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> Book documents early history of Indians and alcohol
>
> Alcohol abuse has killed and impoverished American Indians since the
> 17th century, when European settlers began trading rum for furs,"
> Peter Cooper Mancall, a KU historian, writes in his new book, Deadly
> Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America.
>
> Cornell University Press, Mancall's publisher, says this is the
> first book to probe the origins of a social crisis among Indian
> people that continues today. Deaths related to alcohol are four
> times higher for Indians than for the general population, Mancall
> said.
>
> Mancall explores why Indians participated in the alcohol trade and
> why they experienced a powerful desire for alcohol. He discusses
> current medical views on alcoholism and re-examines the colonial era
> as a time when Indians were forming new survival strategies in a
> world that had been radically changed.
>
> He concentrates on the years from 1650, "when the rum trade began in
> earnest, to the early 1770s, when the American Revolution disrupted
> the colonial economy."
>
> Acknowledging that many Indians today claim Indians and non-Indians
> have innately different responses to alcohol, Mancall writes,
> "clinical studies have found no identifiable genetic trait that
> leads American Indians to abusive drinking."
>
> Colonists probably drank more - seven shots a day of 80-proof rum
> for most people over age 15 - and more frequently than Indians,
> Mancall says. And they encouraged trading liquor to Indians despite
> some awareness that drinking was devastating the social and economic
> order of Indian communities already ravaged by European diseases.
> Drinking binges by Indians during trading often led to violence that
> resulted in deaths or led to accidents such as burns from falling
> into campfires.
>
> Yet colonial leaders expanded the liquor trade to nearly every
> Indian community from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, according to
> Mancall. Indian leaders in some communities responded by creating
> "one of the most important temperance movements in American
> history." Mancall particularly notes temperance efforts of the
> Iroquois, Shawnees, Delawares, Miamis, Choctaws, Catawbas,
> Nanticokes, Piscataways, Creeks, Mingoes and Conoys. Further, not
> all Indians liked alcohol. A 1767 journal entry by a European
> traveling along the Mississippi noted that the Naudowessie (Sioux)
> "absolutely refused to drink alcohol." Other Indians used alcohol
> ritually, particularly in mourning ceremonies.
>
> Some Indians adopted European drinking customs, including offering
> alcohol as a hospitality gesture. Powhatan, for example, apparently
> saved alcohol for such occasions. A colonist wrote that Powhatan
> "caused to be fetched a great glasse of sacke, some three quarts or
> better, which Captain Newport had given him five or seaven yeeres
> since, ... not much above a pint in all this time spent, and gave
> each of us in a great oister shell some three spoonefuls" before he
> directed other Indians to provide lodgings for their visitors.
> Indian temperance efforts were powerless to halt the liquor trade,
> however. "The peculiar vice of Europeans had become a fixture in
> Indian country, deadly medicine that remained to poison relations
> between the peoples of North America," Mancall says.
>
> Deadly Medicine has been praised by Michael Dorris, author of The
> Broken Cord: A Family's Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol
> Syndrome. Dorris said: "Deadly Medicine is an important work of
> scholarship, with powerful, concise and objective insights into the
> complicated history of alcohol use among Native American peoples.
> ... Mancall's book is both an eye-opener for the lay reader and an
> invaluable resource for the expert."
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
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