“Indians Are Naturally Predisposed to Alcoholism.”
Few images of Native peoples have been as intractable and damaging as the trope of the drunken Indian. It has been used to insidiously and overtly support the claims of Indian inferiority that, as we have seen, have been deployed in a host of ways that result in loss of culture, land, and sovereignty.
The trope is deeply woven into American social narratives — perpetuated both in popular culture and in scholarly circles — and it plays out in a number of ways. For instance, the drunken Indian male (a version of the degraded Indian) is often seen as morally deficient because of his inability to control himself, making him a menace to society. Or he has become alcoholic because of his tragic inability to adjust to the modern world — he is the Indian stuck between two worlds, and he is pitied. More recent explanations of Indian alcoholism hold that it is genetically inherited. Regardless of the prevailing stereotype, the underlying logic is that Indians are somehow predisposed to addictive drinking, more so than non-Native people, who, naturally, can “hold their liquor.”
[For more of this story, written by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker, go to https://psmag.com/whats-behind...d741b1e27#.fbu29w2zp]
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