Drinking and Sobriety among the Lakota Sioux - (Contemporary Native American Communities) by Beatrice Medicine (Paperback)

About the Book

Where previous studies have focused primarily upon drinking styles among Indian populations, Beatrice Medicine develops an indigenous model for the analysis of alcohol abuse, promoting a tribal-specific approach to addiction. This new ethnography of the Lakota examines pattern...

Book Synopsis

Whereprevious studies have focused primarily upon drinking styles among Indian populations, Beatrice Medicine develops an indigenous model for the analysis of alcohol abuse, promoting a tribal-specific approach to addiction. This new ethnography of the Lakota examines patterns of alcohol consumption and strategies by individuals to achieve sobriety. Her book is essential for medical anthropologists and health professionals concerned with Native American health issues and alcohol abuse.

Review Quotes

For at least the last 15 years of her life, Dr. Beatrice Medicine was making and recording new ethnographic observations and carefully working toward new theoretical conclusions regarding 'Drinking and Sobriety Among the Lakota Sioux, ' thus expanding her 1969 study on the subject. Her new empirically developed study is packed with explicit examples of how Lakota men and women experience and culturally manage alcohol consumption, presented in a way that helps readers understand how certain undercurrents of Lakota life and culture support both alcoholism and sobriety. For example, in a culture packed with rewards for behaviors that are indicative of strong individualism, Medicine describes how alcoholics use this value to maintain heavy drinking (on the one hand) and (on the other) to invoke it as part of their strategic determination to attain new and individual sobriety. The pattern is nearly full opposite to 12-step programs and others that call upon 'group' or 'community' sanction against alcoholism in order to 'cure' individual alcoholics. This posthumous last great work of Dr. Beatrice Medicine is an important book that has value across academic disciplines and at all levels of higher education. It will also be valuable in environments where it is important to consider new antecedents and measures to help with mental health and social work issues associated with American Indian drinking, domestic violence, child rearing, and diversity of gender roles.

Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries.

Beatrice Medicine's book is an important addition to Native American and Great Plains studies....To support her claims, she presents studies she conducted on Standing Rock Reservation and convincingly links cultural attitudes to current patterns of alcohol use.

I believe that treatment centers do not treat the whole person. They do not, for instance, tell a person that their treatment equips them with coping skills that deal with physical addiction, but cannot eliminate craving. I don't think they delve into the spiritual aspects profoundly enough even though there is a concept of a higher power in AA meetings. Bea Medicine's study will give a new and revealing perspective on American Indian alcoholism, one that will contribute immensely to the treatment of American Indians.

Using the Lakota Sioux as the focus of study, she presents a culturally rooted social-ecological analysis of alcohol use, as well as a compelling case for researchers, policy makers, and (mental) health practitioners to emphasize a culture-specific approach to the alcohol use issue.

About the Author

Beatrice Medicine was a teacher and anthropologist, who taught at the California State University at Northridge as well as over thirty universities throughout the United States and Canada. She was descended from the Sihasapa and Minneconjou bands of the Lakota Nation.