In the sixteenth century, the nomadic, reindeer-herding Sámi people of what’s now northern Sweden and Finland and the Shawnee of the Ohio Valley in North America, who lived in farming villages organized as a confederacy, didn’t necessarily have much in common. But, as anthropologist Sami Lakomäki, historian Ritva Kylli, and archaeologist Timo Ylimaunu write, both groups found themselves in disputed relationships with colonial powers in which alcohol played a significant part.
In both regions, the authors write, colonial powers provided liquor to Indigenous groups as part of the fur trade. The Sámi had been selling the hides of beaver, reindeer, fox, and other animals to traders for centuries, and by the 1590s one of the products they received in return was Swedish and Finnish liquor. Around that same time, English merchants began offering Caribbean rum to the Shawnee and other Native groups as part of the trade in deerskins and beaver pelts.
Both Indigenous groups adopted alcohol for social and ritual purposes, drinking with visitors and at celebrations and ceremonies.
The Sámi and Shawnee often viewed their relationship with the outside powers differently from how the colonizers saw things. For example, the British metaphorically described the king as the father of North American societies, which they viewed as vassal states, receiving gifts of liquor as part of a relationship in which they owed him loyalty and tribute. The Shawnee turned this around, demanding generous treatment by symbolically identifying rum as the milk of the royal parent. In 1795, two Shawnee leaders argued that the king’s “breasts” should be “full of milk” for their people.
Of course, alcohol is often a controversial thing. Some Swedish leaders soon began arguing for the regulation of Sámis’ drinking as part of a larger kingdom-wide debate over the moral and economic dangers of excessive alcohol use. Some Sámi responded by insisting that alcohol was a necessary medicine and crossing the border to Norway, which had less regulation, to obtain it.
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In contrast, it was Shawnee leaders who first proposed regulation of alcohol in their communities, viewing it as contributing to violence and leaving people vulnerable to being cheated by European trading partners.
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Some British colonial leaders objected to curbing alcohol sales, arguing that they were crucial to the fur trade and to keeping Native people dependent on the British Empire, since they didn’t have much need for a continued supply of other European products. Even when colonial authorities passed laws against selling alcohol to Native Americans, they often claimed they were impossible to enforce. The authors note that this reflected a specific view of “Indian country”—that it was the sovereign possession of Britain; British subjects there didn’t fall under the control of Indigenous law, yet British law also couldn’t control their actions.
Ultimately, the colonizers’ different approaches reflected a deeper difference: While Sweden wanted to incorporate the Sámi as Christianized, taxpaying citizens, the British—and later Anglo-Americans—tried to keep the Shawnee and other Native Americans at a distance.
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