For the past half century, Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12-step recovery program has been the dominant method for treating alcohol abuse in the United States. Reservation communities have been no exception. But as Erica Prussing vividly describes in her new book,White Man’s Water: The Politics of Sobriety in a Native American Community (University of Arizona Press, 2011), a one-size-fits-all approach to treatment does not, in fact, fit all.
An assistant professor of anthropology and community and behavior health at the University of Iowa, Prussing lived for three years on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, working with community organizations, building long-lasting relationships, and gathering testimonies of alcohols’ often disruptive impacts on the lives of many Northern Cheyenne. While many young women have embraced the 12-step program, others – particularly of the older generation – find its moral assumptions foreign and unhelpful. What emerges from Prussing’s account is not a reductive and totalizing “Cheyenne culture” but rather a complex negotiation of tradition, community, and recovery in the face of persistent colonial challenges. This nuance and attention to detail makes Prussing’s call for indigenous self-determination in health care all the more powerful.
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Deep in the ocean an orca pod is on the hunt these aren't your average orcas These guys are organized Marketing team did you get those social media posts scheduled for the seal migration? Hi, I captain We even have an automated notification for all pod managers when they go live They use Monday calm to keep their teamwork sharp their communication clear and their goals in sight Monday calm for whatever you run even orcas go to Monday calm to dive deeper Welcome back to new books and Native American Studies. I'm Andrew Epstein and thanks for listening to this podcast with a new books network Each month we pick a newly published work in Native American and Indigenous Studies and spend the hours speaking with the author If you've been listening to this program since I began in May, you'll surely have noticed a disciplinary trend in the works I discuss they are for the most part historical in nature reflecting the bias of your host who is in fact an aspiring historian Well today I'm finally breaking my routine as I'll be joined by Dr. Erica pressing assistant professor of anthropology and community and behavioral health at The University of Iowa We'll be talking about her new book white man's water the politics of sobriety in a Native American community Just out from the University of Arizona Press Dr. Pressing spent several years living on the northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana Involved in community health initiatives and conducting interviews about the disruptive role Alcohol and alcoholism has played in the lives of many northern Cheyenne These testimonials serve as the basis for Dr. Pressing's sensitive and thought-provoking work Exploring the cultural shaping of personal narratives the politics of how these perspectives interact in local social life and To the consequences that these processes have for individual seeking sobriety In turn she demonstrates the diverse ways in which northern Cheyenne community members experience alcohol related problems and Conceptualized the transformation from drinking to sobriety. I hope you enjoy our conversation Dr. Pressing welcome to new books in Native American studies. I'm so glad you could be here I'm very glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me Andrew. Of course. Well today. We're discussing your new book white man's water The politics of sobriety and a Native American community It's just out from the University of Arizona Press and the first people's publishing consortium I'm particularly glad to be discussing this work today as it's really my first foray for this podcast series into Contemporary issues into cultural anthropology But what's even more exciting is that this work doesn't just assume the distant pose of a scholarly observer It's also deeply embedded in and accountable to the northern Cheyenne community that is its focus so There's much to discuss here, and I'm looking forward to doing so But I want to start by asking you to tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to write this book. Oh Okay, great. Well, so I'm on the faculty and the University of Iowa in both anthropology and public health So I first came to the northern Cheyenne community Through sort of a collaborative effort I had been interested in looking at Research about women and alcohol and was finding there really wasn't much out there in the sort of health literature About Native American women So I went looking for a place that would be interested in having me do this kind of work that they could directly use it in their own You know health programming and so on and northern Cheyenne was that community So I've been connected with them since 1992 is my first sort of contact and visits and so forth I live there from 94 to 97 As a result of my experiences there I finished my PhD anthropology and then also got a master's in public health So I have a very detailed sort of interest in producing knowledge that can be actually applied by people who are interested Working in Native communities on particular health programs. So that's a bit where I'm coming from in sort of writing the book. I guess Where does the title of your work come from white man's water? It's very provocative title It took me a long time to figure out what to call the book and I realized that the answer was sitting right in front of me that white man's water is the translation of a prominent Cheyenne term for alcohol, which is not and literally it means You know whiskey refers to whiskey and there's other words for wine and beer and so on But I thought it was it's one of the first terms for alcohol that the community developed