American Indian Culture and Research Journal

These stories are excerpted from life histories of four urban Indian men speaking within the broader context of their addiction and recovery. These interviews are the most recent, abstracted from a research study (1993-1995) on addiction and recovery processes with American Indian women and men experiencing at least two years of recovery from alcohol. The chronology stretches from memories of childhood in 1944, through the 1960s and 1970s, problems with addiction in the 1980s, and recovery processes in the early 1990s. This study focuses on a sample of Indian men (ages 35-53) who are Wisconsin natives, share Oneida or Chippewa ancestry, are second-generation urban dwellers, and see themselves as Indian men. All have lived in Milwaukee, “A Gathering of the Waters” on Lake Michigan located north of Chicago, for at least twenty-five years. These men qualify as embodiments of Vizenor’s crossbloods—”the postmodern tribal bloodline”: Chippewa, Irish, Oneida, Mexican, Serbian-Croatian. The crossblood encounters are communal rather than tragic, and these stories are “splendid considerations of survivance.” It is the communal that is emphasized in this telling.