Drinking, Conduct Disorder, and Social Change: Navajo Experiences (review)

Drinking, Conduct Disorder, and Social Change: Navajo Experiences by Stephen J. Kunitz and Jerrold E. Levy. Oxford University Press, 2000

Under a single cover, this book presents a rigorous analysis of drinking within the Navajo reservation across three types of communities (border towns, Indian agency towns, and rural) and two samples (those attending substance abuse programs and matched controls from the general population). Quantitative data from surveys (n = 352 in treatment, n = 734 controls) are complemented by in-depth qualitative interviews that bring alive and put a face on the findings from the statistical analysis. A well-written history of the two focal areas of the reservation (Tuba City and Shiprock) provides a helpful synopsis of federal actions and cultural ramifications including boarding school programs, the livestock reduction program, corporate exploitation of oil resources, and an evolving youth culture with gangs. Indian drinking patterns of today are placed in the context of the home brew and bootlegging era of the 1930s, the repeal of Indian prohibition in 1953, and non-Indian workers whose drinking styles influenced early experiences of alcohol.

The book has much to offer. As a treatise on alcohol consumption among the Navajo nation, it is comprehensive. Unlike many alcohol studies, here the authors even discuss the types of alcoholic beverages to which study subjects were introduced as their first alcohol experience; for example, in the 1950s, men drank fortified wine, but this changed to a preference for beer, which is maintained to this day among both genders. Difference in drinking status among those living in agency towns, border towns, and reservation communities highlight significant differences between community types and also between genders. For instance, among Navajo women there are more lifelong abstainers in agency towns and reservation communities than in border towns and in a national sample.

Frequently presenting statistics from the study samples, the authors introduce appropriate comparison data from other studies, including prior research on and off the reservation and studies with Navajos, other Indian tribes, and the national population as a whole. Thus the findings are anchored in time and place. The fourteen-page reference list at the end of the book is an excellent resource on the relevant literatures including Indian drinking, Indian culture, reservation history, national drinking trends, and mental health issues.

In the chapter on alcohol dependence, the authors introduce antisocial personality disorder as a risk factor for alcohol dependence. One agenda of their research program was to study the relationship between having a conduct disorder in one's youth and developing alcohol dependence. Authors argue that if conduct disorders before age fifteen were found to be associated with the most severe forms of alcoholism, then special preventive measures would be appropriate. A similar theme is undertaken in a chapter on "types of alcoholics," where findings suggest that, in the populations under study here, severity of alcohol dependence is associated with antisocial personalities, while distinctions between type I or type II alcoholics do not discriminate across conduct disorders.

The chapter on alcohol treatment wisely includes both formal and informal sources of help seeking. Respondents' voices bring alive their pathway to recovery, as shown with this excerpt:

Some of my family came by and they lectured me here and they told me to use the Native American Church. They took me in there and they lectured me. That's when I started thinking. The elderlies talked to me. . . . The Sun is always looking at us all day and all night. You are not alone. If you have kids you have to think about them. You brought them into this world and now you're drinking. (135)

Life stories also dominate the chapter on Navajo women's drinking patterns. I would have liked to have heard more about the incidence and prevention of fetal alcohol syndrome in the three communities under study. However, the life histories illustrate the risk...