and it just sort of speaks volumes right about You know colonialism race and you know the introduction of alcohol under those conditions to the community so As soon as I sort of remembered that I knew that I was like, ah, there's the title before we delve into some of those themes You just raised actually I want to ask you a bit about the changing relationship and seemingly a very positive way between cultural anthropology or ethnography and indigenous peoples in North America and how it's changed over the past decades and You know as a graduate student in Native American studies one of the first Essays or books. I had to read Was vine Deloria junior and you point them out you say as well the anthropologists and other friends Which linked the history of anthropology to colonialism? But it also called for a greater accountability to native communities and I'm hoping to talk a bit about Those tensions your strategies and addressing them how how anthropology has changed? Yeah well, I would say like any change right it's sort of incremental and sketchy and unpredictable In terms of it's not sort of necessarily widespread across the whole Academy, right? There are generational differences in how people conceptualize what it means to do ethnography And I think for people of my era, you know who was going to graduate school in the 1990s at that point They were a number of key works Drawing on post-modern theories and so forth kind of working to Listen closely to critiques that have been raised by subaltering people right people who are not in positions of power in the production of academic knowledge and yet who are subjects of that production process and So I think that vine Deloria has a very you know public very widely circulated statement for Native North American studies but these same claims have been made in a whole variety of other arenas as well and As a graduate student in the 1990s, I would say most of the faculty members I was working with were not necessarily on board with these critiques and they were kind of like oh, you know Do you really want to work in Native North America people won't talk to you? There's all these politics, you know So there used to be a rite of passage for American ethnographers to get their first experience as a graduate student Usually working with the native North American community and by the 1960s that was you know gone So it's now considered kind of a difficult place to work But to me I guess I always thought as these are valid critiques obviously researchers should be producing knowledge that can be used by communities And this is a wave of ethnography everywhere in the globe that you need to be accountable to communities that you're working with So I didn't see it as you know something to avoid, but something to embrace. This is the direction that discipline is going And the you know intervening decades since that essay came out in the late 1960s have witnessed a lot of changes in anthropology But you know, you still find a lot of what I would argue more, you know Colonial mentality is that you know, it's your intellectual freedom or your academic right somehow to go and produce knowledge For its own sake and for your career's sake rather than being accountable to communities So I'd say progress is happening and anthropology and sort of fits and starts on that on that count So I was hoping you can also just introduce our listeners to the community you worked in Tell us a bit about where it is and a bit about its history And then I hope to also ask you a bit about your methodology how you went about integrating yourself in the community and negotiated the Insider outsider positions there, right sure sure well the community is located in what's now southeastern Montana state of Montana and it has an interesting history as a reservation community Originally the northern Cheyenne's had been intended to live with the southern Cheyenne's the two groups had kind of Split off from one another by about the 1840s given all the sort of events going on on the plains just spending some groups spending more time in the north some more in the south and the southern Cheyenne's had been sent to live on a reservation and what later became Oklahoma right Indian territory and the northern Cheyenne's were sent down there as well And they hated it. They hated the climate. They just didn't want to be there at all They tried to negotiate to leave and weren't successful with the powers that be so they just basically Decided to make a run for it and they went up the northern north through the plains and found refuge at Fort Tio in What's now state of Montana, my own city area and through negotiations with Cheyenne leaders who had joined with the military in the years following the sort of end of Cheyenne freedom on the plains and also help from Some allies in the military non-native allies. They were able to get what was known originally as the Tongue River Reservation, which is named for the river that flows along its eastern border So it's a small community There's about 4,500 5,000 residents And there are five different districts Three sort of major towns And It's located in the sort of high plains. There's timber and so forth resources. There's rangeland But it's not a good climate for things like small-scale farming and so on which were the original economic, you know enterprises that The federal government wanted to impose in the early reservation years. So it's been Economics are a difficult issue on this reservation as for many others It's somewhat more remotely located than the neighboring crow reservation for example, which has an interstate that goes right By it or through part of the northern end So that kind of shapes the opportunities and access that non-native have to this community Now How does alcohol factor into this? I mean you talk about long-term processes of colonization and survival and lay them out and I'm wondering how how alcohol plays into these processes that you you lay out