Old Missoula

Letter to The Missoulian – 1944

From An “Old Indian”

Editor, The Missoulian: I am an Indian, and as such, I would like to make a plea to my race regarding the drinking of liquor.

Indians, we are causing ourselves a lot of grief, misery and degradation by our vain and silly attempts to ape the worse features in the white man’s way of life. And in addition to all that, we are creating a problem for society at a time when all our efforts should be directed in sober, constructive channels.

We are very foolish ones to be hanging around the white man’s beer parlors, and to be pleading with unscrupulous persons in back alleys and side streets to buy us beer, wine and whiskey. Of course, they procure it for us, just so long as we dig up the price. In that manner they refill their pocketbooks and quench their own consuming thirsts, while we sink lower in a gutter largely of our own making.

Liquor is strictly a white man’s invention and luxury. Let him keep it! Wherever he has passed it to us, it has always been to our financial loss, sorrow and shame. In 86 years, I have seen naught but evil result from these liquor contacts between the two races.

We have sold off our horses, often our lands, our cattle, our gloves, moccasins, saddles. We have lied, cheated and stolen. We have parted company with the clean moral code of our ancestors. All in order to purchase booze and its decadent frills and pulseless thrills. We have bartered away our virtue in cheapening imitations of the most undesirable phases of white civilization.

We had better forget all about drunken parties, and return to our lands to produce honest livings. Perhaps we may set a good example to white loafers in beer parlors, who, like ourselves, devote much time to drinking, card playing and sporting about, while the youth of the land, both white and red, are out fighting our battles.

We should keep our Indian women away from such places, where they learn nothing good. Lately we notice some of them (grandmothers at that) blossoming out in war paints, wearing slacks (in which they look like buck Chinamen), their hair cut short, and with cigarettes drooping from carmined lips. Such bold immodesty is not for Indian women, who with their men, should be at home rearing their children in decency.

We should cease patterning our lives after the manner of those depraved whites who exist from one eveningtide to another in hopeful anticipation of “another party.” Let us think of the clean ways of our fathers, and of the decency of the early white settlers who feared God, worked hard and followed honest trails.

Too long has an evil type of white man inculcated, encouraged and preyed upon our false appetites. Now, the better white man, to his eternal credit, would protect us, but, through greed, bungling and mismanagement, he is powerless.

Let us loosen ourselves from the evil foisted upon us, and in redeeming ourselves, we may be able to help some of the weaker ones among the whites. Through self-control, we shall find protection from the wiles of harpies, bootleggers, vendors and solicitors.

We are just Indians. We can not, with either moral or legal safety, tamper with liquor. Let us forsake all evil and under God’s guidance, climb back to the higher places whence we have fallen.

J. U. S. Tice.

The above Letter to The Sunday Missoulian appeared on September 17, 1944.

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