Tradition helps community thrive (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Tradition helps community thrive

MARIE WADDEN
http://www.therecord.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=record/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1165792212430&call_pageid=1024322086066&col=1024322199686

Map shows location of Old Crow, Yukon

(Dec 11, 2006)

The pride and joy of Canada's most remote and healthiest Aboriginal
community is plain to see on its website.

Oldcrow.ca shows photos of this year's high-school graduates -- four
young men and two women -- outside the school. The young men wear their
caps and gowns with flair; one has his arms crossed and his head cocked
as though challenging the world to defeat him. One female has her arm
around an elderly Gwichin man.

Six high-school graduates from a community of 300 may not seem like a
big accomplishment. But think of the challenges.

Old Crow is in the Yukon and has no roads connecting it to anywhere
else. It's 200 kilometres above the Arctic Circle and closer to the
Alaskan border than to any place in Canada. If you think of Canada
having four corners, Old Crow is the most northwestern corner.

After university, many of these graduates will want to go home because,
despite its remoteness, Old Crow is a good place to live.

There hasn't been a suicide in Old Crow since 1996. That death might not
even have been a suicide.

"It was a person with a mental disorder," Chief Joe Linklater explains,
"and we might have prevented it had we been able to act more quickly."

This is remarkable considering the suicide rate in many other Aboriginal
communities is many times higher than the Canadian average.

One academic study always cited on the subject of Aboriginal suicide
rate was conducted in B.C. by professors Chris Lalonde and Michael
Chandler. The professors looked for the factors that made communities
with low suicide rates different. They learned that the healthiest
communities are the most self-governing. The less Ottawa, the less
suicide.

Old Crow has had self-government since 1995. That's also when Linklater
was elected to lead the community at the age of 30.

"We've learned more about governance in the past 11 years than all our
years under the Indian Act," he says. "We've come a huge distance in a
short while, especially when you consider the Territorial government is
70 years old, and the Canadian government is 140 years old. I'm proud of
what we've accomplished."

Linklater leads a very inclusive governing system. His small band
council, just four elected members, administers the community's
services. Policy is set by the Elders Council, a Tribal court and the
General Assembly.

You can get a surprising amount of business done this way.

"We held a general assembly this weekend," Linklater says, "and 40 to 50
people attended. We passed 24 resolutions in three hours. There was no
yelling or screaming. We got consensus and compromise."

Self-government must also lower addiction rates. Old Crow is so
comfortable with its social health, it is considering dropping a
15-year-old ban on the consumption and possession of alcohol.

You wouldn't tamper with something that's not broken, so why consider
abolishing a law that seems to be keeping everyone sober?

"There's more alcohol here now than there was 15 years ago," says
Linklater.

Bootleggers have been able to get alcohol and drugs past the RCMP even
in this remote place.

Drinking and drug use are not big problems in the community, but
Linklater is afraid if the bootleggers are not put out of business they
may start smuggling worse things.

Not everyone in town is comfortable with lifting the alcohol ban. When
Linklater tried to strike a committee to make recommendations, he
couldn't find anyone who was neutral.

So an independent facilitator is to be hired to chair community meetings
until a consensus is reached.

Some feel Old Crow has enough going for it to make moderate drinking
possible. They might be right.

Old Crow hasn't suffered the same losses as most other Canadian
Aboriginal communities. The habitat of the Porcupine River caribou
herd, the community's main food source, has not been destroyed by a
hydro electric project or a logging operation. Old Crow's isolation has
been its saving grace. The people still have their land.

On the town's website, the radiant pictures of the 2006 graduating
ceremony provide insight into the source of the chief's confidence
about its future.

Saskatchewan sociologist Dr. Richard Thatcher says Aboriginal students
who are grounded in their culture and raised to be comfortable outside
of it have the best chance to avoid social problems. Bicultural youth
have greater choices.

Children in Old Crow learn from the B.C. curriculum, but there are lots
of additions, like the Gwitchin language and traditions.

"The school is an integral part of the community life and many of the
local people work with the students. This is especially true of the
elders who spend a lot of time teaching the pupils legends, how to
trap, fish and hunt," the website explains.

Chief Linklater wants to strengthen the students' grasp of math and the
sciences with more instruction on the land.

"We'll study biology while out trapping the animals," he says, "and
physics by looking at the property of snow. Our environment is a living
laboratory."

The challenges his students face have been turned into opportunities.

This year's graduates -- Wade Kaye, Amanda and Travis Frost, Malinda
Bruce, Robert Linklater and Floyd McGinnis -- had to leave home after
Grade 9 to attend high school in Whitehorse, 600 kilometres south.

For three years, they lived away from their families, returning only in
the summer.

But their families never left them. Old Crow is one big extended family
and Gwitchin families in Whitehorse support the students so they won't
get too homesick.

"Strength of culture would be one reason we're a healthy community,"
Linklater says. "The strength of the Gwitchin language is another.
Third, our strong sense of community -- everybody looks out for one
another. And finally, we all feel ownership of what's going on because
we have self-government."

Linklater believes his community is on the right course, where
alcoholism and other addictions will not be an issue in another
generation even if the prohibition is lifted.

There is, however, another potential threat.

The United States has been talking about developing oil and gas projects
in the sensitive calving and wintering grounds of the Porcupine Caribou
herd.

If these projects go ahead and the caribou herd is affected, the
Gwitchin of Old Crow may suffer the kind of trauma that has harmed so
many other Aboriginal people.

Marie Wadden received an Atkinson Fellowship to research a project on a
topical public policy issue.