for your readers Yeah, I would say that to me alcohol sort of serves as an illustration right of these much larger historical processes unfolding and the sort of cultural ideas and debates and political debates that the community has engaged in Surrounding how to respond to colonization, which is an ongoing question and an ongoing process. I think in Many contemporary native communities northern China among them. So to me alcohol sort of serves as this particular site for looking at those processes Again, it's introduction as part of colonization right sort of makes its figure in that in a particular way Also the intensity of the problems associated with it. It's it's on people's radar as you know a difficult health issue And you know one that is subjected to a variety of interpretations by different people Interpretations that can change over the course of generations that can also change in a person's life right alcohol Something they may engage in in the youthful eras of their life and then no longer later So it's just to me was a really fascinating location to sort of look at these complex and diverse Cultural processes that are going on in the community, which was immediately sort of Striking to me, you know, you kind of come out with a stereotype idea I guess of What it means to study culture and I had some background in more contemporary social theories when I started fieldwork But I think was still kind of you know I'm gonna be able to come up with some laundry list of you know features that defined Northern Cheyenne culture and pretty quickly It became apparent that alcohol is highly debated and contested and there's multiple perspectives about it And that sort of opened me up to you know more contemporary sort of thinking about how do we understand what it means to be a member of a cultural community in the current day and age and I think part of the appeal to was noticing immediately that the 12 steps of alcoholics anonymous had a very prominent role to play in this community and That's also a nice way to look at the way in which much broader kind of globalized even processes right end up playing out in Localized cultural context because clearly this whole mode of you know therapeutic intervention into alcohol was not developed in Native North America at all And has been adapted in some ways But in other ways it really helped me to sort of see and tell the story I hope of the pressures that are brought to bear on tribally run and tribally managed health care systems That there's a tendency to sort of have this default reliance on non-Native therapies and Sort of how those politics work This topic of alcohol really enabled me to tap into that because of the prominence of 12-step approaches. Let's talk a little bit more about the 12-step program as you said, it's Well, I'm hoping you can tell me a little bit about its history how it how it comes to be the dominant paradigm In the northern Cheyenne community and as well as some of the tensions around its its reuse Yeah, well the history of it. I mean it was founded in the 1930s by sort of middle-class, you know white male to people when a recovering alcoholic and Alcoholic wanting to recover in one of physician and so it became this sort of grassroots movement that accrued a lot of attention and a lot of members and Ultimately through a process that's really actually fascinating to me, but got very integrated through a variety of networks and Research interests certain research centers emerged by the 1950s for example to look at alcohol use in the United States and we're sort of Connected with AA and it's sort of Organizational infrastructure at a grassroots level and so the emergence of research about alcohol and the activities of AA were very intertwined in the mid-20th century And it became sort of this, you know standard at the same time there were always complaints that do we really have any evidence that it works or for who it works, right? And then with the various civil rights movements of the 1960s There was a whole move to diversify AA and sort of say do we need special groups for women or for, you know, people of gay and lesbian and transgender, right these sorts of Gender sexual identities racial and ethnic identities other sorts of things so that's a feature of the movement and In addition to that, there's also been an expansion of its scope from just focusing on people who drink and want to stop drinking To people who were affected by that as spouses as children right as members of family systems That was a big trend in American psychotherapy by the 1970s You have all these kind of larger historical currents playing into the evolution of the 12 steps and at this point in time I would say there's a lot of criticism of these approaches and whether and how they work and at the same time it remains a very profound kind of foundation for the way in which a lot of therapeutic interventions for substance abuse are formulated And there are definitely alternatives where people want to do things like short-term therapies as opposed to lifelong attendance at meetings Which is kind of a cornerstone of 12 step approaches And people also want to focus on you know, you can do individual therapy kind of cognitive behavioral sorts of things where you alter how a person thinks about alcohol and their relationship to it and Behavioral sort of consequences or changes follow from that so that you don't need necessarily the whole group mechanism the group meeting So there's a lot of you know Discussion of alternatives and in some cases implementation, but I think when you sort of talk to people who work in the substance abuse field on the front lines Many are still they were raised, you know, and their chemical dependency, you know training program that they went through focused on ideas that are grounded in the 12 steps and The basic concept is you know that you've come under the power of substances That your life and psychological world is oriented around the use of a