Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Winter 1997

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter 1997, pp. 19-33.

Comments

Copyright 1997 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

"The welfare of the Omaha is close to my heart ... I am living among them and I know what I am writing about," wrote Noah La Flesche in a 1916 letter to the Superintendent of the Omaha School, the field official in charge of the Omaha agency. In a passionate tone, La Flesche went on to plead: "If we had a man who would take the drunken Indian, fine him, put him in jail till he sobered up, drinking would not be so bad. This is going to ruin the Omaha. I ask you to help us ... we are in great need of help. Help us before another crime is committed."1

A member of the Omaha tribe, the "Upstream People" of northeastern Nebraska, Noah had witnessed cultural alienation and social decay on the Omaha reservation following the rapid rise of alcohol abuse in the wake of socioeconomic convulsions set in motion by the allotment of land in severalty in the early 1880s.

I have drawn upon the records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and archival materials at the Nebraska State Historical Society, lincoln, to, first, provide an overview of the devastating changes following the implementation of the Omaha Allotment Act of 1882. Then my focus shifts to the Omahas' responses to the ensuing alcohol abuse. As it turned out, Omahas embraced temperance and prohibition, but also adopted an indigenous approach to reform.

Fur traders brought alcohol to the Missouri Valley in the early 1800s. Stories of how traders plied Native peoples with alcohol abound in contemporary accounts, which also reveal the baneful impact of alcohol on the Indians, often resulting in cultural loss and destitution.2

Scholars agree that alcohol abuse was another tragic consequence of the lopsided Indian- white relationship. In general, scholars from most disciplines reject the "firewater" myth, the notion that American Indians are particularly susceptible to the ill effects of beverage alcohol. Alcohol abuse was not rooted in "Indianness," whether culturally or biologically understood.3 In fact contemporary scientific research has proven that inebriated Indians and European Americans require comparable amounts of alcohol to achieve intoxicating blood levels; both racial groups also suffer the same levels of memory and verbal impairment.4 Since alcoholism is a behavi. or disorder, the causes of Indian drinking are to be sought in historical, social, and economic circumstances.5 Few scholars, however, have paid much attention to the· responses of the Native peoples to this social disease.

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