From hooch to highballs, alcohol washes through Canada's North. Some say drinking comes with the territory. Others say that's just the liquor talking. By Tim Querengesser
“You sure can drink those ciders,” Dave said as I ordered two more while finishing my first. We were in the Taku, a neo-Klondike saloon decorated with pick-axes and spittoons where men with beards hit on women dancing in snow boots. I drank fast to soften my culture shock and chose cider because I was on a health kick, but every time I ordered more the blond waitress with the AC/DC-mullet sneered. Later, I switched to manly mixed drinks to appease her. When the lights came on 2 a.m. I was buzzed and dancing like an animal. “I think you’re going to like it up here,” Dave said.
It was 2004. I’d left Vancouver for the unknown of working at a First Nations radio station in Whitehorse. I arrived in November, with winter in full loom, so making friends was a priority. A worried acquaintance in Ontario gave me the phone number for Dave, her friend-of-a-friend she knew in the Yukon. I called him on my first Friday there and he invited me to the Taku, the busiest bar in town. That was all I needed to survive in Whitehorse. It was to be my first of many nights in the Taku.
You couldn’t escape it – life in Whitehorse swirled around alcohol. There was always an event tied to the drinking, like some half-hearted excuse. There were hockey-pool nights to drink. There were drunken birthday celebrations. There were welcome-to-the-Yukon parties and goodbye-to-the-Yukon parties. If it hit minus-40, you hit the bar. If it was warm you did the same. There was the Taku, where we went after work. There was Freepour Joe’s, where we went for a big buzz. There was Lizards, to dance; the Roadhouse, to watch hockey; the Casa Loma, after playing hockey; and the Kopper King, for chicken-wings, cheap beer and, occasionally, to watch people fight. If the party moved to someone’s house you always brought beer. No one worried much about who was driving, and everyone drank regardless of age or gender, or if they liked hockey or ate wings.
That winter in Whitehorse I realized the North has a unique relationship with alcohol, as if partying for any old reason is part of the place. It seemed logical that I drank more than I had in the south, considering the lonely landscape and the bitter cold. Bars and parties were warm and welcoming. Drinking was like a civic duty, an act of bonding with one’s fellow citizens. Liquor was like water, power and roads – an essential service.
Statistically, booze in the North is a story of Jekyll and Hyde. Perhaps surprisingly, research in the Yukon and NWT shows that here, fewer people per capita drink than in the rest of Canada, and that the region leads the country in teetotalers, the majority of whom are aboriginal. But though overall numbers for the North don’t exist – Nunavut has yet to complete a survey of alcohol consumption – there’s ample evidence that among those who do drink, there’s a much higher number of “heavy drinkers” – people who down five or more drinks at one sitting.
It seems it’s always been that way. So many of the old-timers’ rollicking stories are awash in whoop-ups and hooch. The Klondike stampede seemed half lived in saloons, where girls kicked up their skirts and men paid for rounds with gold dust. That romanticism extends right across the North: Iqaluit’s Zoo was long legendary for fulfilling its name, while Yellowknife’s Gold Range starred in Mordecai Richler novels. Going to the Fogcutter in Haines, Alaska was – and still is – like joining an exclusive club. So, does the North have a drinking problem? Or is liquor, quite conversely, a cherished part of our frontier culture? Or is it a little of both – a heady buzz, plus one hell of a hangover?
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Behchoko, 110-kilometres northwest of Yellowknife, is the hub for the Tlicho Dene, one of the most politically and economically active First Nations in the Northwest Territories. The town can divide. Homes are small, but thanks to money from the diamond mines, many residents drive shiny new 4x4 pickups. A handful of such trucks are parked in front of the Tlicho government office when I walk in to meet Joe Beaverho, a band councillor who’s promised to tell me about alcohol’s heartbreaking effects on his and other small towns in the North.
Beaverho greets me with a broad smile, but the subject we launch into isn’t cheery. He’s leading a push to ban booze here, or at least highly restrict it. Alcohol is linked to an estimated 80 per cent of his community’s deaths, and one tragedy in particular hangs over our conversation: Last winter, a 28-year-old local man went out drinking, became disoriented and froze to death on his neighbour’s stoop. Sad as it was, Beaverho says, it’s happened several times in the past few years.
There’s plenty of lower level tragedy here, too. Beaverho says kids at eight and nine are getting their first taste of booze, which has led to problems that include sprees of arson. And even though diamond mining has brought previously unknown wealth, alcohol is threatening to de-rail that progress. Some workers aren’t allowed on their flights to the mines because they’re drunk.
At the moment Behchoko, like 11 other communities in the Northwest Territories, is “damp.” That means there are limits on alcohol, but no outright prohibition. In the NWT just six communities are totally “dry”; in Nunavut, there are eight, but only one in the Yukon. Beaverho and his supporters argue dryness, though difficult to enforce and a breeding ground for bootlegging, promises social benefits in stunning numbers. Each year when booze is briefly banned in Behchoko for spiritual gatherings, RCMP say crime drops by more than 70 per cent. “I’m trying to make people understand we do have a problem,” Beaverho says.
