Did Europeans introduce alcohol to Native Americans? I find it hard to believe that, with all of the maize lying around that they never came up with some sort of strange corn-based beer, at least, but my understanding was that they had no exposure to alcohol before Europe’s exploration/colonization.
I realize that North America (don’t know enough about South and Central) was low on native fruits for winemaking–Ocean Spray says that the only major fruits, presumably meaning ones that we modern types eat, native to N.A. were cranberries, Concord grapes, and blueberries–but still, no alcohol?
The Apache group of the Southwest did indeed make their own booze before the Europeans arrived, but it wasn’t nearly as strong. Cite: “Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold : Europe’s Conquest of Indigenous Peoples” by Mark Cocker. The preference for and ability to produce fermented food is a feature of animals even dumber than man: note how many carnivors will bury their kill and let it get nice and rancid first. And cows may browse all day on fresh grass, but they can’t wait to be called into the barn to chow down on the heady contents of the silo.
I don’t think the Indians would have had any need to make alcohol. Why not? They had clean water. In Europe, with all the farms and domestic animals, water was significantly more polluted so alcohol was drunk to ward off cholera and other ills of having too many people in one place. In NA nobody was farming on that large a scale (save the Aztecs), so there were no great cities (save those of the Aztecs), keeping water clean.
Derleth – There WERE large agricultural societies along the Mississippi.
The Aztecs had liquor, too – pulque, I believe.
I must admit, though, that I’m surprised that there wasn’t more alcohol. The northeast had GRAPES, after all. Upstate New York has wonderful growing conditions for grapes, and you can make wine from the native stock of labrusca grapes. I like it, in fact. You can also make wine out of a lot of fruits that grow wild. So why no wine?
Cal-They were along the Mississippi. There’s your water. Besides, those cultures (Mississippi mound-builders) died out because of overpopulation. And, Cal, I made specific exception regarding the Aztecs. I thought they had some kind of ceremonial drinks. What I did not know was that the southwest natives had alcohol.
What the North American Indians didn’t have was distilled spirits. There is also some evidence that Indians had a higher tolerance for alcohol than Caucasian or Asian people (whether or not that indicates a familiarity with alcohol prior to European contact is out of my league). High tolerance combined with high-test booze is a recipe for trouble.
This article here hints to some genetic predisposition for alcoholism, but the specific mechanism is beyond my understanding, if it is actually described therein:
An interesting note can be found in Jennings’ The Invasion of America, p. 40 n. 27, in which he quotes another researcher:
The phenomena reported in early records [of “mass drunkenness and demoralization” - SK] must not be confused with behavior observable today. Nancy Oestreich Lurie’s studies of contemporary drunkenness among Indians indicate that it has become “an old, patterned form of recreational behavior [that] is managed and probably no more hazardous to health than karate, mountain climbing, or mushroom hunting.”
Sofa King, I imagine that when the author speaks of the dangers of mushroom hunting, they are not referring to large killer fungi attacking you, à la “Day of the Triffids”, but rather of the risks of gathering and consuming poisonous mushrooms.
The Yanomami of Brazil have this wonderful tradition where the women chew fruit (or sugar cane) and spit it into a jug (thereby providing yeast). They then add juice, allow it to ferment and voila! Alcohol for all of the guys when they come back from the hunt. They even keep it cool by floating it in the river.
It doesn’t sound very delicious though.
As for the North American Native population I can only tell you about the Hopis (because I just asked my sister-in-law and she is a Hopi who grew up on the res. in AZ).
This is what she says: "Alcohol is completely foreign to the us. We don’t use it in any of the ceremonies (as you would expect if it was traditional), and many of the tribe elders consider it a ‘white mans poison’.
It is illegal to bring it on the reservation, because so many of the people there have drinking problems. I don’t know if there were any alcholic substances before, but we have no oral history if it."
There you have it. Straight from the Hopi’s mouth.
She might be as Hopi as she wants but I cannot see how that gives her any authority on what happened hundreds of years ago.
I am not going to say anything about the tribes that were in what is today the USA but I can tell you that the Mexicans did have alcoholic drinks when they met the Spanish and they did use them and abuse them.
Alcohol consumption is NOT by-product of bad water. The Egyptians drank wine, as did man people in the Middle East who had no problems with fresh water.
And Wine is NOT a distilledspirit. It can be created “in the wild” under the right circumstances. Once created by accident it can be e-created by a little practice. So the question still does stand – why no Wine among the Indians? I dmit I never thught of it before, and it’s a good question.
I don’t know anything about alcohol and the North American Indians but in addition to the Aztecs the Incas made some type of alcoholic beverage. I can’t remember the name off the top of my head. It seems from this discussion that alcohol in the New World was more southernly located.
Yes, there was booze before Columbus, including the corn beers, mezcals, and manioc chicha (the Inca and Yanomami things) mentioned earlier. I know too little about the subject to speculate on if or why grape wine was overlooked.
I’ve heard that typically American cultures had a wider variety of narcotics in use than Old World counterparts. These include such familiars as coca, peyote, and tobacco (hallucinogenic in massive doses), as well as things little seen in your average addict’s repetoire, like Banisteriopsis. I’m disinclined to believe it, since Eurasia and Africa had opium, khat, and probably marijuana, but if it’s true, alcohol may have just had more competition.