substance and that you need to relearn how to behave Socially how to talk and think about yourself and how to deal with your feelings in a way that enables you to Operate live, you know feel motivated by a variety of other factors, not just the relationship to the substance So that's kind of a a big contribution, I guess to Therapeutic interventions for alcohol And one of the observations you make in the book is that as that wall the 12-step program is not Universally embraced at northern Cheyenne you found that a young women in particular found meaning in the program I'm wondering why you think that is? Yeah, I think it's definitely a generational thing, you know, I think that The open expression of emotion and so forth. That's often part of 12 step approaches That's something community members themselves sort of pointed out well women just express their feelings more, you know And it wasn't just women. It was sort of younger generations of women who'd been more exposed to, you know, some of those modes of Expression in the surrounding society through their education through just their, you know growing up experiences and so forth their experiences in childhood Kind of having more exposure to that than older generations had had But I think also There's a political motivation there. This is a rhetorical tool That can be used to make claims about, you know What kind of a problem is alcohol what should be done about it? You know, how does it relate to other kinds of problems in the community and so forth? So I think that it's attractiveness is also not just familiarity from childhood experiences and exposure to the non-native world or whatever But also that this serves a political purpose And then along with that I think the psychological appeal of it is also important to attend to that again because of familiarity or because you know repeated stories that I would hear from younger women were I Knew something was wrong, but I didn't know what it was and you hear this a lot in sort of 12 step discussions in general People have this experience of sort of revelation right that I never knew what to call it Or I never knew that other people had the same constellation of problems that I do And so it's putting a name to something that had been deeply troubling to a person, but they hadn't really been Able to think about in those terms So I think there's sort of layers of sort of cultural and historical and political and sort of psychological Factors involved in why younger women tended to kind of be more open to this But at the same time they're quite quite critical of its limitations, too So it's an interesting, you know, there's light widespread criticism in the community They're aware of those critiques and in some cases share a lot of them But on the other hand see something that is workable or appealing or whatever about this approach to what are some of those critiques that that get raised? Yeah, the big critiques are just if you look at the 12 steps of AA and the group meeting format and the emotional expression and The centering of a treatment program, right? This outpatient recovery center program around 12 step approaches There's just some major things that are pretty quickly visible It's a very culturally and historically specific thing to sit around in a group and talk about your experiences and express emotion about them And that's just not, you know Emotion is certainly expressed in daily conversation and people talk about their experiences But that format is culturally foreign to this environment And so that's one big thing Even basic things like the first step of AA is, you know To recognize that your powerless over alcohol and that this is always going to be a problem for you as a result And you should remind yourself constantly that you're an alcoholic So that's the sort of scripted way that you introduce yourself in a 12 step group is hi I'm so and so and I'm an alcoholic, right? Well in one prevalent sort of local theory of language You're very careful about how you speak in the Cheyenne world because language is seen as having the power to constitute reality So you don't say things carelessly and when you say things you focus on what you want to happen or help bring into being So that is very much, you know conflicts with constantly saying and reminding yourself that you're an alcoholic You know, and so I have a couple of quotes from people Sort of grappling with that right like why should I say I'm an alcoholic if I say that that's what I'm going to be So there's basic conflicts there and then the whole sort of you know outpatient recovery center The staff being there because of their credentials, you know having gotten training and chemical dependency counseling Mostly through the local tribal community college, but also elsewhere The idea that somebody has the authority to tell you how to change your behavior Because of their education is also doesn't fly that well in all sectors of the northern Cheyenne community Where really you want to get advice from somebody who knows you who you respect who meets kind of local standards of you know maturity and kind of well-being which means having a household right supporting your family interacting in a generous and you know constructive way with members of your family group and with others in the community so those standards are quite different and so they would often be you know Discussion and about the personal lives of the counselors right who are working at recovery center and Why should I listen to this person if they have XYZ going on in their lives kind of thing? So there's multiple layers to kind of the critiques of the 12 steps as a conceptual framework as a set of practices And then also how it's been institutionalized in the community I'm not on the generational difference that you raised a few minutes ago you write that an interview in women at northern Cheyenne that most construct alcohol as a powerful source of disruption in their personal and