Drinking and Sobriety among the Lakota Sioux (review)

A number of years ago, while studying in the archives of a research institute, I discovered an unpublished manuscript. It described an ethnographic study on alcohol and the Lakota that captured the issue of alcohol and Native people in new ways, unlike anything I had read before. Now, at long last, Beatrice Medicine's seminal work, Drinking and Sobriety among the Lakota Sioux, is finally in print. The book posthumously reports on her landmark study, representing a lifetime of ethnographic work begun in the 1960s. Since that time, Dr. Medicine continued interviewing and observation on her home Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, refining her theory and insights through the 1980s and until the time of her death in 2005.

Her work was pathbreaking in a number of ways. Drinking and Sobriety among the Lakota Sioux represents one of the original scholarly anthropological studies on a topic in American Indian culture presented from an Indigenous perspective, coming from the point of view of a scholar who was insider to the cultural group in question. Perhaps because of this singular and unique vantage, rather than limit her exploration to drinking problems and their effects on Lakota society, Dr. Medicine instead constructed a detailed, nuanced, and indeed visionary work, providing one of the first explorations of sobriety as understood by Indigenous people. At one point, she articulates the central goal of her work:

Another level is a more important variable; it is composed of males and females who . . . have chosen to quit drinking. The dynamics involved in this decision-making process is the critical issue needing explanation. Factors that have prompted this decision not to drink are the heart of this investigation.

(83)

In the 1960s, study of sobriety required a different vision, a voice apart from the dominant interests of the social sciences literature of the time on American Indians and alcohol, with their associated descriptions of a culture of poverty and of pathology. With great compassion, Dr. Medicine describes through her ethnographer's lens the enormous courage of Lakota men and women who had come to quit drinking. One of many highlights for the reader is the detailed description from life history interviews of Native people who became sober. What is particularly striking about this description is her cogent meditation on important elements in the process of giving up drinking, including the process of "Lakota self-analysis" during the person's movement to sobriety, and key moments marking individual turning points on the path to sobriety. Through these case histories and her analysis, Dr. Medicine brings to life the "dynamics involved in this decision-making process." In doing this, she provides one of the first Indigenous explanations in academic scientific research of problem drinking, methods of stopping, and healing from drinking.

It is important to note this is not a book limited to an understanding of change on the individual level. Dr. Medicine explores the Lakota confrontation with alcohol on multiple levels. She also locates healing on a group, societal, and synergistic level, exploring the Lakota religious renaissance through the role of the Sun Dance in the control of alcohol. This is one of the first books on contemporary expressions of Indigenous healing in North America, based in Indigenous spirituality and traditional ways of knowing alternative to Western biomedical traditions.

Though this is one of the first studies of American Indian sobriety, the book does not turn its back on the effects of drinking, and the reader is continually moved by the courage of the author in addressing these effects. Drinking and Sobriety is a brutally frank and honest assessment of the horrible consequences of drinking on a people and their society. Dr. Medicine describes the costs of alcoholism on Lakota society with considerable candor. She explains why and how Lakota people drink, interprets the historical circumstances into which the Lakota along with other tribal people were socialized into drinking, and lays plain its toll. Though she clearly locates the context of drinking within colonial experience, she does not provide...