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Imagery & Stereotyping Explained
Indian Caricatures |
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How some people try to distance themselves from these images |
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Most indigenous
peoples in North America did not have alcohol
in their cultures. In some areas of the American
Southwest, a beverage of fermented corn called
tesvino was used during rites of passage rituals.
The Pimas and Papagos created alcohol from the
Saguaro cactus and used it as part of a spiritual
ritual believed to bring rain. The Aztec fermented
maguey to make pulque, also used in rituals. Because
spiritual power was derived from the drink, its
consumption was strictly controlled. European
colonization introduced alcohol to most American
Indians and altered the drinking patterns of others.
The alcohol trade was probably introduced in
the mid-Seventeenth Century, as part of the
fur trade. French and English colonists distilled
brandy and rum from sugar grown in the West
Indies. Native Americans tended to favor rum,
which helped keep the English competitive with
the French. English colonists also favored rum,
and they consumed far more alcohol than did
Native Americans. Colonists in America tended
to view alcohol as gift from God, and only the
action of abusing alcohol was from the devil.
Colonists recognized that alcohol abuse often
created havoc in some Native American communities
that did not have a history of alcohol in their
culture. Particularly devastating was the |
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The
Drunken Indian Stereotype |
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influence it had over young Native men,
who often had control over the furs and skins being
traded. Trading for alcohol often left Indian communities
in a state of poverty, which then undermined their efforts
to cope with European colonialism. During the colonial
period, both colonists and Indians recognized this trend
and took steps to limit the alcohol trade, but the Euro-American
traders recognized the vast economic potential of a
trade in which they supplied a product in high demand.
Some Colonial officials also recognized that the rum
trade was too important a link in the economic chain
to be severed.
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Spread
of the alcohol trade in the West following the
Revolution prompted the federal government to
include a provision in the 1802 Trade and Intercourse
Act granting authority to the president to stop
the sale of alcohol to Indians. Meanwhile, urbanization
in the East created its own set of social pathologies,
including alcoholism, prompting a new attitude
toward alcohol and the formation of the American
Temperance Society in 1826. The Natives themselves
carried out the most effective temperance efforts
among Indians. Attempts to end the business of
selling alcohol to Indians were fruitless because
of the vast |
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| profits to be made by unscrupulous traders,
and because of the social and cultural damage inflicted
on the Indians displaced by the Federal government's
removal policy. These Indians were confined in what
became officially known as Indian Territory in 1834
in present-day Oklahoma, easy prey for aggressive White
alcohol traders. |
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| The building of the transcontinental
railroad, the destruction of the buffalo, and the resulting
Plains Indian Wars devastated the Plains Indian culture.
Confined to reservations and forbidden to hunt, they
became wards of the federal government, reliant on sporadically
delivered welfare for their very survival. This new
reality plunged the American Plains Indian into a state
of cultural shock and poverty ripe for the spread of
alcoholism. Subsequent Government policy, whether it
be attempts to create reservations, disband reservations,
assimilate Indians, or to obliterate Indian culture
created an astonishing range of Native American social
pathologies associated with alcohol that continue to
the present day. Euro-Americans played the multidimensional
role of creating this environment, supplying the alcohol,
and then perpetuating stereotypes of Indians by identifying
alcoholism as a sign of some inherent weakness that
justified the centuries of treatment they received and
the righteousness of their subjugation. |
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| The ongoing presence of the
noble savage stereotype has created a schism in America
over associations of the American Indian and alcohol.
In some cases, Indians were and are singled out for
discrimination, as evidence in the first three images
below. At the same time, however, towns like Whiteclay
Nebraska exist purely to sell alcohol to Indians of
the Pine Ridge reservation who can not buy alcohol on
the reservation. Meanwhile, noble savage imagery has
appeared on alcohol products in the past, and one product,
Crazy Horse Malt Liquor, was the subject of a long-standing
controversy that ended in 2001 with production of the
brand ending. |
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| Also available on the open market are
numerous novelty decanters, shot glasses, jiggers, and
flasks. Most of these mock Indians through attempted
humor with silly, cartoonish, childlike depiction of
Indians and their drunkenness. Others are more forthcoming
with their contempt, such as the remarkable totem pole
decanter below, complete with drinking cups and a drunken
Indian hanging on the pole, flask in hand. Still others
continue the noble savage theme, such as the metal flask
below. |
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| Most remarkable of the novelty items
connecting Indian with alcohol are the souvenir alcohol
flasks featured below. These appear to have been mass-produced
and mass marketed to national park gift shops and tourist
destinations around the country, probably in the 1950s
and 1960s. The graphics are identical, and the name
of the tourist place is typically embossed in gold.
Many of these are from places that are generally not
immediately associated with Indians, including Lincoln's
Boyhood Home and the U.S. Capitol. Most remarkable of
all, perhaps, is one sold at gift shops at or near the
Cherokee Indian Reservation in North Carolina. The front
of these flasks typically features a drunken Indian
and a reference to "firewater." On the reverse
of some are consumption levels, with dergatory names
for each level, such as "feelum better" and
"wantum sing." The person who drinks the entire
flask, is a "dead injun." |
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| The Authentic History Center is still
actively collecting sources for this section and will
present a more comprehensive analysis in the future. |
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