Posted on 12/25/2016 3:22:01 AM PST by Cronos
As soon as she glimpsed the body on the icy street, Marie Nickolai knew it was Jackie Amaktoolik. He’d been drinking outside.
She wept “That’s my brother,” she said.
When homeless people die in Alaska, it is often like this: outside, facilitated by a lethal combination of alcohol and cold.
...Nickolai, 42, and her stepbrother grew up among eight siblings in the remote Yupik village of New Stuyahok along the Nushagak river in western Alaska. She said it was a childhood of picking berries, hunting moose, fishing and attending the Russian Orthodox church.
..laska has some of the highest per capita rates of homelessness and alcoholism in America. From October to April, when temperatures can fall below freezing in this city of 300,000, bodies turn up outside with grim predictability; they are found in cars, hunched for warmth near transformer boxes, or in makeshift camps in the city’s many wooded parks.
Bodies also appear in the spring, as the snow recedes, often surrounded by plastic bottles once filled with alcohol or mouthwash. The most at-risk are those who have poorly treated physical or mental illnesses and years of alcoholism. The dead are disproportionately Alaska Natives, police and homelessness advocates say, who make up 20% of the general population but constitute half of the clients in shelters.
There are about 3,000 to 4,000 people without permanent housing in Anchorage, though many of those are living in shelters or couch surfing. At the last count in August, about 450 people were living in emergency shelters and in outside camps.
...the drug of choice in the city is alcohol. The rate of alcohol abuse among Alaska Natives is consistently the highest among all ethnic groups, mirroring that of American Indians in the lower 48 states
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Obama is still President. The man died under Obama’s watch
I wonder if the uninitiated have the wrong idea of reservations.
Since I worked with the children, it was pretty good. But the reservation itself is very depressing. It’s like a lot of other things in life: if you give it to someone for free, you remove all motivation to succeed.
Every member of the reservation knows, they can live there for free, so you don’t have to do anything in life. Many just “exist”.
Artillery prep for the January 20 main assault.
Yes you t is. Sad deal all around
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