Alcoholism is a disease that affects all family members and crosses generations. Throughout the United States, a movement toward recovery and freedom from alcohol and drugs is occurring. This is also happening in Indian Country. In Oakland, California, two Blackfeet women, mother and daughter, are at the apex of this new Indian movement. Betty Cooper is director of the Native American Alcoholism Program and her daughter Theda New Breast is a pioneer in the field of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome prevention.

Betty Cooper has been working in the Bay Area Indian community for many years. It was during her years as a social worker that she first experienced the effect that alcohol was having on the Bay Area community. She believes that most of the problems that families confronted then originated from alcoholism in the family.

It was while working at Inter-tribal Friendship House in Oakland that she saw the devastating result of alcoholism from people who didn't have food, babies with no milk, no gas for the car, no place to live, evictions, teenage problems and every type of health problem. She next worked for the Urban Indian Child Resource Center, also in Oakland, where she says, "We had child abuse and neglect, we had more neglect than abuse. It was probably
99% alcohol related."

She recalls that it was in the 1950s when alcohol was no longer restricted from the reservation that it began to be sold openly. The results were immediate and devastating. It seemed that everyone began to drink including grandmothers who had never used alcohol. Small children were left sitting outside the bars crying for their parents who were inside drinking. Even babies
were left alone in cars while the parents drank. She saw a pattern of arrests, spouse battering and fragmented families emerge as a result of alcohol. Within her own family her brothers developed severe drinking habits and the problems that came with it. After she and her husband moved to California he also became an alcoholic.

After what she had seen and experienced personally she decided to become involved in the field of alcoholism treatment, recovery and prevention.

Theda New Breast has been involved m the field of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) prevention and education for ten years. She focuses her attention on women and youth. FAS, she says, is very high among Indian women. "In some Indian communities it is seen in as many as one in 100 births."

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is a birth defect that is caused by drinking alcohol during pregnancy. It is probably the second most common birth defect and probably the number one cause for mental retardation. FAS manifests itself in both physical and mental development delay. Facial deformities and deformities of the limbs, heart and central nervous system are often FAS related.

According to New Breast, FAS is 100% preventable and 0% curable. A woman does not have to be alcoholic to have an FAS child. There is no known "safe" level of alcohol consumption for a woman while pregnant.

She also stresses that, "Indian women have been ignored in alcohol literature. Alcohol abuse has become the single most serious health problem
accounting for the five leading causes of death among American Indians."

Her involvement began, she says, when she was in her teens. "I am an ACA (adult child of an alcoholic). I went to Alateen and I found out my father had a disease. He wasn't just a mean person who beat us up. I said, 'that won't happen to me'. Of course, it did and I got into recovery."

It was ten years ago when she saw many studies that pointed out that most women who are pregnant spontaneously decreased their alcohol consumption. Practicing alcoholics cut down and social drinkers quit. "I saw that this was the Creator's way of taking care of children. And I saw that pregnant women were a prime source for intervention."

New Breast has developed an innovative training program and begins with training the trainers. She and her staff have put together a training manual that has an Indian focus, talks about Indian culture and tells any kind of caregiver or community person ideas on what to do about FAS education, how to put on a demonstration in one's own community.

"We try to get them involved because they are the ones who are making critical decisions over Indian people with either incarceration or taking the kids away or whatever. They need to know about Indian people and we try to sensitize them."

The overall purpose of the three day training cycle is to provide personnel of the Indian alcoholism programs, Indian youth and other key gatekeepers in California with the knowledge and tools to conduct training seminars on the prevention of alcohol related problems with the emphasis on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Fetal Alcohol Effects (FAE).

One of the innovations introduced by New Breast is the requirement that each trainee who attends a session must sign an agreement to return to the community and train a minimum of 25 people in whatever they consider to be their community. New Breast says, "This has been real successful because it's a pledge they make within themselves. We've got people out there diligently training in their communities."

She has used FAS as a way to open the door to talk to Indian communities about addiction, but her primary focus is FAS. While her mother is busy in the urban inner cities Theda also works in the rural areas of California. She has designed a youth alcoholism prevention program on the Tule reservation, the second largest reservation in California with a population of approximately 650. Focusing on girls between the ages of 11 and 19, the program teaches them about the physiology of women, traditional midwifery, and how to deal with contemporary issues, choice making and how to be a traditional woman in contemporary society.

"A lot of the choice making is just simple skills. It is teaching our young women the ideas of support system, especially for raising kids. I try to help them understand that anyone can have kids but that doesn't mean they have parenting skills. Especially if they come from an abusive family background, a dysfunctional family. Then they are going to raise a kid the way they were raised and what happens is we raise another generation of dysfunctional people coming from a dysfunctional family."

"We do a lot of cultural things, outdoor things, showing them they can still have a good time and alcohol does not have to be involved."

They also bring women speakers to talk with young women. These women serve as positive role models because they are doing things with their lives and it doesn't include alcohol. And now they say things like, "Hey, I want to grow up and be like that, that Indian woman who is doing her thing and she's not drinking."

Theda explains, "It's just letting them explore and not limit themselves. She can still be a traditional woman, she doesn't have to live on the reservation. She can live in contemporary society but still have the values and beliefs that are traditional and keep them sacred and operate in the world and raise her family in that manner."

Cooper's work with entire families has given her insights into what happens in many homes where one or both parents are alcoholic. The whole family must find ways to cope with the chaos and unpredictability of daily life. One of the ways this coping manifests itself is to pretend there is nothing wrong. This is denial.

Cooper adds, "You know there is family denial but our communities also deny that there is an alcohol problem and I think our communities have to begin to look at themselves and how they enable their parents, children, grandparents.

Cooper says, "In alcoholism, what it really does is kill your spirit and even if you are functioning, you can be spiritually dead. We incorporate Indian spiritual values because the use of drugs and alcohol has brought people to a level of guilt and shame and we remind them that the medicine man always says that the altar is always there. It's we who drift away from the altar but it's always there and we can always go back.

Learning to have fun without drugs and alcohol is an aspect of our lifestyles that needs role models. Cooper adds, "We have more clean and sober events here (Bay Area) than we used to. We have clean and sober powows, and each year we have an event we call 'Running is My High' and we invite everyone out to run, walk or stroll, we ask all family members to come back to the lodge and we have a brunch. Instead of saying don't drink, don't drug, don't do this or don't don't don't, we have a strong positive message about natural highs."

Cooper has hope for a future where a whole generation will be free of drugs and alcohol. She says, "Right now, if we can reach the children from the third to the fifth grade and teach them some coping skills and if we teach them not to use alcohol and drugs and how to cope with it if it's at home, then we're looking at the year 2000 having young people, young Indian people, who have never used or abused.

We're looking toward having a whole generation of Indian people who don't feel that they have to be chemically dependent. We have to look at the overwhelming problems of alcoholism in our communities but we also have to look forward with hope."

Source:

Native Self-Sufficiency