Word: inlets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...almost a routine night for native constable Simeon Tsnakapesh as he patrolled the streets of Davis Inlet, a ramshackle village of about 500 Innu Indians on Labrador's north-east coast. Alerted by a neighbor's complaint, he tracked a group of noisy youths to an abandoned wooden shack near the ice- locked government wharf. Prying open the door, the cop found a horrifying scene: six youths, ages 12 to 14, sniffing deadly gasoline fumes from green garbage bags on the floor of the unheated building. "You couldn't hear nothing but the wheeze from the bags," relates Tsnakapesh...
Self-destruction is virtually a civic preoccupation at Davis Inlet: when Partridge, 38, a former policeman from Halifax, Nova Scotia, arrived two years ago, he found himself involved in suicide intervention at a rate of four cases a month. "Every adult in the community has contemplated suicide," he says. "Every second person has attempted it in one form or another." Nearly one-quarter of the population tried in the past year alone. Partridge also found that 95% of the adult population suffer from alcoholism, and estimates that of 360 children, more than 10% are "problem sniffers" of gasoline...
Shocking as they are, the statistics are at risk of adding to the dehumanization that breeds the despair here and in other desolate native settlements dotting Canada's north. Life in Davis Inlet is an economic dead end. Only a handful of natives hold jobs at the post office, school and nursing station. There is no industry except the impatient wait for welfare checks, ranging from $237 to $316 a month per family. As many as 20 people live crammed into a single unpainted clapboard dwelling. None of the 67 houses administered by the local Innu Council have running water...
...proud-prowed tugboats ply their course along the inlet, and Raffi remarks how much he likes them. Reminded that they depend on fossil fuels, he smiles ruefully. "I know, I know," says the man in the child. Then the child in the man, who has given pleasure to millions of others, asks, "Ah, when will I understand...
From his room at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage, Joe Hazelwood has an unimpeded view of ice-choked Cook Inlet and the snowy peaks of the Alaska Range looming 100 miles to the north. But across the street in Courtroom C of Alaska Superior Court, where the defrocked skipper of the Exxon Valdez is trying to sort out his legal future, the outlook is murky...