Studies in National and International Development

Challenging Addiction in Canadian Literature and Classrooms

Cara FabreUniversity of WindsorThursday, November 24, 2016

Talk Outline

Background: why I wrote the book

Main argument of the book

Novels refigure addiction as social suffering

Pop culture and the Alcoholics Model of addiction

Interrogating the myth of the “Drunken Indian”

Conclusion

Challenging Addiction in Canadian Literature and ClassroomsKey points of analysis

Dominant Depictions of Addiction

Popular culture in its many forms contributes to common assumptions about the causes, and personal and social implications of, addiction.

Dominant representations and discourses of addiction essentialize behaviours labelled “addictive” as signifying individual dysfunction, moral failure, poor individual choice, and/or disease.

Such narratives are not only misleading, but are also instrumental in obscuring the social determinants of health and exacerbating the harms associated with substance use

Fictional Representations of Addiction as Social Suffering

Several Canadian novels challenge pervasive cultural and institutionalized scripts about addiction by forging structural, thematic, and linguistic links among presumably addictive behaviours and capitalism, patriarchy, and settler colonialism.

Substance use is refigured as adaptive or survivalist in relation to the ideological, social, and structural forces that characterize these “interlocking systems of domination” (Razack 12).

These novels refigure the development of addiction and its treatment as social suffering rather than individual pathology or moral failure.

Social Suffering

That which “results from what political, economic, and institutional power does to people, and reciprocally, from how these forms of power themselves influence responses to social problems.”

Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds., Social Suffering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), ix.

Novels Analyzed

Heave (2002) by Christy Ann Conlin

lullabies for little criminals (2006) by Heather O’Neill

Skinny (2005) by Ibi Kaslik

Consumption (2007) by Kevin Patterson

In Search of April Raintree (1983) by Beatrice Culleton Mosionier

Monkey Beach (2000) by Eden Robinson

Models of Addiction

Alcoholics Anonymous Model

Biomedical Disease Model

Cognitive Behavioral Model

Cultural Analysis Model

Literary Analysis Model

Systemic Analysis Model

Alcoholics Anonymous Model of Addiction

“A fellowship like no other,” roots in the Oxford Group, a religious movement which “practiced a formula of self-improvement by performing self-inventory, admitting wrongs, making amends, using prayer and meditation, and carrying the message to others.”

These principles structure the Twelve Steps that the original 100 members of AA recorded in the 1930s

“Origins,” Alcoholics Anonymous, accessed 19 February 2016, http://www.aa.org/pages/en_US/aa-timeline.

Alcoholics Anonymous Model of addiction

“alcoholism is a progressive illness … it cannot be cured in the ordinary sense of the term, but that it can be arrested through total abstinence from alcohol in any form.”

“A.A. Fact File,” Alcoholics Anonymous, 9. Accessed 19 February 2016, http://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/m-24_aafactfile.pdf.

The central tenet of AA philosophy -“the alcoholic is a very sick person.”

Foreword to the first edition of the Blue Book, xiii.

Twelve Steps extended to the ever-widening category of addiction (NA, OA, WA, SAA), as well as within medical, penal, and psychiatric institutions, appear to have made AA the common sense approach to treating addiction

Pop culture and the Alcoholics Anonymous Model of addiction

Narrative Markers of AA Member Story

1) the ritual identification of oneself as an alcoholic

2) the reinterpretation of one’s past to affirm the cause of one’s problems as drinking

3) the description of “hit[ting] bottom”

4) the testimonial conclusion of describing one’s life since finding AA

Carole Cain: Argues that rehearsing the AA story is a process of “identity reconstitution”

“Personal Stories: Identity Acquisition and Self-Understanding in Alcoholics Anonymous,” Ethos 19, no. 2 (1991), 220.

A Battle Against the Self?

Addiction has come to signify a struggle with the will over self, it refers to a “relation of the soul to itself, not to any objective state of affairs.”

Mariana Valverde, Diseases of the Will, 28.

Contemporary iterations of AA narratives emerge within political and moral economies that demand self-control and self-containment from people, imperatives that are naturalized within and ideologically vital to neoliberal and neoconservative agendas

AA and Abstinence

Ubiquity of the AA model of addiction means AA is “frequently the first people try … But if it doesn’t click for them, they may give up hope of recovery.”

