Alcohol and Native American Experience

Many novelists addressing the Native American experience use alcohol as a motif to express the paucity of Western culture and the capacity for alcohol to destroy traditional Native American spirituality. Alcohol appears as a subject in both Susan Power's The Grass Dancer and Louise Erdich's Love Medicine as a malevolent force. In both novels, it has an enormous negative impact on the Indian culture. Alcohol literally represents the capacity for physical destruction. Symbolically, it acts as a sign for the death of the Native American culture and the coopting of Native spirituality by Western culture.

The action of The Grass Dancer is set into motion by an alcohol-driven tragedy. Henry Burger, an Anglo who has just broken up with a Sioux woman, is bemoaning his fate in a bar. After too much to drink, he drives home and begins to hear "mocking voices speaking a language unfamiliar to him. Sioux, he guessed" (Power 6). As he continues to drive, the pebbles striking his truck are "Sioux ghosts he was certain were pelting his truck with rocks" (Power 6). In his stupor, he becomes convinced that "Dead Indians were trying to put one over Henry Burger" (Power 6). He eventually smashes into a car being driven by the protagonist's father and brother.

Louise Erdich also uses alcohol as a motif, yoking it with destruction and corrupt Western spirituality. Native Americans are forced to adjust to white society, and, in doing so, they mus

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ies not only because of the physiological effect but because "maybe she knew then that it would be her lot in life to be denied marriage" (Esquivel 6). When Tita fixes a wedding cake for her sister, who is to be married to Pedro, whom Tita loves, the cake is not merely an item in the narrative, but also literally and symbolically an expression of Tita's love for Pedro: "The moment that [the guests] took their first bite of the cake, everyone was filled with a great sense of longing" (Esquivel 39). Isabel Allende also uses food as a way of moving the narrative along. Eva's mother dies after eating a chicken bone during a Christmas feast. Not only does the event affect the plot, but it also begins to shape Eva as a storyteller: "I have never forgotten that moment, because from that day I have had to sharpen my perception in order not to lose her" (Allende 42). She also witnesses a lavish banquet and is thrilled because now she would "be able to describe royal feasts, reveling in details I never could have invented" (Allende 111). Food is intertwined with storytelling as she sits "on her bed, drinking wine, eating cookies, and discussing the ideal plot" (Allende 250). Both authors use food as a catalyst for storytelling. Esquive
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Approximate Word count = 1732
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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