“There’s a treatment centre where the residential school used to be”: Alcoholism, Acculturation, and Barriers to Indigenous Health in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach

The Drunken Indian stereotype has a long history of expression across literary, scientific, sociological, and political discourses. This article traces the persistence and operative nature of its production and reproduction and argues that Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach challenges the stereotype through refiguring addiction as social suffering rather than individual — and racialized — pathology. By employing cartographic imagery, generational juxtaposition, and a first-person dual point of view that negotiates between spectral and spiritless worlds, Monkey Beach contextualizes habitual drinking as a response to alienation from cultural practices that are becoming increasingly threatened by ongoing colonial and capitalist policies of individualism and acculturation. The Haisla characters contend with the affective consequences of living in what Karl Marx calls a “coerced” and “ forced labor ” economy. Yet, because the forced transition to this mode of production is a relatively recent process within Indigenous histories — one that is violently and insidiously imposed, rather than always already installed — it has not become fully naturalized. Consequently, Robinson depicts addiction as engendered not only by historical trauma emergent from the dismantling of Indigenous lifeways connecting kinship, land, and spirituality, but also by the ideological and material conditions of capital. Ultimately, Robinson's novel betrays how the material conditions of late capitalism exacerbate colonial trauma, which manifests as social suffering, and extend colonialism’s acculturative shadow. As such, Monkey Beach re-signifies addiction as exposing the limits of full participation in a colonial and capitalist economy, precisely because of the cultural, economic, and spiritual violence on which such systems are predicated.

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