COLUMN ONE : A Village’s Sobering Reversal : For decades, every adult in the Indian town of Alkali Lake was alcoholic. Sober now, they watch in anguish as their children pick up the bottle.

If there was ever a showcase of teetotaling, it is this Indian village of 486, set in the piney hills of south-central British Columbia. If there was ever a lesson to be learned about the ancient, everlasting snares and delusions of strong waters, the fathers and mothers, sons and daughters of Alkali Lake are the ones to teach it.

The Shuswap Indians of Alkali Lake came by their abstinence the hard way: Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, the alcoholism rate here was 100%, and when recovery did come, it involved a sort of house-to-house combat with booze.

“It was continuous drinking,” said Francis Johnson, a 40-year-old recovering alcoholic who now teaches fourth through seventh grade at the village school. “Because of the drinking, there was a lot of child neglect, wife abuse, rape, gang rape--the worst kind of things you can imagine.”

Even the children drank in those days, he said. So did the parish priest. Contemptuous outsiders dubbed the place “Alcohol Lake.”

Then, through the herculean efforts of a lone married couple, virtually every adult in Alkali Lake sobered up.

Today, the townspeople entertain themselves with strictly alcohol-free dances and bingo games, and at the recent wedding of one of Johnson’s sisters, he said, the bride and groom served an innocent fruit punch.

Maggie Hodgson, an Indian addiction expert who has worked with some of the Alkali Lakers, celebrates the “hyper-vigilance” today of the village, which, like many Canadian Indian settlements, is largely composed of several extended families.

One-time leaders and elders of the town are under investigation for their drunken crimes of the past. Indeed, addiction counseling has become something of a growth industry--the only one in town.

The Alkali Lake story shows what can be done through the right mix of neighborly concern and brute determination, especially on an Indian reserve--as Canadian reservations are called--where fatalism toward the wages of drink runs high.

But it is not a story with a happy ending--for the people of Alkali Lake are now finding that no matter how dramatic their generation’s success in fighting the bottle may be, it is still no guarantee against the addiction of the next generation.

And if the town’s experience shows that alcoholism can be conquered en masse, it also shows that the long-term effects of drinking can outlast even the drinkers themselves.

“Our age was drunk and we sobered up, but now our children are drinking,” said Mabel Paul, a 39-year-old woman with a welcoming smile and sad eyes who pauses to explain the situation while mopping melted snow from the schoolroom floor. “My oldest is 19--now he’s the one who’s starting to drink.”

To appreciate the anguish a surge of teen-age drinking has brought to this town of recovering alcoholics, one has to consider the depths to which Alkali Lake had sunk two decades ago. Nearly every adult in town talks explicitly of those days, as if trying to draw warnings from them.

There is the witness of Josephine Johnson, for one, a trapper’s daughter born in 1935. She does not remember people drinking so much when she was small, she said. Indians were forbidden by law to patronize bars and liquor stores then, and today’s welfare system had not yet been set up. Johnson remembers her father leading a difficult, but dry, life, trading pelts in the winter and hiring on as a ranch hand or fruit picker when the spring thaw came.

It was the white fur traders, she said, who introduced beer and liquor, offering drink to the Indians in exchange for pelts.

“Then (my father) started coming home with a bottle,” she said. “Violence started. I remember my mother getting slapped around.”

She watched in horror and promised herself that she’d never drink, she said. But in 1951, Indians won the right to drink in bars, and in 1962 they were allowed to buy carry-outs.

“That’s when thing started getting bad,” she said. “That’s the time when I started drinking. I went on for days and days. Twice I landed in the hospital for too much alcohol. Whenever I got hungry, I wouldn’t eat--I just had a drink.”

A freight service, the Dog Creek Stage, started up, taking liquor orders from the Alkali Lakers and hauling in the booze over the gravel road from Williams Lake, the nearest large town.

When the money was bad and she couldn’t afford the stage, Josephine Johnson said, she would scavenge old jars and bottle caps and put up her own homemade beer. And when she couldn’t find enough bottles, she added, she would guzzle straight from the brew pot.

She chuckled as she told of her alcoholic husband’s car crash: His injuries were grave, she said, and the insurance company sent the couple a check for $17,000 to cover his claim. She and her husband paid the hospital bills--and then giddily drank through the rest of the windfall.

One day Josephine Johnson came home from an all-night toot in a neighboring town to find that a court had taken away her children and sent them to a foster home. Her response was not grief or outrage, but pure abandon.

“I had it made then,” she said. “I had no responsibilities. And then I really went at it.”

Up and down the rutted dirt streets of Alkali Lake, in and out of its one-story houses and icicle-strung log cabins, the facts repeated themselves.

Fred Johnson, now principal of the village school, said he used to drink so much that he “just felt like a hunk of bacon walking around.”

