Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America.

Recently I had a brief conversation with a member of a local Indian tribe. When I asked how he was doing, he replied in almost depressed fashion, stating that he had been attending too many funerals on the reservation recently. Naturally, I inquired why. He said because of the ongoing, deadly drinking problem among tribal members.

This conversation jolted me, not only because of lives needlessly lost but because I was in the process of reading Peter C. Mancall's Deadly Medicine. This volume explores the colonial background of the debilitating and destructive problem of alcohol use and abuse among Native Americans. Mancall frames his study with a review of current theories regarding why Native Americans continue to have difficulties with liquor. Scientists, for example, have speculated about genetic predispositions passed through the generations.(1) Anthropologists have viewed heavy Indian drinking as a form of protest against Euroamericans because of the loss of traditional cultural life-styles and values.(2) Historians, by comparison, have not fully engaged themselves in this discussion.

One of Mancall's intentions is to offer an informed historical perspective, and he does so with a carefully-researched text that moves easily from subject to subject. After dealing with stereotypes in which he reminds his readers that pre-Revolutionary era Indians "never drank that much" (p. 14), at least on a sustained basis in comparison to colonists, he notes that the central concern of European settlers was the prospect of drunken "savages" committing heinous acts of violence - so often reflected in the extant writings of white settlers. As Mancall also points out, such fears - and sense of alcohol's potential for destructiveness - were also present in Native-American communities, especially among women who often bore the brunt of physical abuse from binging males.

Alcohol, Mancall reminds us, was a European contribution in the Columbian exchange with Native Americans, except in portions of New Spain where the native populace had already produced small quantities of distilled beverages - in most cases for use in public ceremonies. Early English and French traders quickly drew Native Americans into the transatlantic economy by using alcohol as a primary lubricant in the burgeoning commerce in furs. Despite local and provincial laws that emerged to prohibit the sale of alcohol to potentially drunk and violent Indians, liquor persisted as a key trading commodity as well as a corrupting agent of native ways of living.

Mancall discusses consumption patterns and personal and cultural costs, and he seeks to break new ground by addressing the matter of why some Native Americans drank so heavily in binge-like fashion. Among many explanations, he suggests that Indians got drunk while in the process of mocking what they saw as silly colonial customs, such as toasting. Personal empowerment and regaining control over one's life were also important stimulants to heavy drinking, especially among Indians who had to cope with heavy death tolls among tribal members or, more generally, with the depressing realities of cultural degradation and decline. At the same time, alcohol seemed to be a "sacred substance" (p. 75) with "magical effects" (p. 80) that permitted the drinker to go so far as to visit a better world, however briefly. And since alcohol rather than the drinker was responsible for possible crimes, Indian peoples had nothing to fear if they became destructive while inebriated. There could be no retribution, at least from other Indians, because the mind altering character of alcohol was the real culprit. In some instances, tribal members even encouraged particular individuals to get drunk, hoping they would murder undesirables in their midst.

These explanations are worthy of further exploration. So is the author's argument about broad-ranging temperance movements among the native populace. Mancall contends that Native Americans attempted in various ways to promote abstemious behavior, the most extreme examples of which were the revitalization movements of various spiritual leaders like the Delaware Prophet Neolin. When native temperance advocates called for assistance from imperial officials and traders, they received virtually none, largely because of the never ending "greed for skins." On the other hand, Mancall does not simplistically lay all blame on Euroamericans, since he points out that "Indians who tried to halt the alcohol trade also encountered resistance at home" (p. 123).

Deadly Medicine is a challenging, balanced, thoughtful book. Mancall does not pretend to have all the answers. Rather, he suggests many possibilities in looking at the roots of a serious and damaging social problem that seems to keep defying solutions. Mancall, as such, has produced a significant book, one that should serve as a model for other scholars interested in writing both informative and "useful" history.

James Kirby Martin University of Houston

ENDNOTES

1. Mancall provides an up-to-date bibliography of this literature and suggests that readers begin with Donald W. Goodwin, Is Alcoholism Hereditary? (2nd ed., New York, 1988).

2. The classic essay is Nancy O. Lurie's "The World's Oldest Ongoing Protest Demonstration: North American Indian Drinking Patterns," Pacific Historical Review 40 (1971): 311-330.