The Historical Roots of a Frontier Alcohol Culture: Alaska and Northern Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alcohol arrived in Alaska and northern Canada at various times beginning in the eighteenth century, by way of abusers of alcohol including traders, military personnel, whalers, miners, and finally construction workers as late as the mid-twentieth century. Likely influenced by newcomers, and perhaps owing to the tradition of feasting during times of plenty, Natives apparently adopted a binge or spree style of drinking soon after exposure. Colonial authorities and later national governments regulated trade in alcohol with Indigenous peoples, but these prohibitions were unevenly applied and widely flouted. In the frontier context, where outside authority was generally resented, drinking heavily and getting away with drinking affirmed courage, virility, and vigour, all valued personal attributes. Between the 1950s and 1970s, alcohol abuse and related harms, which had been limited and/or intermittent, became pervasive, owing to regular access to alcohol that coincided with economic development, settlement, and government provision of social services and transfer payments. In the early twenty-first century, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous northerners abuse alcohol at higher rates than their southern counterparts; however Indigenous Alaskans and Canadians experience strikingly higher levels of alcohol-related pathology, stemming from relatively high alcohol consumption rates, coupled with a binge or spree style of drinking. As northern communities face myriad alcohol-related problems, including high accidental death rates, sexual assaults, child abuse and neglect, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder and extremely high suicide rates, an enduring frontier ethos fosters complacency and breeds resistance to alcohol regulations that would limit individual choices in order to reduce harms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".