Cultures Clash as Alaska Town Votes on Alcohol Ban

It is 34 degrees this autumn afternoon at the top of the Earth. A plane flying up from Fairbanks, the first to make it here in two days, drops through the fog and, as passengers anxiously scan the white mist, busts out a few feet above the slate-colored swells of the Arctic Ocean.

A slow drizzle settles in an icy sheet over mud roads, clapboard houses, piles of half-repaired snowmobiles and tire-biting dogs roaming the streets. There are no trees, no grass, no potted evergreens at City Hall. And in a construction boom town with hundreds of imported workers living off the dwindling Prudhoe Bay oil bonanza, there is no beer.

In the northernmost town on the continent, 300 miles above the Arctic Circle, a place where the winter night begins on Nov. 18 and goes on for two months at a stretch, there has not been anything to drink for a year. Barrow, where freewheeling dance halls of the 1960s were an Arctic legend, went dry in November with a ban on alcohol.

It is an ordinance, one of dozens in effect in native villages across Alaska, that has stirred mounting resentment among immigrants unwilling to spend the long winters without a drink. It also has inspired a new sense of hope in a community that is finding alternative ways of offering a future to its young people and of solacing their pain--ways of healing, as alcohol counselor Doreen Simmonds said, “the dark places that make us want to be drunk.”

A referendum to bring booze back to Barrow, set for the ballot on Tuesday, has plunged the community of 4,000 into an intense debate that pits personal freedom against frightening stories of a community that had lost its way--a numbing saga of murder, rape, teen-age suicide, and drunks who wandered to their deaths out on the ice in numbers shocking for a town of its size.

Incidents Decline

In the four years leading up to the ban, Barrow had 87 rapes, 26 of them involving children; eight alcohol-related suicides and 45 suicide attempts; 2,057 arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct; 675 drunken assaults and 229 children arrested for drinking. Fetal alcohol syndrome rates were among the highest in the world. In the year since the alcohol ban passed by a margin of 12 votes, total alcohol-related incidents have been cut by nearly 70%, according to figures from the North Slope Borough Department of Public Safety. Suicide attempts are down 34%, drunk driving is down 79%, felony assaults are down 86%.

“It was 20 or 30 degrees below zero, and women were dragged off the street into abandoned buildings and raped. . . . One victim was raped six times on that dike going across the lagoon,” said Barrow Police Capt. Jim Wood, who said the town’s sexual-assault statistics were comparable to those of a city of 60,000 people.

“Or it’s the middle of the night and a kid is out wandering on the street. You take him home and you knock on the door and it’s answered by a drunk parent and you can hear a brawl going on inside and you have to inject a kid back into that atmosphere,” Wood continued. “I’ve been in houses where the kids are huddled in the corner and the adults are wrestling and writhing on the floor. Since the alcohol ban, there hasn’t been any of that. It kind of gives you a sense of well-being.”

The alcohol ban followed a number of years when Barrow, like many other communities across Alaska, was “damp”--meaning liquor could be privately imported and consumed but could not be sold. The ballot initiative, launched when its leaders collected more than 700 petition signatures, proposes to reopen the bars and allow unrestricted alcohol sales. The town of Bethel, watching Barrow’s experience over the past year, has a measure on the ballot Tuesday to ban alcohol sales and possession.

In many ways, the alcohol debate has shaped up as a battle over which culture will dominate the dozens of Alaskan native villages that have seen their traditional ways fall victim to the influences of television, twice-daily jet flights and the hundreds of foreign workers who have moved in with the oil money at schools, construction sites and government offices.

The alcohol issue has a dark resonance that spans more than a century, with native leaders blaming the roots of the problem on white traders who brought in alcohol as an exploitative advantage. Eskimos, they say, have no genetic tolerance for alcohol and almost always end up as binge drinkers. They see anti-alcohol ordinances as a way of protecting the community; immigrants often see it as a personal-freedom issue and wonder why they can’t be permitted to have a drink in their own home.

“You have two different paradigms here,” said public health nurse Mary Messner. “The value system that springs from native people in Alaska, and one that I would describe as the extreme side of Western white. And it is very difficult to find a meeting place because you are speaking a different language.”

The committee promoting the bring-back-the-booze initiative is a collection of secretaries, school employees, office workers and contractors who mostly came to Barrow for its high salaries, cheap land, spectacular northern skies and close, home-town atmosphere. Its leader, Tom Nicolas, is a California transplant who works as a mechanic at the local air charter service.

