“All excess is ill, but drunkenness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men”, (William Penn a preacher, minister, and missionary in the late seventeenth century). In The Absolutely True diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexies shows us how alcohol abuse affects Junior's life, how painful it is to deal with the effect, and how it leads to violence and death of the ones he loves. Alcoholism is a disease that affects millions of people and it isn't different for Indians as we see in every other page of this novel. To understand why alcoholism is a disease, it's important to look up it's effects.
Some Indian merchants had realized that these trades were unfair so only sold good furs for what they believed was goo manufactured goods. Though there weren’t disputes between the French and the Indians, land disputes would break out between the Indians over hunting grounds. This trade made for a far less stressful relation between the French and the indigenous people of the ‘New World’. Trade did have its faults for the Indians. Disease brought with the French quickly killed many Natives because they didn’t have any immunes built up.
It was passed due to several reasons; a number of states believed that corruption, child abuse, crime, and unemployment had increased due to alcohol. Also, drunken and absentee workers were unacceptable, since this was seen as a huge drag on the economy. In 1917, twenty-six of the states voted themselves “dry”, which basically meant that they would dismiss alcohol and remain
The shock of seeing the people who should have a good future being sucked in to the vicious cycle of reservation life is close to unbearable, but it is the norm in this area. And, the fact that nobody strives to defeat the embarrassingly to correct stereotypes of Native Americans makes me pity; very few people try to obtain academic achievement instead of working at the casino, drowning in drunk, and raising a clan of children that will mimic the calamitous ways of their parents. I know some teenagers Native Americans close to my age have all gotten drunk and high, and most have been sent to jail or treatment centers. They do not know a few words of the Ojibwe language beyond simple commands, and numbers that have been repeated throughout the reservation since they were young. For Native Americans age 15-24, the alcohol related death rate is seventeen time higher than the national average.
Massive loss of lives from war, epidemic, disease, and murder led to a struggle to maintain the values that were drivers of the culture. Above internal issues was the arrival of white society which began to strategically break down the structure of Native American communities by targeting their political system. Another distraction at this time was the growth of alcohol in Native American society and it was a problem in many high ranked officials. Leaders such as Red Jacket, Hendrick Aupaumut, Young King, Logan, Skenandoa, and Handsome Lake were all notorious drunkards, which showed poor leadership and hostile environments. Drinking not only took a toll on leaders but also on the society as a whole because money for meats, vegetables, dry goods, and hardware was being spent on alcohol.
The 18th amendment contributed to the rise of organized crime because it created a lot of underground business. From killings to people living in poverty, that’s what the prohibition caused. If people really thought that prohibiting alcohol to be sold leally were going to help the way that people lived during this time, they were wrong. A lot of people were against the law, they argued that if they banned alcohol legal businesses were going to go broke and that was not going to help the economy get better. But alcohol was not the only thing breaking families apart they said, after the war, soldiers would come home and find themselves in a whole, struggling to find jobs.
The higher alcohol content in hard liquor was more effective for getting drunk yet it also took its toll on the population’s health. Prohibition also created a large amount of bootleggers and moonshiners that were producing home made alcohol that was not always safe to drink. People also tried to get alcohol from sources that were still available and legitimate such as alcohol that was produced for medical, industrial and ceremonial purposes. People even attempted to get alcohol by trying to filter the alcohol out of antifreeze. Many of these homemade alcohols contained much higher percentages of alcohol and they sometimes were unsafe to drink which led to several deaths during the prohibition.
The introduction of the Indian Removal Act saw numerous tribes displaced from their ancestral homes time and time again, and while the rest of America prospered, they were forced onto small plots of land, and not even formally recognised as citizens of their own country. The buffalo which they depended on were slaughtered, causing widespread starvation, and every time they retaliated against this appalling treatment it only served to further reinforce unfair stereotypes which still haunt them to this day. Hopefully, by examining the mistakes of the past, people will avoid repeating them in the
The Native Americans were treated badly by the Europeans when they arrived, the long term effects of this such as homelessness, alcoholism, a valuable things stolen from then and it can be seen in the story “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”, the author is Sherman Alexie. Alcoholism The author shows how alcohol has affected Native Americans in the story “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”. The narrator says “Rose of the Sharon junior and I carried our twenty dollar bill and our five dollars in loose change over to the 7-eleven and brought three bottles of imagination I the quote means mostly 50% of the Native Americans are alcoholics and where you’re an alcoholic and you have to take care of money and business most likely you’re going to spend it on alcohol. The narrator
The Native Americans seemed weird to the Europeans, as did their customs. At first, the Natives were in awe of the guns, horses, and unheard of things, but they did not know that the Europeans were not there to make friends. The Europeans had brought diseases that would wipe out thousands of Natives. At first glance people think that this is just a bad thing, but this disease had delayed overpopulation and removed extreme conflict. The Europeans introduced Natives to new things, such as firearms, metals, foods, and horses which became a large part of Native American culture.