community worlds but Older and younger women appeal to different rhetorical frameworks when when discussing strategies for sobriety in particular older women Describe becoming sober as a return to known values while you write that younger women portray sobriety as an extended process of Psychological transformation like can you talk about this tension a little bit and what what that means return to known values versus Psychological transformation and how that plays out in and sobriety politics right right? well the way I see it is those were the kind of features of the Women's narrative and again the older versus younger is kind of an analytical, you know Convenience right not all women who are of older generations necessarily fit in that rhetorical The category of these rhetorical strategies that I'm going to describe So people move in between them and I have some examples of that in the book But as a rule or as a pattern older generations of women Tended to engage in a prominent local rhetorical convention where you gain a steam and authority by positioning yourself as closer to the past And so women would tell stories about their early childhoods the values that they had learned as a child How that changed and was disrupted sometimes very directly by alcohol as part of the story and how their own Involvements with alcohol then came to whatever point of frustrating them and They had this desire to change and what they how they described that process is that they needed to go back to what they had already learned in childhood and Literally women, you know did learn different things right growing up in a different era of reservation life before alcohol use became prevalent So there's definitely some accuracy I guess if you want to say that some historical accuracy to the accounts that they are Constructing here, but there's also a rhetorical dimension in which people of older ages Especially gain credibility when they make claims that link their own Practices or perspectives to the past and this has been described in other native communities as well So for younger women then they are inhibited from that maneuver that exact maneuver. They can't say well I learned this and that in my childhood because they didn't grow up under those conditions and Everybody knows that right so they are kind of searching for some other kind of authoritative rhetorical framework to help them construct credible claims about what alcohol is and This is where the whole sort of 12 step family systems idea really resonates I think with younger women because it provides an explanation for those who did grow up with parents who drank Which is you know a significant proportion of the women that I interviewed they are able to talk about that very concretely and how alcohol Interfered with the transmission of cultural values and so they are essentially shut out of this very prominent esteemed local rhetorical device By that reality So they're looking for something else and they're looking to mount a critique in some ways of their parents generation's behavior as well For most they don't personalize it to their parents so much is considered as a larger, you know Legacy of you know Colonial disenfranchisement and so on that their parents were suffering from that So yeah, that's kind of the features of older quote. I'm sorry versus younger Stepping back a little bit about the the community at large Number one one quote that stuck with me was that you write that living in the Northern Cheyenne reservation involves Constant encounters with the vagaries of federal policy Yeah, and that's something that I think you know non-native folks don't necessarily experience obviously when walking around yeah Having to constantly encounter the vagaries of of federal policy. What do you mean by that? How does that look on in a community like Northern Cheyenne? Yeah, yeah It means that you know different policy eras can have really profound Consequences in terms of people's employment, right? Are we in an era where there's federal funding available for social and educational programs more so? Or is this an era in which that's been constrained that has you know direct impacts on the sort of proportion of the Northern Cheyenne population That is able to be employed at a particular point in time because those are huge employers right the reservation context From a health perspective if you want to implement you know a program that runs over years like you want to prevent diabetes and implement an educational intervention in schools or whatever, right? You're content dependent oftentimes on federal funding cycles that are much shorter than that So and unpredictable from year to year exactly how appropriations are going to happen You know, there's lots of laws on the book saying that Congress is supposed to support you know XYZ things with XYZ amounts of money But when push comes to shove if you have a war going on or you have an economic downturn or whatever, right? Those decisions are going to be made under very specific historical conditions that change from month to month and year to year So it's such an impact of federal funding on everything housing, you know And health and education and these key sort of local features of local life You just really experience this in a very dramatic fashion you know, it really matters the outcomes of elections and things like that, you know, whereas in the sort of mainstream society You know, that's not you know, people don't vote or whatever and they're just like well, it doesn't matter So yeah, did you witness some of those those changes happening even in your time your years living there? Yeah, I was there, you know through the mid 1990s and Have continued to maintain ties there. So I'm sometimes get out everything blurred here of the presidential administration since so far as you know but kind of Yeah, that was definitely something that people talked about and I knew people who lost jobs because Educational programs were cut, you