“A lot of people my age died,” he said. “Crashes. People froze, and people drowned. House fires.” He said he once beat up his father--also an alcoholic--so badly that he almost killed him. He himself is still missing his front teeth from a beery car wreck years ago.

Francis Johnson, meanwhile, wrote a thesis about Alkali Lake after he sobered up and went to graduate school. He told of his father’s beating his mother to death, and the rage he felt.

“I attempted suicide on several occasions,” he wrote, telling of efforts to drown himself in rivers and a bathtub and of trying to strangle himself with a rope. “I went to the mountain with a .22-caliber rifle. As soon as the sun came up I was going to shoot myself, but I didn’t have the courage to do it.”

Such tales and inventories are typical not only of Alkali Lake, but of Indian reserves and reservations across North America.

“No group in America, or possibly the world, has been stigmatized more by alcohol-related behavior than American Indians,” said Philip A. May, a University of New Mexico sociologist who for six years ran the U.S. Indian Health Service’s programs on the children of alcoholic mothers.

May points out that alcohol abuse varies widely from tribe to tribe and that some tribes drink less than the national average. But on the whole, studies show, Indians in North America begin drinking younger than other ethnic groups, drink more often and in greater volume, and suffer far worse effects.

Under severe peer pressure, they often adopt a flamboyant “drinking style” of going on binges in groups. “Binge drinking,” May has written, “is perceived as the unique ‘Indian’ style and is the most easily observed, exotic and curious”--not to mention the most dangerous, as statistics attest.

Studies show that Indians have higher rates of alcohol-related arrest and hospitalization, or blackouts, suicide and homicide. More than three times as many Indian men die of cirrhosis of the liver and other alcohol-linked disorders than do white men--34.7 Indians per 100,000 deaths, as opposed to 9.8 whites.

Why this should be has been the subject of extensive research, much of it seeking some physiological difference between Indians and whites. No credible study has ever been able to find one, May said, adding that he thinks the reasons lie in social, cultural or psychological factors.

Alkali Lake’s turnaround started in 1972 with Phyllis Chelsea, now 46, a mother of three and recovered binge drinker who currently runs a counseling center on the main street of the village. Her husband, Andy, also was an alcoholic. He said he was hospitalized four or five times for kidney trouble before he finally sobered up, and twice he beat Phyllis so badly that she required hospital treatment.

The violence terrified the couple’s children. One day the Chelseas dropped the kids off at their grandmother’s house and went off on a drunk. When they returned, days later, their eldest daughter, Ivy, then 7, refused to go home with them.

It was a watershed moment for Phyllis Chelsea.

“I grew up having a lot of feelings about my parents’ drinking,” she said. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with them.” Now, here was her own daughter, refusing to have anything to do with her. Phyllis Chelsea quit drinking on the spot, and in the years since she has pulled almost every adult in town up onto the wagon with her.

Her husband came first. Andy Chelsea, 47, said he continued drinking for about a week after his wife stopped but became more and more disgusted with what was happening in his village. The chief had put him on an education committee, and he took to visiting the tiny local school. Children would show up black and blue in the morning, he said, with ragged clothes and rumbling stomachs.

“It was so pitiful,” he recalled. “You’d never see them smile. You’d never see them have fun. They were just dragging themselves to school.” Steeled by his wife’s example, he, too, stopped drinking for the sake of the children.

May, the sociologist, is not surprised. He has been giving speeches on the perils of heavy drinking for 20 years, and the only thing that “makes people catch fire,” he said, has been the recent understanding of alcohol’s lingering effects on alcoholics’ children. May used to try to prod people toward sobriety with talks on car crashes and suicide, he said, and they would merely say, “Ho-hum, we’ve heard that before, and it’s an insurmountable problem.”

The first year was lonely for the Chelseas: Friends would burst into their home and taunt them with open cans and bottles. They tried to hold a dry New Year’s Eve party; the only people to come were village children, happy to eat a hot meal--and one woman who announced that she, too, was going to go sober.

Then the village chief decided to step down and appointed Andy Chelsea to take his place. Stone sober, and suddenly vested with vast powers, Chelsea decided to dry out the town.

First, he told the whiskey priest to leave. Next, he gathered evidence on who was moonshining and got the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to run some busts. The first person arrested, it turned out, was Chelsea’s own mother.

Next, Chelsea banned the Dog Creek Stage from Alkali Lake, cutting off yet another source of beer, wine and spirits. And finally, he started holding the villagers’ welfare checks each month and issuing vouchers instead. The vouchers could be used to buy food and clothing--but not booze--at nearby stores. Chelsea kept the books and reimbursed the merchants at the end of the month. The shopkeepers were cooperative, but hard-drinking villagers nearly mounted a rebellion.

