CREE AUTHOR TACKLES ‘FILTHY, STINKING’ ISSUE
Book aims to bring light to dark topic of aboriginals and alcohol
Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing My People (and Yours) Harold Johnson University of Regina Press
Early on in his new book, Harold Johnson strikes an apologetic tone. He knows the theme of his book — alcohol use among aboriginals — will court controversy. But he cannot stay silent any longer.
“I’m about to drag this filthy, stinking subject out into the light,” he writes. “It is my hope that the light kills it.”
After almost 20 years as a lawyer, including eight as a Crown prosecutor, Johnson, a Cree from northern Saskatchewan, estimates a staggering 95 per cent of his criminal cases involve people who were intoxicated.
From his base in La Ronge, Johnson says he’s amazed how many people he’s met who have suffered a brain injury as a result of getting hit with a bat, board or rock during a drunken brawl. He’s grown tired of hearing domestic violence victims utter the phrase: “When he’s sober, he’s a good guy.”
And he’s become fed up standing next to graves of people who died from alcohol: He lost two brothers to drunk drivers.
It’s time, he says, for people to stop being afraid to talk about the issue.
“If a white person uses ‘Indian’ and ‘alcohol’ in the same sentence, they’re afraid of being called racist. If an Indian says ‘Indian’ and ‘alcohol’ in the same sentence, they’re afraid people are going to point at them and say, ‘Look it’s true, they are lazy, drunken Indians,’ ” he told the National Post.
“I’m taking a subject and opening it up and saying we have to talk about this.”
In Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing My People (and Yours), from University of Regina Press, Johnson writes that while colonization and trauma from residential schools may help to explain the reasons for alcohol abuse, they don’t offer any solutions.
“If we allow ourselves to believe the victim story and we live by it, we become victims, and victims can never fix their own situations,” writes Johnson, who once worked as a logger and miner.
The criminal justice system is similarly ill-suited to deal with the problem, he writes, as it tends to look at a case “through pinholes … that tiny portion of the problem that the lawyers want looked at and that the law allows.”
Society also can’t depend solely on treatment centres, which often employ outdated 12-step models, he argues.
Instead, Johnson is calling on aboriginals who don’t drink — about 35 per cent of the population, according to one study — to stop being “silently sober.”
“How about we spread the story that we are proud of our traditional culture and that it is a culture of sobriety?” he writes. “I would love to see a Facebook posting that said, ‘I am proud to be Cree, proud to be sober.’”
Rather than sending people away for treatment, Johnson suggests turning communities into treatment centres. Taking a page from neighbourhood Block Watch programs, Johnson says people on reserves could put signs on their doors indicating they are a “Sober House” — places of refuge for people who are alone or cut off from their families.
Limiting the supply of alcohol and increasing taxes are also options that could be examined, he said.
A study released in 2009 found alcohol-related deaths among First Nations in B.C. were five times higher than the rate for other residents (15.1 per 10,000 compared with 3.4).
The same study found 41 per cent of First Nations deaths from motor vehicle accidents were alcoholrelated compared with 19 per cent for other residents.
“It’s hard to bring it up in a safe way without sounding as if you are (buying in) to stereotypes,” Dr. Evan Adams, then an aboriginal health adviser for the province, said in an interview at the time. “It has to be initiated by us — as First Nations — and it needs to happen at every level.”
Adams, who is now chief medical health officer for the First Nations Health Authority in B.C., said the issues remain “complex and … hindered by stigma” and it’s best to empower individual communities to figure out solutions.
“There is no pan-aboriginal approach,” he said.
Wab Kinew, a Manitoba MLA and author who has written about how he and his father engaged in self-destructive behaviours before quitting alcohol, said Johnson is starting an important conversation.
However, substance abuse and alcoholism are not unique to the indigenous community, nor are they reflective of any inherent flaw, he cautioned.
These are learned behaviours that can be traced back to the fur-trade era and to residential schools, he said. Any talk of solutions cannot be divorced from that historical context.
While abstinence may work at the individual level, communities are likely better off focusing on harm reduction, he said. Expanding on Johnson’s idea of establishing sober houses, Kinew said there needs to be more social and recreational outlets for those wanting to stop drinking.
Johnson, meanwhile, says he is working with the province of Saskatchewan to hold more community meetings to find ways to end the “cycle of alcohol and despair.”
“The story about Indians and alcohol has been around for a long time,” he writes.
“This does not have to be our story. It never was ours. … And we have the power to end it.”