In the wake of the catastrophes of Sept. 11, a young Muscogee woman was hit and run over in Tulsa, Okla. Rumors spread throughout Indian country that a carload of white men, maybe Skinheads, yelled, ‘Go back to your country,’ then killed her and fled the scene.
That’s not what happened, but it took five days for the police to sort out the facts.
In the meantime, Native people started mobilizing against the unseen enemy who had cut short the life of a 21-year-old because she was mistaken as Middle Eastern or because she was Indian.
It was plausible that she could have been taken for someone from the Middle East. Many Native Americans are among the first to be searched in airports and government buildings during security alerts, because we fit the profile.
It was plausible, too, that she could have been singled out as a Native woman. Oklahoma has a well-documented history of white men deriding and killing women because they are Native.
As it turned out, the young woman was not killed because anyone thought she was Middle Eastern or because she was Indian. And she was not killed by white men.
Police say that two carloads of Native people were driving under the influence and yelling at each other. They took it off the road and into a parking lot. Before long, someone was dead.
How much did the drivers and passengers have to drink and were they high on anything else? Did the people in the car that left the scene know that anyone had been hit or run over? Did the people in the car that stayed do anything to get immediate help for the dying woman? Why did they compound the tragedy with lies?
The answers to these questions will come out in the trial and insurance investigations.
What we know now is that people in the cars drank until they started throwing beer cans and batteries and harsh words at each other.
They drank until they were stupid.
They drank until someone was dead.
They drank until someone thought it was a swell idea to say that the runaway car was filled with homicidal racists.
The unseen enemy was not an outside force, but an enemy within ? booze.
Yes, we all know it was the white man who introduced alcohol in Indian country. When the white man failed to wipe out all Indians through warfare and extermination, liquor became the weapon of choice, a slow genocide, but effective.
Alcohol has been the main oppression Indian country has internalized for more than a century. Every Native American family is touched in some direct way by the sadness, sickness, impoverishment and danger that come with alcohol abuse and alcoholism.
This is so much a part of our existence that many young Natives think drinking is an integral part of being Native, that you aren’t really Indian unless you drink, that you can’t really have fun without being drunk.
The rate of alcoholism among Native Americans has been the highest in the country for nearly 100 years running. In recent decades, Indian country also has experienced a dramatic rise in drug addiction.
On Oct. 4, the Health & Human Services Department issued the results of its national survey of substance use in 2000. It reported that the rate of ‘current illicit drug use’ was ‘highest among the American Indian/Alaska Native population,’ at 12.6 percent. This compares to 6.4 percent each for whites and blacks, 5.3 percent for Hispanics and 2.7 percent for Asians.
‘Among youths aged 12 to 17 years,’ the federal study found ‘the rate of current illicit drug use was highest among American Indian/Alaska Natives,’ as it was in 1999, for a rate of 22.2 percent for the two years.
The health agency reported that binge drinking in 2000 was the highest, 26.2 percent, among American Indians and Alaska Natives. Among young people between the ages of 12 and 20, binge drinking by Natives was the second highest nationally, at 20.3 percent, just behind binge drinking by underage whites, at 21.4 percent.
These findings confirm what we already know, that alcohol and drug abuse in Indian country is an emergency we cannot ignore.
We, the responsible adults, have to do a better job than we have done so far of telling our children that these bad medicines have no honorable place in Native traditions and societies.
We have to instruct all our relatives with the example of our lives that this is no time in our history to be under the influence of these bad medicines.
They are threats to our families, our nations, our future generations. They make us forget our ancient teachings and our own lives. They make us remember things that never happened and resentful of illusions. They compromise our dignity and our rights.
They are the enemies within. The ones we tip-toe around and tolerate in our homes and schools and governments. The ones we allow to corrupt our ceremonies.
The ones who are killing our children.
