My Mother and Her Masks: Alcohol, Trauma, and Strength

My mother was beautiful. Once, I remember driving down the Glenn Highway from Wasilla to Anchorage, Alaska, and a man nearly ran us off the road. He was making eyes at my mother so fiercely that his wheel, just like his intensions, veered towards us trying desperately to collide with her in any way possible. In hindsight, I too lived just outside of reaching my mother, earnestly yearning for her to turn and see me.

She was a light skinned Alaska Native woman, “Indian” she would say to represent her Deg Hit’an (Athabascan) heritage. Her frame was petite and hovered around 100 lbs. for most of her life, but her spirit was strong, expansive, and torrential. Both for negative and positive. In our culture, we wear masks in dance and song and ceremony. We wear masks as invocation and in incarnation of the spiritual realms. Sometimes she was masked as red Fox (Choghlugguy). Then she was in her beauty, independence, interdependence, and playfulness. This is who she truly was. However, mostly she was masked as dangerous brown Bear (Gegha vixinijit). Then she would spiritually kill herself and me by chomping bites from our bodies and chewing fully before going back for more. Alcohol would run through her like the blood that could not come from the wounds we carried. I wished for injuries of the physical kind because with those I at least knew the pain could subside.

Trauma and alcohol have complex relationships within Alaska Native communities (Napoleon, 2013; Skewes & Lewis, 2016). Alcohol is not bad, but it can become this way when it consumes. Colonization tried to destroy us. First, it was the Russian fur traders and then the United States government; notably, through church-run boarding schools (Napoleon, 2013). The Alaska Native community, infrastructure, ways of life, and fabric of culture were seemingly turned on their heads overnight. However, this happened over years and years. It continues to this day through racism, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives crisis, and land claims and land seizures, to name a few. It is also perpetuated by clinicians who have not exercised the cultural humility to understand us and our stories, histories, and worldviews; and those who fail to face their own biases, or worse, those who endorse, enable, or enact racism and related myths (Gonzalez et al., 2019).

In Alaska Native culture everything has spirit (Kawagley, 1995; Napoleon, 2013). All substances come from the earth and the earth’s awareness, and by the nature of existing, have awareness. This can be used for good or harm. Alaska Native values emphasize balance (using the medicine in the right way) or abstinence (not using the medicine at all). Balance is harmony in mind, body, emotions, and spirit not only within the person but also with the world (Kawagley, 1995). Abstinence is stopping that which creates or increases imbalance. This means that alcohol can be used but in a way that is not harmful.

Alcohol is a medicine that must be taken in small doses (Duran & Duran, 1995). Trauma does not accept this. Trauma comes to alcohol and says: please mute me, numb me, stop this pain. In turn, alcohol says: I will do this, but you must repay me. Then it slowly takes the life of the person (their spirit) in return for what it can offer (fun, momentary relief from pain, forgetting who you are, destruction of the self).

You see, alcohol is spirit too.

Once, when I was healing my own traumas, I had a vivid dream. It came to me between time. Meaning that life, lives happen all around us coalescing at their significance as opposed to in a linear path. Chronological time would be too simple for human beings anyways. In Deg Hit’an culture, dreams can have powerful meanings, as one is in the spirit world, between time, and can travel to spaces where we need to experience or receive messages for healing. In my dream I was sitting in a bar. I was surrounded by cherrywood with layers of varnish, alcohol bottles artistically placed on shelves, and faceless people chattering around me. The door opened and my mother came through the featureless faces in full Technicolor like when Dorothy opened the door to the world of Oz. I said nothing, but she stepped into my trauma and the revelations I held. I opened my mouth. “I know” she said in a way that was absolution for her, for me, for all our abusers. Her hair was gloriously red about her head and framing her beauty.

My mother never received her Alaska Native name. This was due to the hardships endured. My grandparents were too focused on survival during key developmental times. They also drank alcohol to remedy their own traumas. My mother spent her early childhood perpetually hungry for food, attention, and nurturance. Ulcers filled her tiny empty belly until the time when my older brother could fill that space. Yet, in the face of this great adversity she was known for her resilience, wit, and intelligence. I imagine it would be fitting for my mother’s Alaska Native name to be Choghlugguy (red Fox). One day when I am approaching my ancient (i.e., Elderhood) and if I am lucky enough to be considered wise, I will give names to the younger ones. I will go to her and call her Choghlugguy so she can stay hidden when necessary and be the protector when she needs.

She died two weeks after she completed an intensive outpatient program for alcohol misuse. No one is to blame; it is not our way. My mother died having laid unconscious on the floor of her tiny one room state subsidized apartment for a day. Two days? It is a blur, but what I do know is she died, and alcohol misuse was a part of that. Trauma was the culprit, weaving a web long ago. This story is common, but it is not the whole story. It is only one account from one perspective. Just as if we were to go to the weed and pluck it expecting it to be gone, we instead would discover we must find the root and pull that.

Do not pity my mother, because pity is useless and disrespect. No, she died in ceremony. The sound of the drum vibrated her soul into the spirit realms where the ancestors surrounded her. Death is not defeat, but rather, fact. In as much as any large change in our lives ushers in new beginnings, death is a Technicolor doorway.

Once, I remember my mother told me that her counselor said, “Your daughter can help you because she’s a psychologist.” I think my mother believed this. I was appalled. However, as I reconsider this statement given my growth and distance, I accept it. Undoubtedly, the healing I have done within myself flows towards her even now.

In Deg Hit’an culture the Elders teach that we must go to the water. Water is an ancient source of healing. When we may not know exactly how to carry something, the water does. It knows what to do. Water is always flowing, always in process. Sometimes those in the healing profession feel like they need to save other people, but this is not possible. We can only love people enough and see them so clearly that perhaps they can re-know themselves.

The work worth doing is never easy.

Our clients pack up their belongings and items that do and do not belong to them, sometimes collecting and other times stealing the traumas that are not their own and not theirs to bear. They bravely enter the healing space. We, in turn, fill our pockets with our own stories, lived experiences, and generational insights, meeting our clients in the therapy room. If we are intentional we empty those pockets before we fill them. Tossing aside stigmas and biases and setting down that which cannot serve us or them within the therapeutic frame.

I could not save my mother. We cannot save anyone but ourselves. This is our Alaska Native value. Rather, we create healing medicine within ourselves so potent and so bright that it radiates in all directions, illuminating ancestral timelines both before and after. In this sense I can cocreate new masks with my clients that reclaim the spaces of their own medicine. Healing is a spiritual realm that we visit again and again, it is a source, not a destination. It is in these multidirectional and scopious places that I find her. She turns towards me, indeed still beautiful. More powerful, ancestral, and liberated. I am beautiful too, because our beauty does not need healing to shine; it only needs recognition and nurturance. I gently raise my own mask. She can see me now.