know that had been in existence for the preceding administration for four years or more and then times change and so people are kind of Very entrepreneurial right and try to figure out if there's something else that's up and coming that they can either Hook up with or can they apply for something right grants or something in order to keep keep going? So yeah, it's a very Very literal very tangible sort of feature of local life. Sure. I'm slightly different track. You write a bit about Popular representations stereotypes or long-standing colonial narratives from the non-native world And I'm wondering how those shape issues like alcoholism and treatment You know that contending with some of the very deeply embedded Colonial stereotypes or narratives that surround issues of alcoholism Yeah, yeah, I think the major ones you know are familiar to everybody just the sort of taken for grantedness You know so many times I'll say oh I study alcohol youth among native North Americans and people start nodding like Oh, yeah, you know, they know that's a big health problem And they know that it probably has a genetic component Those are the two sort of features of knowledge that are really have widespread sort of, you know popularity and of course when you look closely Rates of drinking styles of drinking and so forth very dramatically between and within native communities You know all well-designed research sort of shows that very consistently So a lot of our data about drinking doesn't come from well-designed research studies It comes from sort of like emergency room visit records, right or arrest records or something And those are very selective and a few individuals with serious problems can grossly inflate those numbers which then get attributed to the entire community Either locally like a tribal community or to native people's in general So there's the sort of ongoing tendency to overstate and kind of dramatize the extent of alcohol problems in native communities or assume that the most severe forms, you know plague everyone as opposed to being you know localized in times and places The genetic component also has huge, you know cache a I guess circulates very widely and Lots of carefully designed research has shown very mixed findings about this You know Native North Americans did not have alcohol as a substance in their you know world Except for some groups in the southwestern US who made Drinks alcohol out of fermentation, but distilled alcohol the strong forms that were brought in by the Europeans definitely arrived and with Europeans and so there does seem to be room for a discussion of the sort of physiological dimensions, right of alcohol related problems among native people, but there's really interesting works by Anthropologists like Gilbert Quintero and also historians like physician historian David Jones who've looked at just the logic straight what political tasks are accomplished by Focusing on the genetic components of this problem You know Looking at biological explanations in a reductionistic way like that as if genes just you know account for the whole problem Just has a sort of a Does the work of excusing more complicated thinking about the social and political, you know Dimensions of the problem. So there's just a lot of debate and discussion about how is alcohol introduced? What was the role modeling their social learning right on the frontiers especially by people you know railroad workers and trappers and traders? These are not people known for their temperance And so alcohol gets introduced and people learn how to use it in particular ways that then become pathologized in the eyes of the you know mainstream society and Then again, you have the sort of self-fulfilling knowledge production Process where you got a rest rates and ER records and so forth being used to make this claim over and over that alcohol is a severe problem among native people and to me, it's really just you know Alcohol is a severe problem for some native people it's a severe problem for some non-native people too And you benefit the people who have these problems best by attending closely to exactly who they are And not globally generalizing about the groups that they may be members of sure Sort of along those lines the final final part of your book talks about the challenges and possibilities of Culturally appropriate alcohol services. I'm wondering what this might look like and Indigenous self-determination and health care more broadly. What how might that how might that look? Yeah, well, that's a very interesting question and I think there is work in a variety of Indigenous communities worldwide That's showing, you know, just exactly what indigenous controlled health care can look like It's very community-based right. There's consultation with communities about what services they think they need how they should be provided and so on There's sort of that process Is very much part and parcel of how services are developed and delivered as opposed to just sort of here's the health care system right this sort of standard approach where Whatever is considered conventional and the mainstream society is just sort of brought in I Think there are examples of things like the Navajo Nation right which has a very collaborative Relationship with the federally funded health care system and has been able to integrate traditional healing practices into that Just so you can go into, you know, the hospital sort of setting or the health center setting and receive standard biomedical care and also, you know, traditional healing To sort of deal with the different dimensions of a problem So you've got tuberculosis you need an antibiotic for that, but you also need a ritual to sort of deal with how did your body? Become susceptible to the tuberculosis Act area that it encountered right so you can deal with different dimensions At northern Cheyenne, I think the story is more typical perhaps It doesn't get as much kind of attention is communities that are