Delphine Red Shirt
The concept of being drunk as expressed in Lakota
By Delphine Red Shirt In the early part of the nineteen hundreds, farmers and ranchers in Nebraska hired Lakota men to work. Whole families lived on ranches to help herd cattle and horses. It was a way to earn a living doing what you were good at coming from a horse culture. They also hired Lakota to harvest everything from potatoes to sugar beets. Even through the seventies, young Lakota men were hired to bale hay. These men worked hard to earn their pay. Now those few jobs are held by immigrants from other countries. It was never that the men didn’t want to work, because I saw my grandfathers and dad do that kind of work. Whole families lived for that kind of work, including Black Elk’s family. It was honest pay for a hard day’s work. At the end of a day, these men drank liquor. But, it was only the men, in the beginning. They would get up the next day and go to work. Then as time went on, the women drank. Then things began to fall apart. These were in places were alcohol was sold just down the street. Many died because alcohol was sold just down the street. It was too available and when there was a hangover from cheap wine then relief was just down the road. I grew up watching it. I spent the first years of my life in a small Nebraska town where Lakota people had access to alcohol. My memories of that time are not good, “waste sni,” we say in Lakota. Especially after children were taken from families and sent into the foster care system. Years later, many of those children came back adults who were somehow broken in unspeakable ways. Despite the alcoholism, I grew up whole, because somehow, an adult in my family saw it and left it. When my oldest sister died because alcohol was too available and just down the street, my mother thought moving back to Pine Ridge would save the rest of her children; in Pine Ridge where alcohol was not so readily available. She was right. We did survive. What I remember the most are the references to alcohol and what it did to a person. “Etomni,” one could say about someone drunk, that they were in a state of confusion. “Owaste iciya,” was another term, that they felt “good” for just one instant, perhaps. “Etomni sica,” a bad drunk; or the many other references I heard as a child. As a child, for me it meant, get out of the way. When there was someone drinking, it was not a place for a child to be. As we, at Pine Ridge think about legalizing something that kills our people very rapidly, we need to remember individually, how we were first introduced to the fear that surrounds it. It is a plague that affects every family. I have a relative that I avoid because at the first of the month my relative has access to money and alcohol, “takuni waste sni,” there is nothing good in the world for that person. Other times of the month when my relative can’t afford it and doesn’t have the money for gasoline, there is no drinking, “wayatkapi sni”. There are many who, for whatever reason, are alcoholic, stay alive for that reason: lack of accessibility. True, there are bootleggers, but for people that choose to live far from the towns, they don’t live just down the street. My relative can drive to Sharps Corner and if it were that close, I think things will deteriorate. There are better solutions and we can put our minds together and think about the future of the children, as Sitting Bull once said. Otherwise, alcohol for Lakota people is nothing short of a Hotchkiss gun mounted on the hill at Wounded Knee. Hotchkiss was the gun that was first used against the Nez Perce in 1877 and the Lakota people in 1890. The weapon itself was a rapid fire gun made of steel and was designed to be light enough to travel with a cavalry and had an effective range beyond that of a rifle -- a description that could fit a can of beer for the Lakota people. Making it legal will hasten the death for many. My vote is “heya, waste sni kte ksto.” (Contact Delphine Red Shirt dredshirt@aol.com) Copyright permission by Native Sun News
Join the Conversation