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Considering the hurt booze seems to cause to Behchoko, it seems uncouth to suggest alcohol is also a positive part of Northern life. But it’s kind of true. To understand why people drink, you first have to ask why they wouldn’t. It’s a question I find easy to answer. Truthfully, in the North, there are few reasons not to drink, especially during winter. Having moved North of Sixty three times, on each occasion I’ve found community in groups loosely connected through drinking. Arriving in Yellowknife in the summer of 2008 was the same. I immediately fell into the party circuit, making friends beside campfires while drinking beer. Later, when the snow arrived, the party moved into the bars.
And here’s another truth: In the rough-and-ready North, embracing drunkenness is way more acceptable than it is elsewhere in Canada – meaning it can still be rip-roaring, innocent fun. Take away the boozy nights away and my best Northern stories disappear. Like the night at the Fogcutter when the woman wearing a clown mask and carrying a hatchet jumped out at me and screamed, “We’re goin’ shrimpin!” Or the many nights I’ve headed to the bar immediately after work and – because there’s nothing else to do – moved from table to table until closing time, reuniting with friends and sharing in the resulting stories for weeks. Up here, I drink because I feel camaraderie with fellow Northerners. In some weird way the place has become part of me, and I enjoy celebrating membership.
Such guilt free indulgence can do some a lot of good. At Yellowknife’s Gold Range I met Libby, a forty-something Caucasian woman who grew up in Inuvik but moved to the U.S. and got married. There, she told me, she lived a conservative Christian life, staying home most of the time and not socializing. She was unhappy, 75 pounds overweight and unable to speak up or smile. “I’m a new person,” she says. Since divorcing her husband and moving back North she’s lost weight and gained an infectious lust for life. She feeds it by celebrating. “I’m so happy now,” she says with a broad smile as we drink beer together, and while couples jig around the dance floor. “I can’t believe the way I used to be.”
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To understand why people drink you have to ask what benefits they get from it, says Arctic anthropologist Hugh Brody. For one, Brody says, booze can create a sense of belonging. “For people that have been displaced and dispossessed, the way drinking can help you feel that you have a community and a place in it – that’s not a factor to be underestimated,” he says.
Brody should know. For five months in the late 1960s, he researched his groundbreaking book, Indians on Skid Row, by drinking with Chipewyan, Slavey and other aboriginal people on Edmonton’s skid row. He expected to find the drunks struggling and fragmented, but discovered the opposite. “It was pretty moving because the people I spent time with were mostly welcoming and friendly, and were helpful to each other,” Brody says. “Apart from one or two really chronic alcoholics, most were not disintegrated as individuals and there was a community that was quite real.”
That community was centred around bars and was focused on drinking. This still holds true today, in the North and elsewhere. For many aboriginal migrants to the city, Brody observed skid rows offer a place free of middle-class expectations. And because drunkenness is seen as a goal rather than as a shameful escape – as it often is elsewhere in society – it isn’t hidden. “There’s an enthusiasm for drinking, for drunkenness, and there isn’t that anxiety and guilt,” Brody says. “I came from a culture where you struggle against alcohol, where you boast about having drunk six double-whiskeys and three pints of beer yet are still walking. The people I drank with on skid row had no such resistance. On the contrary – if you’re spending money, the point is to get drunk.”
Brody explains in his book that this enthusiasm, this drunkenness, challenges social norms and can lead to anger and stereotypes. Downtown Yellowknife is a shining example. The city’s skid row is in the heart of its business district, and every morning as bureaucrats shuffle to work beneath office towers, street drunks – predominantly aboriginals, but not exclusively – curse and giggle at them. Many buttoned-down locals speak of the situation as a “problem,” and many perpetuate that old myth that aboriginal people can’t hold their booze. But Brody argues most judgment of drunks stems from frustration that they don’t aspire to advance themselves. “What reason could you give somebody for not drinking?” he asks. “That may not be as easy as it sounds. Of course you can tell them it’s a waste of money and causes grief in their loved ones, but for people who in a way don’t have much to live for, it’s hard to make the argument they shouldn’t drink.”
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For those people – the ones without much to live for – Yellowknife’s John Howard Society has become a warm shelter. Inside, the smell of mouthwash greets you before you’re through the door. I meet Lydia Bardak, the tiny but confident executive director, among a never-ending din of drunken outbursts in her office. She looks like a teacher more than a frontline worker, wearing a grey sweater-vest over a pink dress shirt, blue jeans and penny loafers. “There are times friends, family and the police are concerned about me,” she says, surrounded by drunken people who dwarf her. “I remind them that I don’t have any power to take away from people. There’s no harm I can bring to them. I feel safe.”