interested in this kind of approach and yet are encountering a lot of barriers to doing so It just takes a very specific set of resources strategies Leadership and so on to be able to counter this overwhelming as I see it sort of pressure from funding agencies Especially federal funding the regulatory agencies that oversee health care services, right? You have to be able to speak in a certain language to justify and document what you're doing and The easiest thing you could do is come up with a cultural program that fits your community So you could hang out your single and say here's the Cheyenne culture, right? approach to sobriety and again what my findings continually showed is that there is no clear consensus about what that means What is Cheyenne culture and I think imposing that idea that there should be some Coherence is to me an artifact and a legacy of colonial encounters It sort of says if you change from traditional ways or whatever that somehow you're less native, right? and to me the diversity and complexity of the community is part and parcel of the lived reality of of being indigenous in the contemporary world and Health service systems are not currently set up to acknowledge or work with such complexities So what I see as the need is for a multi-dimensional kind of you know different kinds of therapeutic resources being available And people being helped with finding what works best for them And this is just not an mentality that's seen as efficient, right or kind of you know feasible in our current sort of service systems But I think it's really would benefit a lot of populations not just native populations to think more along these lines but the very pressing need you know in native communities to me is Abundantly clear there are higher rates of health problems and there is an extra layer of sort of but don't you have a coherent local culture? Right that message kind of embedded in the way in which health care politics play out so There's been some attention to other communities that have managed to kind of take local control Navajo is one that I think has gotten some attention There's groups in Canada one of my Close research colleagues is Joe gone. He's at the University of Michigan. He's a psychologist and also a member of the grove on Tribe in Montana and he's done work with Aboriginal I'm sorry First Nations communities in Canada and looked at a very eclectic interesting healing center which has this kind of coherent idea or Image of a medicine wheel, but within that has all kinds of things. There's 12 step things They're sort of Eastern medicine things, right? There's just like a lot of things that can get Incorporated into that sort of symbolic right umbrella and the umbrella itself has local cultural appeal to Native groups on the reserve where he was working And yet it still has a lot of flexibility. So that's an example But you know, how do you get funding for that? How do you explain that in a persuasive way? You know to funding agencies, how do you document that a therapeutic intervention works and in healthcare in general? This is really difficult in mental health care. Wow It's really difficult to kind of gather data showing that your intervention worked because of the complexities of transforming somebody's behavior and sort of Psychological world, you know, there's not this nice clear. We're gonna do this for a year and measure the outcome it doesn't really lend itself to the data gathering and reporting Practices that are emphasized in our current sort of health care system has your colleague in Canada been able to Or at Michigan rather, but is his work in Canada been able to receive any funding or Articulated to goals in a way that is coherent. That is Comprehensable by the very limited frameworks that these you know NGOs nonprofits and the government operate with in their funding decisions. Yeah Yeah, I think so, and I think this raises the sort of international comparison issue where in Canada. There's been just a different Sort of popular consciousness, I guess of indigenous Experiences, you know, there's an apology on behalf of the federal government to first nations for, you know For example, the residential boarding schools right and the impact that had on generations of First nations children and there was actual funding put behind that That you know survivors of this are entitled to funding to help them with the various problems that this whole experience Left them with and you know in the u.s. We don't have that we don't have a formal federal apology We have you know a lot of debate, you know, if there's gonna be an apology There's certainly not going to be any financial resources accompanying it, you know the climates I think of awareness of indigenous people's contemporary experiences and the sort of political motivation to address those are incredibly different and actually my my current work does Look at international comparisons in the ways in which health research has been taken over by indigenous peoples and The scenario in the u.s. Is very different than the scenario in a place for example like New Zealand where Maori activism has led to Maori controlled health research centers that operate quite differently than what you see In terms of for example tribally run epidemiology centers or other sorts of things that have emerged in the United States By way of conclusion, I want to ask you about the different potential audiences that you have for this book And what you hope they take out of it I mean it occurred to me when reading it that this is a book that can and will be read by anthropologists But also I would imagine healthcare workers or people just generally interested in Reforming healthcare practices. So what is there different messages you hope to convey to each of those audiences and what might those? Take away points be for you Yeah, that's a great question This is a problem with working for over a decade on the same project as your own thinking evolves right and