Native Americans and firewater (and Tim Sheehy’s statements)

by Raffaella Milandri©

A statement, made public in early September, by Republican candidate Tim Sheehy of Montana, wealthy owner of a firefighting aircraft and helicopter company, has stirred up a furore by talking, in a racist and insulting manner, about the famous ‘firewater’. Sheehy told his audience during fundraisers for his campaign: ‘All the Indians out there are drunk at 8am’ and ‘They let you know if they like you or not if they throw cans of beer at you’ on the Crow Reservation.

The New York Times also investigated the matter. Audios of his statements were made public by The Char-Koosta News, the newspaper of the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. Tribal leaders have repeatedly asked Sheehy to publicly apologise. In Montana, there are eight federally recognised tribes and seven Indian reservations. In addition, there are 74,130 Native Americans of voting age in the state, according to Four Directions Native Vote. Who definitely won’t vote. Let’s take a look together at what’s behind the ‘firewater’ myth, and why alcohol has, indeed, been a problem for Native Americans ever since they met the white man.

Weapon for genocide

It is documented that alcohol was used by white merchants as early as the 16th century as a bargaining chip and as an ‘aid’ in trade negotiations: they offered the Indians the famous ‘firewater’ and, given the devastating effects that alcohol had on the natives, obtained furs and other goods often at derisory prices. Coyhis and White liken alcohol to a weapon used with premeditation to defeat and exterminate Indians; pure alcohol, to be diluted with water, was brought by the military to facilitate US government missions and negotiations on Indian land (Don L. Coyhis and William L. White, Alcohol Problems in Native America: The Untold Story of Resistance and Recovery – The Truth about the Lie, Independent Publisher, 2006).

Rick McBride, mixed-blood Cherokee, describes alcohol as a ‘tool’ for making treaties with Indians: ‘Alcohol, along with bribery, fraud, and deception, undermines the history of treaties between Indian tribes and the United States government, which have resulted in the haemorrhaging of Native territories. Any modern court outside the United States would declare many treaties unenforceable and invalid’.

Historically, alcohol and its effects were unknown to the Natives before the arrival of the Europeans, except for a very few tribes who produced alcoholic beverages by using them, along with other mind-altering substances – such as peyote, in ritual contexts and rarely for personal enjoyment. Intoxication was ‘associated with the quest for enlightenment, healing powers and victorious warfare’.

Most natives initially responded to alcohol with disgust and suspicion. They considered drunkenness ‘degrading to free men’ and questioned the motives of those who offered a substance so offensive to the senses and which ‘made men fools’.

But when Europeans began to provide Native Americans with large quantities of distilled spirits and wine, using them to dominate negotiations and to subjugate them by dulling their intellects, the tribes had very little time to adapt and develop social, legal or moral guidelines to regulate the use of alcohol. In 1753, Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography: ‘The Indians are exceedingly prone to get drunk, and when they do they are very quarrelsome and disorderly… indeed, if the design of Providence is to extirpate these savages to make room for the cultivators of the soil, it does not seem improbable that rum would be the appointed means.

In his research, Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who coined the term genocide, concluded that the distribution of alcohol was one of several means (such as forced relocations, the destruction of cultural symbols and the ‘re-education’ of children) by which European-American settlers committed genocide in North America.

The Alcohol Problem on Reservations Today

The use of alcohol as an object of exchange and the practice of intoxication for fun or to relieve stress have gradually undermined traditional Native American culture. Today, 12% of deaths on the reservations are related to alcoholism, from which only women are able to restrain themselves, lower in percentage. Fatal accidents, liver diseases, homicides and suicides are linked to alcohol. American Indians have been victims of ferocious alcoholism for about four generations; youth in some tribes reach peaks of 80% in alcohol and methamphetamine abuse. The main reasons? It is believed that, in addition to a historical ‘post-traumatic shock’, the causes are low self-esteem, depression, the cultural conflict of values between their culture and the dominant Western one and, not least, being victims of racist incidents, at school or at work. There would also be a genetic factor: a different metabolism of alcohol, linked to enzyme genotypes (ALDH1 and ALDH2) although scholars are not yet in agreement on this point.

Alcohol is often taken through ‘binge drinking’, acute episodes that leave entire families unconscious and penniless. In some tribes, the fetal alcohol spectrum disorder rate is as high as 1.5-2.5 per 1,000 live births, more than seven times the national average, while among Alaska Natives, the fetal alcohol spectrum disorder rate is 5.6 per 1,000 live births.

Alcoholism, in reality, is the tip of an iceberg, consisting of a myriad of submerged problems. The HIS (Health Indian Service) and tribal governments are looking for solutions, through recovery, prevention and education programmes. David Dragonfly, of the Blackfeet, tells me: ‘Here on the reservation we banned alcohol, then liberalised it, then banned it again: nothing changes. There are men ready to beg on their knees for a drop of alcohol’. James, an Oglala Sioux, confides: ‘At least three nights a week I get drunk, until I curl up next to a wall. In the morning I wake up sleeping rough, or in jail. But then I am fine.

 There are those who take advantage even today

In 2012, the case of the Pine Ridge Reservation, which has around 45,000 Oglala Sioux as tribal members, in South Dakota, made a sensation. It has been legally ‘dry’ since the 1970s, because the tribal government decided to prohibit the sale of alcohol. Nevertheless, it has been decimated by alcohol. Incredibly, in the nearby village of Whiteclay, population 10, there were as many as four liquor shops, selling over four million cans of beer and liquor a year, 13,000 a day. The Pine Ridge tribal government filed a lawsuit against the shops, against Anheuser-Busch, a brewer, and other factories, accusing them of encouraging the illegal purchase, possession, transportation and consumption of alcohol on the reservation, where alcohol is prohibited. The tribal government has demanded 500 million in compensation for medical, welfare and public safety costs caused by alcohol abuse, and is calling for a limit on the sale of alcohol in Whiteclay. But if Whiteclay is demonised, around every Indian reservation is full of other ‘Whiteclays’: when I was at the Shiprock Fair, the Navajo’s beautiful pow wow, where alcohol is forbidden, just ten metres from the reservation boundaries, coming from Gallup, at a service station there were megagalactic signs extolling liquor and cold beer, and a bustle of natives with crates of alcohol being loaded into cars.

The Whiteclay epilogue

There are sometimes stories with happy endings. In 2017, the liquor licences of the Whiteclay shops were revoked. A great victory for the Oglala Lakota who, however, have since been decimated by alcohol. Back to Sheehy, given what the story tells, he should just shut up.

Published in Italian in The AntiDiplomatico, 19 September 2024

“Nativi” column by Raffaella Milandri

https://www.lantidiplomatico.it/news-nativi/53237/