New wines and beers of native north America

Abstract

The study of fermented and distilled liquors made by Native Americanpopulations north of the Mexican border has never attracted much interest.Since Weston La Barre’s (1938) continental survey of “Native AmericanBeers”, the information for North America has never been brought up todate, while some rather absurd data have been coded for the purpose ofcross-cultural research (e.g. Bacon et al., 1965; Driver and Coffin, 1975). A partial reason for this lack of interest lies in the assumption that few orno wines, beers, or liquors were ever produced by the indigenous popula-tion north of Mexico. It is true that such drinks were rare in pre-Europeantimes, because the diffusion of alcohol technology which generally accom-panies the spread of agriculture, was stopped in the area of the PuebloIndians whose culture, and especially religion, stressed sobriety as animportant value well into historic times (cf. Beals, 1932; La Barre, 1938).Since the time of European contact, however, not only were alcoholic bev-erages of Euro-American manufacture introduced to Native American pop-ulations but also to some extent the knowledge of alcohol technology, caus-ing many tribes in the United States and Canada to take up their own pro-duction of beers and wines. The quantities thus produced are negligiblewhen compared with the quantities obtained from White sources, but theevidence available suggests, not unexpectedly, that native production had amajor effect on the cultural position of drinking in native societies (Feest,1978). A review of the source materials leads to the conclusion that the wine madeby the Pima and Papago out of the fruits of several cacti is pro bably theonly pre-European alcoholic drink north of the Mexican border (Cremony,1868; Grossman, 1873; RCIA, 1880, p. 4; 1884, p. 6; Hrdlicka, 1906, 1908;Russell, 1908; Lumholtz, 1912; Davis, 1920; Densmore, 1929; Beals, 1932;