Dr. Bernard LeFoll, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto

Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse (CCSA) report found that drug prohibition strategies employed by Correctional Service Canada to enforce zero tolerance (Abstinence) are not supported by evidence-based research

Yet over 50% of people in prison report problems with drug or alcoholAnd 70% of prisoners are sent back to prison because of drug and/or alcohol use

Interrogating the Myth of the “Drunken Indian”

Brian Sinclair

Brian Sinclair, an Indigenous man, died of a treatable bladder infection in September 2008 after sitting in his wheelchair for 34 hours in the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre's waiting room

Hospital staff assumed Sinclair was “sleeping it off,” drunk or homeless rather than a person in need of medical care

"Those stereotypes have not gone away.Aboriginal people frequently experience the same kinds of stereotypes when we try to access the health care system today" (Robert Sinclair, Sinclair’s cousin).

Christopher Coaster

A great father, skilled musician and expert furniture-maker, and alcoholic, Christopher Coaster, from Martens Falls First Nation, was put in a Thunder Bay jail segregation cell to “dry out” on Aug. 3, 2008

Screening found that Mr. Coaster was going through extreme symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. Staff placed him in a roughly 9-foot-by-8-foot space with three solid steel walls and a front wall made up of steel bars covered with acrylic glass.

They ignored his cries for help; he died in the cell.

Hugh Papik

On August 3, 2016, Hugh Papik, a 68-year-old Inuvialuit man, suffered a stroke at an elder’s home in Aklavik

Staff called his niece, Maggie, telling her she needed to come “deal with him;” when she arrived, Hugh kept saying, “I’m not drunk, I’m not drunk.”

She brought him to the Aklavik Health Centre, but says nurses there just kept telling her her uncle was drunk.

It took nursing staff six hours to order a medevac for Papikto the nearest hospital, 120 kilometres away in Inuvik.

He died later that day

Impact of Myth

Direct, negative impact on the social, political, and medical treatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada

Images and narratives of the “Drunken Indian” “turn oppressed peoples into objects, to be held in contempt, or to be saved from their fates by more civilized beings.” (Razack 3)

Pervasive Myth

In 2013, an Attawapiskat First Nation’s teacher reported that Indigenous “children were very shaken up when they read the long string of abusive [online] comments that demeaned them as ‘lazy Indians,’ ‘losers,’ [and] ‘gasoline sniffers.’” (Charlie Angus, “Taking on the Trolls”)

Widespread media images of Indigenous peoples as drunk and poor consistently reproduce a causal link whereby drunkenness becomes synonymous with laziness and moral degeneracy

By depicting Indigenous peoples as lazy, indulgent, and dependent – economically and chemically – the stereotype symbolizes a betrayal of capitalist ideals of hard work, self-control, and autonomy

Settler Capitalist Myth

“[D]ehumanizing caricatures” serve to derail conversations away from addressing systemic and political struggle, including “chronic infrastructure underfunding, third class education and the inability to share in economic development.” (Angus,“Taking on the Trolls”)

The myth of the “Drunken Indian” also seeks to undermine the legitimacy of Indigenous calls for self-determination and nation-to-nation relations by casting Indigenous peoples as irresponsible and incapable

History of the Myth

Based in a long history of scientific, anthropological, literary, and sociological discourses

Biological Determinism and the Fire Water myth

The LCBO, Classification of ”Indians,” and Interdiction

Sociological Debates

Literary depictions of Indigenous people

Biological DeterminismA body of scientific work that attempts to prove that “Aboriginal peoples metabolize alcohol differently,” a view which is rooted in “a very European, class-based conceptualization” of what constitutes appropriate behaviours of intoxication.

Waldram, Revenge of the Wendigo: The Construction of the Mind and Mental Health of North American Aboriginal Peoples, 135.

Such racist and classist essentialism “parallels a kind of cultural essentialism … a view in which the ‘primitive,’ either Arcadian or Barbarian, naturally succumbs to the demands of the inner savage when inebriated.”

