American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This paper focuses on how constructions of Native American drinking serve to reinforce and reproduce colonial images of the Indian.’ I am not so much concerned with colonialism as “the conquest and direct control of people’s land,”‘ as much as with a related process: the conquest and control over people’s images of themselves and others. Thus, I will not direct my efforts toward exploring the settlement of alien people in a new environment, but will examine the settlement of alien ideas into areas where they were previously unknown. My basic premise is that most of what we know regarding Native American drinking is a form of colonial knowledge that emerges from a process wherein cultural beliefs and practices, biological entities and processes, and social interactions and pathologies are constructed through various institutions, disciplines, and intellectual images. As Bernard Cohn notes, a crucial characteristic of colonial knowledge is that it creates standardized categories and oppositional differences that distinguish the colonizers from the colonized. In addition, colonial knowledge functions to keep the colonized in a subjugated position relative to the colonizer. It does so primarily by attributing devalued characteristics and features to a specific group of people that is recognized as somehow distinct, usually in racial, cultural, or historical terms. In deliberately highlighting this form of knowledge in this way I am attempting to underscore a disturbing tendency I see in much of the social science and biomedical research on Native American drinking in the hope that future research will not uncritically reinforce and reproduce these existing colonial categories and perceptions of Native American people. This paper is based on a number of my varied experiences with Native American drinking. These have ranged from anthropological field and library research to living and working in a reservation setting as well as a border town