Alcoholism Among Native Americans

                  Stereotypes, good and bad, exist for every ethnic group. The label placed on Native Americans as drunks has crossed my mind once or twice prior to this course, but was never a fixed perception. After reading The Long Ranger and Tonto Fistfight In Heaven, along with watching Reel Injun, Smoke Signals, and now The Business of Fancydancing, my perception of Native Americans as drunks is beginning to stick. In all of these cases, the native people who are still on the reservation are illustrated as sloppy drunks whose only desire is to drink.

                  What most impacted me are the scenes where the children are continuously forced to witness their parents’ foolish actions. In Smoke Signals, Victor commonly sees his parents at house parties where they continuously exceed their alcohol limit and act out. The Business of Fancydancing also recounts several memories that Seymour and Aristotle have of experiencing the impact alcohol had on their parents. The carelessness of the parents is an enormous burden on the children, and largely impacts them as they grow by influencing them, increasing their chances of following in their parents’ footsteps.

                  Curious, I researched alcoholism among Native Americans to see what I could find and came across this article online that illustrates the severity of the problem. According to a federal report, nearly twelve percent of deaths among Native Americans are related to alcohol. This is more than three times the percent of alcohol-related deaths in the general population, which I found shocking. On a positive note, the article does propose the idea of instituting “culturally appropriate clinical interventions” as an attempt to reduce the amount of alcohol consumption among Native Americans.

Applied Ideas to Trickster Tales

                  On Tuesday we watched the brief 5-minute video of Gerald Vizenor discussing the Trickster and oral tradition as a primary literary source. He clarified that myths have no pattern, but involve a lasting need to tell stories that are intended to bring people together through hope and love and a brilliant act of imagination. After watching the short film, we broke up into groups, where we discussed our assigned sections. My group had three very different stories that involved the skeleton man and because we ran out of time for my group to speak, I wanted to point out our observations, because our three stories didn’t necessarily fall into the either category of agreeing with Vizenor or not.

                  Our stories had no meaning or morals and all abruptly ended, similar to other trickster tales that we have been reading in the last few weeks. One of the dissimilarities we pointed out was that our main figure (the skeleton man) was not an animal like we have normally come across in previous tales. In addition, our trickster was one-dimensional, focusing on their desires only and lacking personality.

                  The one story that stood out the most in our eyes was How Masaaw Slept With A Beautiful Maiden, which had no foundation, along with being very disturbing. Many of the other trickster tales we’ve read have told stories that explain how things came to be or a moral, but this one tale had no aim. The skeleton man took over a grandmother’s body and proceeded to trick the granddaughter to sleep with him, and then returned the grandmother to her body. The grandmother and granddaughter then discover they’ve been tricked and the story ends.

                  Vizenor mentioned that trickster tales never contained a cruel or unkind trickster, but this story discards that thought because of the actions of the skeleton man on the granddaughter. Generally trickster tales are told to give meaning to contradictions, love, mortality, and many other uncertainties, but this story, along with the other two in our assigned section, lacked significance or meaning.