Negative Space: American Indians
- Alcohol Use by North American Indians
- The relationship between a culture and the drug use of its enemies is a complex one.
- American Indian Myths and Legends
- Tobacco and peyote were ritual drugs for tribes that had access to them. Their legends tell of the discovery of rites that made the drugs more useful for insight and medicine.
- The Epidemiology of Alcoholic Cirrhosis in Two Southwestern Indian Tribes
- S. J. Kunitz, J. E. Levy, C. L. Odoroff, and J. Bollinger discover that, just as for Europeans during alcohol prohibition, prohibition of alcohol in reservations does not reduce the dangers of alcohol.
- How Grandfather Peyote Came to the Indian People
- This legend of the Brule Sioux, told by Leonard Crow Dog at Winner, Rosebud Indian Reservation, South Dakota, in 1970, tells of the use of peyote for visions and the power of drumming.
- The Role of Alcohol among North American Indian Tribes as Reported in The Jesuit Relations
- R. C. Dailey writes about Jesuit perceptions of Indian alcohol use, but also notes that these writings were for a European audience and were designed to generate funding.
- The Sacred Weed
- Tobacco was a “sacred weed”, “meant to be shared.” This Blackfoot story “retold from several nineteenth-century sources” tells of how to plant “in a sacred manner”.
- Strong Drink, Strong Drinkers
- High taxes on alcohol first created rebellion; when rebellion ended, the black market began.
- The World’s Oldest On-Going Protest Demonstration: North American Indian Drinking Patterns
- Nancy Oestreich Lurie compares European use of tobacco with Native American use of alcohol.
- “The Drunken Indian”: Myths and Realities
- Joseph Westermeyer notes that when the focus is on drug use in minority cultures it can be difficult to overcome our own cultural blindnesses, but more importantly that it becomes easy to ignore true problems.
More Information
- American Indian Myths and Legends•
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These fascinating stories survey the myths and legends of a variety of North American cultures, and “grapple with those permanently vexing questions about the human condition.”
