Drinking Colonialism: Alcohol, Indigenous Status, and Native Space on Shawnee and Sámi Homelands, 1600–1850

Abstract

Drinking Colonialism:Alcohol, Indigenous Status, and Native Space on Shawnee and Sámi Homelands, 1600–1850 Sami Lakomäki (bio), Ritva Kylli (bio), and Timo Ylimaunu (bio) Introduction: Alcohol and Global Indigenous History IN THE 1830S, three very dissimilar colonial states on the opposite sides of the Atlantic launched almost simultaneous campaigns against Indigenous alcohol consumption. In less than a decade, the United States, Finland, and Sweden prohibited the production, sale, and, in some cases, drinking of intoxicating beverages on Native homelands lying within the borders claimed by the states.1 In each country these legislative measures greatly shaped the political and legal status of Indigenous peoples and their relationship with the colonial state. The liquor laws, together with other contemporaneous legislation dealing with Indigenous rights and lands, asserted state sovereignty over Native communities and helped to construct Indigeneity as a legal and racial category that set rigid limits to Native autonomy. Moreover, they created colonial geographies in which Indigenous homelands became special legal spaces within state boundaries. Beneath these striking parallels, however, the alcohol legislation of the three states constructed Native status and space in significantly dissimilar ways. Most notably, the federal legislators in the United States recognized Native American nations as semi-sovereign entities with authority over Indigenous drinking on tribal lands, while the Finnish and Swedish lawmakers denied the aboriginal Sámi people any autonomy and instead gave state officials full power to police Native alcohol consumption everywhere. These parallel but divergent colonial laws throw into stark relief the intimate interlinkages between alcohol, colonial state-building, and political and cultural constructions of Indigenous status and Native spaces. Scholars have long recognized alcohol as a "colonizing substance par excellence," but while [End Page 1] earlier studies saw liquor simply as "a particularly versatile weapon in the invader's arsenal," more recent research apprehends alcohol's roles in colonialism as far more "complex and even contradictory."2 In particular, during the past twenty years scholarly interest has expanded from alcohol's effects on Indigenous health and well-being to the politics of alcohol in colonial situations. Historians and anthropologists have demonstrated that alcohol gained diverse political meanings in variegated colonial contexts and that both Natives and newcomers mobilized it in multiple ways for a wide variety of political purposes.3 As these studies make clear, intoxicating beverages constituted an important meeting zone for Indigenous peoples and intruders who negotiated their relations and defined their own, as well as one another's, status by drinking, sharing, and controlling liquor. Across the colonial world, the power to drink, to regulate the drinking of others, and to assign cultural meanings to drinking constituted a crucial part in forging new relations of authority and classifying people in novel ways. Moreover, liquor consumption and control spatialized both claims to power and categories of people. By allowing or denying specific, socially constructed groups of people to drink at specific, culturally defined and demarcated places, Natives and newcomers alike imposed political meanings on the landscape, asserted authority over it, and articulated complex ideas about who belonged where and in which status.4 This article explores the complex connections between alcohol and the construction of Indigenous status and space in two seemingly disparate colonial contexts, eastern North America and northern Fennoscandia (the geographic area of contemporary Finland, Sweden, and Norway). It investigates how Natives and newcomers used the circulation, consumption, and control of colonial liquor to imagine and mold Indigenous sovereignty, Indigenous–state relations, and Indigenous spaces between 1600 and the 1850s, as fledgling colonial polities in both areas gradually grew into powerful territorial states. In North America, the essay zooms in on the Shawnee people and their experiences with British and, after 1776, U.S. colonialism. In Fennoscandia, the focus is on the Sámis and their encounters with the kingdom of Sweden and Finland, a province of Sweden that was annexed to the Russian empire as an autonomous grand duchy in 1809. It is important to stress from the outset that Shawnee and Sámi histories are internally immensely diverse. Both peoples have always lived in dozens of widely dispersed communities whose historical experiences have often been quite dissimilar. We concentrate on the main trends...