Alcoholism Among Native Americans

3 Pages 692 Words

One of the biggest concerns in the Native American community today is the

overwhelming presence of alcoholism. I was first informed of this by an old friend

that I served with in the Marine Corps. He had grown up on a reservation, and had

subsequently seen the horrors of this alcohol abuse firsthand. Growing up Irish-

American, I felt a strong empathy for this problem, and therefore felt it would be an

appropriate topic for this essay.

Suzan Shown Hario of Indian Country Today wrote an outstanding article recounting

the horrific death of a 21-year-old Muscogee woman who was run over by a car full of

Native American men driving around drunk in Tulsa, Oklahoma. These men even went

so far as to fabricate a story in which white racists had purposely murdered this woman

falsely believing that she was Middle Eastern. Fortunately, this lie did not hold up with

the authorities and the aforementioned guilty parties are now awaiting trial and will hope-

fully be soon brought to justice.

Suzan’s article gives us an overview of all Native American problems stemming from

alcohol abuse. Studies show that the “rate of alcoholism among Native Americans has

been the highest in the nearly one hundred years running”. On October 4th, the Health &

Human Services Department issued the results of its national survey of substance abuse

in 2000, indicating that the rate of “current illicit drug use” was “highest among the

American Indian/ Alaska Native population,” at 12.6 percent, compared with 6.4 percent

each for whites and blacks, 5.3 percent for Hispanics and 2.7 percent for Asians.

While these statistics indicate a very broad scope of the American Indian population, I did come to find that there were more articles directed towards Navajo men, and their

abuse of alcohol. An article by Stephen Kunitz, with the Journal of Studies on Alcohol

...