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Today's Native American Mail Bag Question:

QUESTION:
When did it become legal in Arizona for Native Americans to buy alcohol and to vote?

~Submitted by Mel H.

Answer:

Native American right to vote

The American Indians who served during World War I returned home to a country that did not recognize them as citizens. They had fought for the country, but could not vote for the president.

The Indian Citizenship Act, passed in 1924, finally gave the indigenous peoples of the United States the right to vote.

The Melungeons, who were located in the southern Appalachias, were a mixed race people who almost certainly intermarried with Powhatans, Pamunkeys, Creeks, Catawbas, Yuchis, and Cherokees.

The Melungeons were ‘discovered’ in the Appalachian Mountains in 1654 by English explorers and were described as being "dark-skinned with fine European features." One theory is they were descended from people of mixed ancestry in Spanish settlements in the South East who kept moving into the interior to avoid English colonists.

Melungeon people were discriminated against by their Scots-Irish and English neighbors as they moved into the areas where the Melungeons lived.

The newcomers wanted the rich valley lands occupied by the Melungeons they found residing there. They discriminated against the Melungeons because they were darker skinned than their own anglo-saxon ancestors and because this helped them obtain the lands they coveted.

This discrimination carried into the 1940’s-50’s and perhaps even longer because of the work of a man called Plecker who was the state of Virginia’s Director of Vital Statistics and an avowed racist.

He labeled the Melungeons, calling them mongrels and other worse terms - some were labeled FPC - Free Person of Color in Virginia. This in turn led to their children being labeled as Mulatto and both of those terms came to mean African American. So people of that ancestry did not get the right to vote until the civil rights movement in 1964 brought about the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, which gave all black Americans the right to vote.

It was not until 1960 that Parliament passed a new Canada Elections Act, which confirmed the right to vote, without conditions, of all adult Aboriginal Canadians. Status Indians in most parts of Canada had the right to vote from Confederation on, but only if they gave up their treaty rights and Indian status through a process defined in the Indian Act and known as "enfranchisement." Understandably, very few were willing to do this.

Métis people were not excluded from voting because few were covered by treaties, so there were no special rights or other basis on which to justify disqualifying them.

Inuit were not excluded either, except from 1934 to 1950. Most were geographically isolated well into the twentieth century, so in the absence of special efforts to enable them to vote, they had no means to exercise that right.

Pre-contact alcohol consumption

Most of the indigenous peoples of North America possessed no alcohol before Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere. Only the Native peoples of the modern-day southwestern United States and Mexico consumed alcohol in any form.

Prior to contact, fermented beverages were used from southern Arizona to Mexico. The Pimas and Papagos used alcohol for ceremonial purposes. The Yumans, Apaches, and Zunis used it informally and secularly, according to Harold Driver.

The peoples who possessed alcohol before 1492 used fermented beverages only in specific rituals. The Tepehuanes and Tarahumaras, who inhabited territory in modern-day northern Mexico, fermented corn to produce tesvino, which they consumed at ceremonies to mark important stages in an individual's life, such as the passage to adulthood. The belief in the sacred potential of alcohol survived for centuries. In modern times, these indigenous peoples began to offer some of their alcohol to Jesus before they drank.

The Pimas and Papagos, who continue to inhabit traditional lands in the southwestern United States, extracted an intoxicating juice from saguaro cactus. They drank in a ritual designed to appease the divine forces that brought rain to their often-arid world. Believing the amount of rain in a year depended on the amount of the cactus liquor they consumed during a specific ritual, they often drank to the point of drunkenness.

The Aztecs of Mexico drank pulque, which they fermented from the maguey. Like other indigenous peoples, they believed alcohol had sacred force, that whoever drank it gained access to divine powers.

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