“We’re being portrayed as killers and murderers because we’re trying to bring back alcohol to the community. We don’t have a problem with alcohol. We shouldn’t be punished,” Nicolas said.

“Everybody talks about culture. Well, part of my culture is I need a decent glass of beer,” added Scott Ownbey, a librarian at the high school for the past eight years. “Friday night pizza parties are a real bitch with near-beer.”

Proponents of the initiative said they speak for at least half of Barrow’s population but have been ostracized for voicing a sentiment that has become forbidden in the year since sobriety took hold.

“The people that used to say hi, don’t say hi,” said Kathleen Krug, an administrative assistant at the high school. “We still say hi, but they don’t say it back. We’ve become trash in this community.”

Barrow’s mayor of six years, Don Long, a former Inglewood, Calif., resident and a native Inupiat, said he suspects that the people who want Barrow drinking again are the same ones who through history have sought to exploit Alaska and its native people. The difference, he said, is that now people are in charge of their own futures.

“I got a tendency to feel that those people who are promoting this election are mostly from outside, and I feel the reason is they have jobs here, including pay they can’t find anywhere else in the world. They’re afraid if we all sobered up in this community, we’d be able to fill up all the work demands and push them out. They’re uncomfortable when we as a community are on the same level as they are,” he said.

Long said he is far from comfortable about Tuesday’s election outcome, despite a week of activities celebrating sobriety and community healing in the days before the balloting. “It’s just going to be close,” he said. “It’s going to be hair-raiser close, that’s all.”

Alcohol Stories

Almost every native family in Barrow has a story to tell about alcohol. A brother who sped drunk through the streets and plowed into the back of a parked truck. A brother who drank himself to the point of senselessness and walked to his death out into the snow. A child, born to a drinking mother, who isn’t learning well at school. A nurse at the hospital who remembers once burping a baby in the nursery and its breath smelled like beer.

Ellen Kanayurak, a 30-year-old fetal alcohol syndrome counselor, said her own oldest child still has painful memories of the years Kanayurak spent drunk. Kanayurak said she started drinking after her mother, an alcoholic, committed suicide, leaving her to move back to Barrow with her estranged father at the age of 12.

Sober for several years now and trying to help her neighbors, Kanayurak said she must go back--before the booze--to the things that have laid bare pain and left it sitting there, naked and thirsty.

She is not unlike many young Inupiat women who, in the middle of the 1990s, have had to figure out who to be. When her parents divorced and her mother moved her to Nome and Fairbanks, Kanayurak had to play with other Eskimos who spoke a different language, and she finally refused to speak anything but English. She got used to city life in Fairbanks. But when her mother died, she had to move back to Barrow to be with her father and no longer spoke the language there.

She has learned as an Inupiat to respect the elders, and wonders how this translates into the workplace, where she is now a professional. Dare she tell older pregnant women not to drink? What about when she disagrees with her boss?

“Trying to fit from one culture I was born into, to fit into another one when I moved out of Barrow. Being ashamed I was a native and then coming back and trying to fit in again,” she said. “In working situations, when do I stand up for my own rights? When do I say: ‘No, that’s not right?’ How do you teach yourself to deal with somebody who’s older than me, and pregnant, and drinking?”

Edna Rice, Barrow’s home school counselor, said that in the year since the ban she has stopped having to knock on doors in the morning to find out why a child wasn’t in school, only to find the parents asleep.

“Before the ban, some of the kids--even in kindergarten or first grade--would start crying on the way to the bus, saying: ‘My mother or father is drunk. I don’t want to go home,’ ” Rice said. “The child is crying, and you want to cry with them. But you don’t dare. You don’t dare cry in front of a child.”

All last week, the town celebrated its year of sobriety with a series of community meetings, potlucks, dances and sing-alongs. Many of the meetings resembled Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, with a parade of speakers coming to a microphone and testifying about their years, or months, of sobriety.

Residents told stories about this fall’s whaling season--a celebration of the traditional Inupiat activity revived in recent years when the tribe was allowed a twice-annual catch of bowhead whales.

Kanayurak took the podium and told the listeners that she isn’t getting any more 3 a.m. calls from police officers asking if a child who has run away from a drunk parent can sleep at her house.

“I heard a lot this year from the children. They’re opening up, they’re talking about their feelings, where before they didn’t,” she said. “That’s a sign of healing. The kids are starting to trust the adults again.”