I’ve come to see firsthand the role alcohol plays in treating emotional trauma. Few will speak of it openly, but many victims of abuse in the North quietly talk of the relief that alcohol can bring to their pain. Of course, self-medicating has a way of falling out of balance. Witness Tony, who strides into Bardak’s office. He’s a hulking man – six-foot-four, with an upper body that dwarfs his legs. I tense: Tony is drunk. But Bardak is happy to see him, and I trust her read of the situation. Tony is originally from Behchoko and he’s the leader of what he calls his “wolf pack,” a gang of vagrants. “I’ll tell you the truth – I’m an alcoholic,” he says. “My boys out there, we drink every day because for me, I’ve been abused as a kid. When I wake up my mind starts thinking backwards.”
Tony tells me he was sexually abused six times, that he’s spent eight years in prison, and that he’s already had a heart attack, even though he’s only 42. He’s been drunk for a month since being released from jail, he says. “It’s just the pain – it doesn’t get me nowhere,” he says. “I want to go for treatment.” His eyes tear. Bardak looks over and tears up, too.
“The judgment is that these people choose this lifestyle,” Bardak says. “But when you’re a hairspray-drinking, stairwell-sleeping drunk-tank regular, the combination of addiction and mental illness means you’re not making choices anymore. These are human beings who need to be treated. They’re dying. But it doesn’t cost me anything to be nice to them.”
Later, to see the role alcohol has in creating trauma, I meet Andrea Harrison at the Association for Community Living in Yellowknife, which runs a support program she’s part of. The 28-year-old First Nations woman is originally from Fort Smith but grew up in Yellowknife. Harrison has been diagnosed with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, as have her sister and brother. “I go through struggles,” she says. “There’s been times when I don’t understand things. I struggled through school but I managed to graduate. Nobody understood FASD. I got teased and bullied. They said I was slow and dumb.”
Harrison avoids looking directly at you, but she’s cheery and has an amazing capacity to forgive. She tells me her mother drank when she was pregnant. She still keeps in touch but they’ve never discussed what happened. Has she considered bringing it up? “I’ve wanted to, but when it comes to writing the letter I totally forget,” Harrison says. “I’m angry at her for drinking while she was pregnant, but as I get older and hear more things about her, what she went through, I just can’t hate her for it.”
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There’s lots one learns while researching Northern drinking. For instance, that Yellowknife, population 20,000 or so, has 12 Alcoholics Anonymous groups. In one meeting, filled predominately with Caucasian men, I listen to a former bureaucrat’s story of drinking for 36 years before being arrested for drunk driving. In Behchoko I meet a fun-natured elder who worked at the former hospital but also used to drink heavily. “Funny thing, I still had my job,” he says, telling me how he’d use bottled oxygen to recover from hangovers. I learn alcohol is the most destructive substance a pregnant woman can ingest, worse even than heroin or crack. I learn many alcohol addicts resort to drinking vanilla extract, mouthwash and hairspray because of poverty. I learn a 375-ml bottle of vodka can fetch $150 in a dry community. I learn that in Yellowknife, vagrants are often arrested for public drunkenness, released without charges on the condition they remain sober, then end up in jail for months after breaching that condition. I learn the booze you buy in Iqaluit is stored in Rankin Inlet, and vice versa.
And more than anything, I learn that ethnicity slices through the heart of the question. Whites and non-aboriginals in the territories are spared judgment for their bouts of intoxication, even allowed to revel in it, while First Nations, Métis and Inuit are either vilified for similar behaviour, deemed incapable – genetically or culturally – of dealing with liquor, and forever living down stigmas linked to booze.
A man who I’ll call Bud, a community program developer at the Tree of Peace Friendship Centre in Yellowknife, is himself a recovering alcohol abuser. He knows all about this divide. We meet at a coffee shop, but Bud, originally from Toronto, isn’t comfortable with the setting. Like most in the addiction-treatment field, he’s religious about anonymity. To chat, we jump in his Jeep and drive to a campground parking lot. There, we talk about race and drinking. Aboriginal alcoholism is, he says, “based on exploitation” –involving residential schools, cultural assimilation and so on. “I see a group that existed in a stark world. They’ve had no time to acquire the skills they need to live in the evolving world.”
But the white side of Northern drinking also troubles Bud. The live-and-let-live culture of the frontier, plus the in-your-face flavour of aboriginal drunkenness, mean many white alcoholics escape judgment, he says. They’re not as easily identified as having a problem with liquor, and are thus able to cover up their excesses easier than they would elsewhere in Canada. He’s got a point. Can you imagine employees in Toronto getting a pass from showing up at work because they’re hung over? In the North, it happens often, brushed aside with a nod and a wink. “Somehow people here equate drinking hard to playing hard,” Bud says.
For good and for ill, both buzz and hangover, drinking a lot is a Northern tradition. For now, that cups seems bottomless.
Tim Querengesser is Up Here's associate editor