Eighteenth-century medical discourse, which constructed drunkenness as a defining aspect of “the Indian character,” along with “‘uncleanness’ and ‘idleness.’”

Duran, “Indigenous versus Colonial Discourse: Alcohol and American Indian Identity,” 114.

The LCBO, Classification of ”Indians,” and Interdiction

”Under the law those found to be known drunkards were classified legally as “interdicted” and were barred from legally purchasing alcohol. While under the Indian Act and other legislation, “Indians” were also barred. In the application of these two sets of laws the lines which separated these two distinct legal categories became blurred, lumping together “known drunkards” together with the peoples of the First Nations”

“The joining of “Indians” and Interdiction (link) categories has had detrimental effects on how people think about the First Nations peoples and alcohol. Although the LCBO is not solely responsible for the development of the “drunken Indian stereotype” their linking of the Interdiction list and First Nations peoples defined as “Indians” as well as their application of federal and provincial laws of prohibition did act to further its development.”

Gary Genosko and Scott Thompson, Punched Drunk: Alcohol, Surveillance, and the LCBO, 1927-1975 (2009).

Sociological Debates

The “cultural continuity/integration paradigm” contends that “alcohol is best understood within the context of pre-contact cultural formations and post-contact learned behaviors.”

The “disorganization paradigm,” which states that “rapid sociological change, especially … resulting from increased contact with more cosmopolitan Western influences, led to increasing rates of mental illness.”

The “acculturative stress” theory addresses the “physical and cultural genocide” that occurred as a result of colonization

(Waldram,143-147)

Depictions of Indigenous people in Settler Literature

“In the 1840s … Indians were frequently depicted as … either drunk or nostalgic for a long-gone heroic age when described in present time.” (MacDonald, 94).

The History of Emily Montague (Frances Brooke, 1769), ”Hurons” depicted as recklessly abandoned in their consumption of alcohol

Roughing it in the Bush (Susanna Moodie, 1871), “worst traits” of the “genuine Indian” are “those which he has in common with the wild animals of the forest ... [which] the pernicious effects of strong drink, have greatly tended to inflame and debase.” (286-7)

Terry Goldie explores the exploitation of the “drunken ignoble savage” image as a “vehicle for humour” in settler literatures (98). The First Nations man in Judith Thompson’s play, The Crackwalker (2010), fulfills such a role, providing comic relief that trades on his incoherent inebriation.

Fictional Subversions of the Myth

Beatrice Culleton Mosionier’s (Métis) In Search of April Raintree and Eden Robinson’s (Haisla-Heiltsuk) Monkey Beach

suggest there is a present-day economic, as well as ongoing colonial, context to both the stereotype and the realities of substance use in Indigenous communities that must be addressed

each contribute critical insights into the project of dismantling the myth of the “Drunken Indian.”

In Search of April Raintree

Mosionier’s novel strategically employs a metonymic figure for the myth of the “Drunken Indian.”

It refigures this stereotype as an ideological and material force of assimilation within circuitries of settler capitalism.

By evoking the specter of the “the drunken Indian on Main Street,” Mosionier’s work makes visible the ways in which the image reinforces colonial notions of Indigenous peoples as both inherently inferior and a vanishing race – notions which differently but directly shape the Raintree sisters’ aspirations and processes of self-formation, as well as their treatment of other Indigenous peoples

Monkey Beach

The novel emphasizes the incremental and seemingly innocuous advancement of logics of capital within the Haisla community of Kitimaat, British Columbia, their relation to the protagonist’s experience of alienation, and the discordant external responses to her pain that are aligned with the very forces that inform her social suffering.

Lisamarie’s drinking is refigured as a practice of social belonging and a periodic response to the alienating experiences of seeing spirits that others cannot.

So, can literature incite social change?

collective effort, intention, and accountability at all points along the continuum of artistic creation and reception –

from fostering critical reflection on how language and power intersect, nurturing the radical imagination, strengthening independent publishing and distribution networks…

teaching literature as participating in creating or exploding deeply held cultural assumptions

pointing to the need for and examples of struggles for social justice, and

positioning ourselves as accountable learners, producers, critics, and teachers of literature, which necessarily involves forging connections between classroom learning and social action