First Peoples, First Prohibitionists

Armed with a new appreciation for prohibitionism as an anti-imperialist, anti-predatory-capitalist movement for community self-determination, Part III returns us to the United States, where prohibitionism goes back to the very first colonization of North America. Indeed, America’s first prohibitionists were its first peoples: battling against the “white man’s wicked water,” through which their sovereignty was stripped, in the same way as indigenous populations in Africa, South Asia, and Australia. Chapter 9 highlights the role of Miami chief Little Turtle in urging President Thomas Jefferson to enact, in 1802, the first federal prohibition of the trafficking of liquor to native tribes, even while liquor excises had become the primary pillar of state finance of the young republic.

Capturing Indian Women

Harmar’s Defeat enraged President Washington and shaped a new U.S. military policy driven by humiliation and infused with vengeance. Reversing his previous, half-hearted attempts to control the Kentucky militia, the president now empowered them. Washington used the Kentucky militia to invade Indian lands along the Wabash, targeting the agrarian and trading villages that stretched from Ouiatenon to Kethtippecanuck. The federal government fully equipped the Kentucky militia and ordered them to attack and destroy villages and crops—and to kidnap Indian women and children. Following two brutal raids, almost 100 Indian women and children were captured and held in a hastily erected prison at Fort Washington, now present-day Cincinnati. The women and children were imprisoned there for more than a year, in primitive, overcrowded, and unsanitary conditions. Indians retaliated for the abduction and for the repeated invasion of their homelands by handing the U.S. Army one of the worst defeats in its entire history under Arthur St. Clair. It was the suffering of Indian women that rallied Indian warriors under Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and Buckongahelas to victory.