a Journal." It's a way of staying in touch with yourself, or reminding yourself that you're moving ahead. Also, it's a way of taking those daily quantum units of job-search frustration, reducing them to a few simple words and then dismissing them as insignificant. To be honest, there's also a bit of petulance at work there: Look, cruel world, what you have reduced me to!

It's also something to do. It's Defoe's Plague Diary. Notes of a Fan. Chronicles of Wasted Time.

So here's my journal. I'll try to keep it simple. No chewing of the furniture, no eruptions of hurt or rage. You'll have to read the sentiment between the lines. And you'll know that when it ends (if it ends?) I'll have found work and my Seldon Crisis will be over. (Seldon Crisis: See Isaac Asimov.)

Thursday, May 21, 2002

Start day by checking email. A woman with information about my proposed documentary (hereafter referred to as PD) has contacted me on Facebook. She wants more detail about my project. I tell her we should communicate by email, because Facebook is "too public." (I've been working on my PD for three months--more about that later.)

I spend five minutes emailing the head of the media department at a local university. Do they have any openings for media trainers, or teachers for that matter? I go through the daily Media Job Search Canada listings. Example: "Senior Network Analyst, CBC Montreal" I do a quick scan of Jeff Gaulin's Jobsite. It's a desert out there. I have breakfast (single slice of peasant bread, buttered) and read about a journalist who wrote a book, made some money, and decided to travel the US with a pool hustler for a year, looking for action.

Yesterday, on the advice of a newspaper buddy, I wrote a short note to a high-profile PR company, telling them a bit about me, and asking about media training jobs. I'll be happy to get so much as an acknowledgement of receipt. You have to understand that I've been doing this daily, for months, and only one in 12 prospective employers even go to the effort of telling you they're received your application. (Here you'll have to read between the lines to sample my emotion.)

Monday, May 25

While bottom-feeding, came across an online men's magazine called JimberJaw that's looking for hip, edgy, sexy articles on such soul-catching subjects as Where to Pick up Girls, Where to Find a Great Cigar, and New Gadgets the New Male Can't Do Without. (JimberJaw is a caveman who's brought to life after being frozen for 50,000 years, and the publication admires his "simple thinking"--all he apparently wants is a Bud, a broad and a gadget) I enquire about such things as payment, kill fee, expenses, etc. The answer comes quickly "$25 per article--300 words. No kill fee. Payment only for articles accepted." I'm surprised they don't offer payment in the form of flints, or a jawbone . . . Gardening is sounding like more of an option every day.

Also inquired about a British-based website that specializes in "wind power and other alternative energy" stories, and is looking for somebody, anywhere, a self-starter, to work for 2 days a week. They promise "competitive" wages. I sent them my CV and my day rate. Haha.

Sunday, June 14

Maybe I should just roll with it. John Patrick Shanley, speaking at a commencement ceremony, says that you just need to tell everybody that you're a poet. Copy Walt Whitman. "Whitman never worked a day in his life." Instead of sweating in the unemployment line, sit under a tree and compose a verse. Presto: You are living gainfully. You are adding to the fluency and harmony of the cosmos. As someone else said, reality is only a matter of how you language it.

Saturday, August 1

Month and a half since the last posting, and little change. No movement on the documentary, no interest in Alkali Lake (unless you count $75 from The Tyee as interest), and little progress in the Sydney Banks retrospective. His "stakeholders" want a budget for a legacy video, but I'm getting silence from Bill. Driving me up the wall. Meanwhile, I wait for the Mary Aikins at Readers Digest to respond to a pitch on three stories: Jade (a pickup from BC Business), Alkali and Banks. But it's like glaciers moving. Nobody responds to anything. My rage is building. Magi thinks I'm falling apart--her theory is I'm looking for "no parking." I have to open up and allow success to come in! Meanwhile, the vault is almost empty. And I've emailed The Chelsea tenants to sound them out on buying the condo . . .