Old Rituals Battle Indian Alcoholism

The seven men, their dark faces prematurely old, are sitting around a big Formica table, smoking. All are American Indians and all are recovering alcoholics.

And for every one of them, the white man’s way of tackling the white man’s disease has failed. Now they are doing it their way.

Eagle feathers. Sacred drums. Native songs. Powwows. Sweet grass in the fire. Tobacco offerings to spirits. Prayer in the sweat lodge.

These seven men believe that at the Three Fires halfway house deep in the Michigan woods they are curing wounds deeper than alcoholism. They are finding native balance.

“A lot of people are lost. They are ashamed of who they are. But this place helps,” says one, Quentin.

Tomorrow Quentin will leave, his recovery here complete. Program director Mike Corbett does not expect to see him come back. The house’s success rate approaches 85%.

The work going on here near the tiny Hannahville Indian Community in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is part of a national awakening to American Indian beliefs. As religious tolerance grows, more and more tribal treatment centers are using native ways to tackle the insidious problem of alcoholism.

One American Indian substance abuse worker likens the process to the same crisis that must take place for an alcoholic to seek treatment.

“I think our community has bottomed out,” says Lee Staples, director of the American Indian Services halfway house in Minneapolis.

Only now, he says, there can be rebirth.

In the peace of the woods around Three Fires, the men learn to build a sweat lodge. In Staples’ converted mortuary in downtown Minneapolis, they drum and smoke a sacred pipe.

For these people, mainstream alcoholism programs and religions didn’t work.

Quentin recalls seeking solace in an Assembly of God church. The pastor condemned the American Indian practice of burning offerings of sweet grass and sage. “He said the smell was a stench to God.”

Quentin says, “I don’t know what made their way right and our way wrong.”

Others at the table say they stumbled at the isolation, stereotypes, and lack of understanding found in even well-meaning programs.

“They see you as an Indian--he can’t do this and he can’t do that,” says Nate. “They don’t see you as a person.”

These alcoholics say they were unable to address the problems that brought them to the bottle, the same problems that ravage American Indian communities so completely that a U.S. attorney two years ago said the substance abuse rate in some northern Michigan American Indian enclaves approaches 100%.

Corbett saw cultural oppression and alcoholism come to a head when he tried to help American Indians in Detroit.

“We found they were totally out of touch, lost, no identity,” Corbett says. “They got their identity when they got together and drank.

“When a culture becomes stripped, it becomes a depression, a pneumonic depression. They drink. They just wipe everything out.”

Corbett says the concrete coldness of Detroit exhausted him, and he got nowhere trying to counsel American Indian alcoholics in that setting. In 1988, he moved his ideas to the Hannahville reservation, to a young halfway program in an old farm house.

Here, when he needs them, are the woods.

Here, his 14 beds are always full, the waiting list tops 100, and many of the men who come here to recover stay in the area afterward, choosing open skies over city skylines.

“We had to bring them out of the cities so they could tie into their nature, which is nature,” Corbett says.

The program is based on the familiar 12 steps used by Alcoholics Anonymous. But with a network of tribal elders and spiritual leaders, and a small but dedicated staff, Corbett teaches the American Indian Way. It is based on peace and inner balance.

“Here they are, Indian, and they don’t know a thing about it,” Corbett chuckles.

The teachings at Three Fires culminate when the men can go on a Vision Quest, a three- to four-day fast that can lead to powerful spiritual messages, inner visions. Not all of them seek the quest.

Corbett does not even consider it for a man who has not reached AA’s fourth step: a searching and fearless moral inventory of the self.

“If they go up there with all those issues unresolved, they’re bringing something up on that sacred hill that will drive them down,” Corbett says.

“Usually, it’s themselves.”