What does it mean when people say that Native Americans metabolise alcohol differently than other races.
In: Biology
So this is something that is technically untrue while having a giant, flashing, * next to it.
When native americans first made contact with the west diseases brought from Europe killed something in the range of 90-95% of all the natives. Can you imagine the trauma the survivors suffered? Imagine everyone in your family being dead from terrible diseases. Imagine knowing that your people, your nation, your tribe, were wiped out. Now you hand those survivors a chemical escape.
Beer and other low alcohol beverages basically go back as far as western history does. Over literally thousands of years we developed social systems, rules, and norms about how folks should drink. But distilled alcohol is a relatively recent invention even for westerners and when it hit the scene it caused HUGE social problems. Our societies literally didn’t know how to cope with working men drinking away their paychecks. When alcohol was introduced for the first time to the natives they got the hard stuff that even we didn’t really know how to handle (and we still don’t really though we have gotten a lot better).
We waged war on the native survivors. It was a war they were never going to win and a war they didn’t have reasonable weapons to fight with. Guns vs. bows and arrows are not some glorious competition of even balance, rather its a friggin slaughter where a professional soldier who has trained his entire life to become competent with a bow and arrow can be easily killed by a 8 year old child handling a rifle for the fifth or sixth time in their life. Horrible, one sided, defeat followed horrible one sided defeat for the already traumatized natives. More great excuses to start drinking.
When the wars were lost and Natives were tossed onto reserves the sexual, medical, and cultural abuse started. Native kids were ripped away from their parents. Native women were raped and sterilised. Key religious sites were desecrated. Once again, a great reason to drink.
And then you get the inter-generational issues. When your grandfather was an alcoholic, and your father is an alcoholic, and your mother is an alcoholic, and you grew up in obviously not the best environment, you are going to be much more vulnerable to that as well.
Then you need to consider the economics and “purpose” of life when living on a reserve. There are not a lot of jobs, and not a lot of opportunities to do what you want in life. Your culture is slowly dying and if you want to be a lawyer or astronaut or world class chef it probably means you have to leave home and contribute to that decline a bit yourself. A lot of people stay on reserves and don’t really have the kind of choices that give life purpose.
When you take all of this trauma and lack of cultural knowledge and systems about alcohol together it creates a population primed for substance abuse issues. So no, Native American’s don’t metabolise alcohol differently, they just have a much better reason for drinking than almost anyone else.
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