before you know it You've got these sort of multiple messages going. I think my message for anthropology is the sort of interesting ways in which you can integrate attention to subjective experiences and sort of psychological realities with contemporary sort of theoretical interest and the diversity and complexity of cultural experience, right? So you know that these two things are profoundly linked together and There's some tendency in contemporary anthropology to look at people as kind of political actors You know only and that that's really their main motivation is whatever they take to be their political arena Within their local community for example and my point is to say no There's still a pretty deep layer of psychological texture there people's childhood experiences You know and things like that their interpretations their contemporary experiences In their localized family world for example do play a profound role in motivating their behavior and actions as well So that's kind of you know There's a long history of anthropology to talk about their and sort of psychological themes and how they've been looked at or not in different eras of American Anthropology But I think for people interested in more in health care services just the now pretty well You know articulated anthropological view that culture to cultural communities are complex that debate and discussion right are part and parcel of life and cultural communities That that idea is well accepted in anthropology now But it's still you know not that well-known outside of anthropology people still will say well What's Cheyenne culture? You know like you can just describe it as the singular thing And so I think getting that message across to people who work in health care and and or develop Policy right for how health care is funded or regulated or whatever is kind of what I'm aiming for here Well, I've been speaking with dr. Erica pressing assistant professor of anthropology and behavioral health at the University of Iowa about her New book white man's water the politics of sobriety in a Native American community It's just out from the University of Arizona press now. I usually ask as my last question What you're working on now or what you hope to work on you've mentioned a little bit In the previous question about that and as is there anything else you'd like to add about? About what you you hope your next project will be or what it is you're currently working on Yeah, well my next project is really built on where this book ends, you know, which is Sort of saying what's really at hand here is the politics of knowledge right and who controls the production of knowledge about health Has a lot to say or a lot to sort of a lot of influence over what will end up being done about health problems And so I've been increasingly interested in indigenous controlled health research and started reading about this and teaching about this I teach a health of indigenous peoples class here at Iowa and Realize that Maori experiences in New Zealand are kind of a Interesting case in point. There's still lots of health disparities there But the sort of indigenous controlled health research has taken on a very powerful life and has influenced in some ways The ways in which the nation state is gathering its sort of health statistics We're not seeing that in the u.s So far even though there's been a movement towards more indigenous controlled health research of underway For quite some time and especially visible since the 1990s So this is kind of a historical and also ethnographic project that seems to be what I like to do with that combination You know looking at these sorts of issues, so well, I'm very excited about that next project But in the meantime our listeners should pick up a copy of white man's water the politics of sobriety in a native American community By my guest Eric of pressing out from the University of Arizona press dr. Pressing. Thank you so much for joining me today Thank you Andrew. It's been great. Thanks You've been listening to an interview with Erica Pressing author of white man's water the politics of sobriety in a native American community From the University of Arizona press you can find us on the web at new books in Native American Studies Dot-com where you can listen to all our previous podcasts and you should track us down on Facebook where you can post questions comments or suggestions for new books you'd like to hear discussed on this program For the new books network, I'm Andrew Epstein and I hope you join us again next month for another new book in Native American Studies Thanks You You You
For the past half century, Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12-step recovery program has been the dominant method for treating alcohol abuse in the United States. Reservation communities have been no exception. But as Erica Prussing vividly describes in her new book,White Man’s Water: The Politics of Sobriety in a Native American Community (University of Arizona Press, 2011), a one-size-fits-all approach to treatment does not, in fact, fit all.
An assistant professor of anthropology and community and behavior health at the University of Iowa, Prussing lived for three years on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, working with community organizations, building long-lasting relationships, and gathering testimonies of alcohols’ often disruptive impacts on the lives of many Northern Cheyenne. While many young women have embraced the 12-step program, others – particularly of the older generation – find its moral assumptions foreign and unhelpful. What emerges from Prussing’s account is not a reductive and totalizing “Cheyenne culture” but rather a complex negotiation of tradition, community, and recovery in the face of persistent colonial challenges. This nuance and attention to detail makes Prussing’s call for indigenous self-determination in health care all the more powerful.
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