The Chelseas said they had to lock up their children at night because of death threats. And Francis Johnson said that one night, a would-be assassin burst into his house and announced that he was going to kill the new chief.

“He had a rifle, a .30-.30,” Johnson recalled. “He just talked, and I just listened, and when he finished I asked him for the shells. He was reluctant, but finally he gave them to me. I didn’t ask him for the gun, because I didn’t know if it was loaded and I didn’t want to wrestle him for it.”

At length, the man left, he said, and “I didn’t hear a shot, so I know he didn’t shoot the chief.”

The death threats and harassment continued through Chelsea’s first term as chief, the couple said--and then he had to stand for reelection. To the couple’s astonishment, it was the same hard-drinking people who had cursed Chelsea the most who now argued that he had to continue in office. The Chelseas had been persuading them, one by one, not to drink.

Mabel Paul, who was the third villager to sober up, said the Chelseas nurtured her through her first tough, dry Christmas by bringing her presents. She said she was amazed because it had never occurred to her that Christmas could mean something besides paralytic drunkenness.

Arthur Dick, who worked for the village administration as a builder, was told that he would lose his job if he didn’t go for dry-out treatment. He went, and says now that he has not had a drink in 11 years.

To encourage the growing number of recovering alcoholics, the Chelseas found baby-sitters to look after their children while they were away for the cure and hired carpenters to spruce up their homes for their return.

Phyllis Chelsea found an Indian spiritual elder off the reserve and brought him to Alkali Lake to instruct the townspeople in their ancestral traditions. He taught them the proper use of some old, neglected huts down by the creek: They were ceremonial “sweat lodges,” he said, which work like saunas and figure in Shuswap purification rites. Villagers have since built a dozen new sweat lodges and use them every day.

By 1986, villagers agreed, 95% of the adults in Alkali Lake were sober. Some traveled to other Indian reserves to tell their story, and now at least three additional settlements have begun to turn dry.

Andy Chelsea, still the chief, has turned from social problems to the village’s chronic economic grief. He attracted government backing for various development projects: a small hog farm, a village greenhouse, a logging co-op. None of the projects has prospered, however, and Alkali Lakers’ dreams of establishing an alcohol-treatment center have been dropped.

“We don’t own the land we sit on, so whatever we do has to be approved by the federal government,” Chelsea said. He added that the young villagers who had trained for jobs in the development schemes were left without hope when the projects folded.

And now the young people--the same ones who as children had weighed so heavily on the collective parental conscience--have begun drinking. And not only are they drinking, but drinking in the same deadly “styles” that put Indians across Canada and the United States at high risk. Mabel Paul said friends recently called her one night to warn her that her 19-year-old son was lying unconscious in the snow.

Alkali Lake recreation director Alfred Harry, 25, said his best friend hanged himself two years ago. “He knew he was an alcoholic, and he couldn’t have stopped that,” said Harry, an adamant non-drinker who considers himself an alcoholic simply because his mother drank while pregnant with him.

Arthur Dick, the home builder, said his younger brother died last month when he blacked out and vomited while lying on his back. He holds out a snapshot of the young man just days before his death, clean-cut in a baseball cap, proudly holding a pair of mounted antlers.

“He had just graduated (from high school) last June,” Dick said. “He had two scholarships. This is the kind of thing I don’t understand--what are the kids going through that we don’t know about?”

Studies show that the children of alcoholics are from 4 to 8 times more likely than the North American population as a whole to become alcoholics. What the researchers don’t know--and may never know--is whether the tendency is hereditary or behavioral, although there is strong evidence for some of both.

Maggie Hodgson, executive director of the Nechi Institute, a training and research institute for Indian addiction counselors in Edmonton, Alberta, thinks it has everything to do with the pain children harbor for years after watching their parents and other relatives beat up each other.

“In the Indian community, our greatest strength can be our extended system,” she said, noting that it helps alcoholics support each other through the D.T.’s. “But I wonder if our greatest strength can also be our greatest weakness. Because we live so closely in our extended-family situation, we’re very affected by those relatives’ drinking.”

Wilfred Johnson, the son of a man who drank himself to death, took a break from sweeping up the snow with a “shovel” made of a signboard tacked to a pole and tried to explain the situation:

“Even the kids around here who have got a Grade 12 (diploma) and stuff--they’re still not working. They’ve got no communication with their parents, and they feel so lost they just don’t know which way to go. They get so they just say, ‘The heck with it,’ and go and hang themselves.”

He put down his scoop and offered to give a visitor a tour of one of the ceremonial sweat lodges. He is proud of the lodge, neatly carpeted with cedar boughs, and he noted that in Shuswap tradition, it represents a mother’s womb.

“I used to drink, and I got pretty close to killing myself with a knife,” he said. “I’m on my second year sober now. I feel like I’m trapped between two worlds.”