Lose the Label: Drunken Indian
by Barbara Comito
Lose the Label: Drunken Indian
By Barbara Comito
Union Gospel Mission
“All this time, I thought being an alcoholic was being Native
American. We were always called ‘drunken Indians,’ always labeled
alcoholics. I was told I was going to be an alcoholic because I was
Native American, because it was a generational curse or just in my
blood, a cultural thing… I thought it was inevitable.”
Michael grew up on the Nez Perce Indian reservation. She was
Indian Club president, editor of her high school newspaper. She was
raised by her aunt and uncle in a good home, and her biological mom
was always a part of her life.
Surely being an alcoholic wasn’t inevitable, in her blood, or part
of her cultural identity. And yet she became one. “I tried to be
strong and stay away from that. I was never going to be a drunken
Indian. Until one day, it consumed me, and that’s what I became.”
Childhood: Michael’s father was an alcoholic. She had almost no
relationship with him growing up. When she was in high school, he hung
himself.
“I never really had a close relationship with him. My mom just
didn’t want anything to do with my dad. He would try to come once a
year on my birthday if my mom would let him see me. Whatever animosity
they had between each other affected me because I never got to know my
dad.”
And what she did know was tragic. “It seemed like it was the norm
for people on the reservation to drink more whenever a tragedy
happened. Well, he lost his brother, my uncle, in a fishing
accident…They were fishing on the Columbia, and he went over and died.
My dad didn’t take that very well because he loved his brother, and so
he started drinking more until he took his own life.”
Beginning Adulthood: Michael says she held things together pretty
well for many years. She had a good job with the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, worked her way up the ladder, had a home and a nice car.
As a receptionist for the Native American Rehabilitation
Association, she told herself she would never be in the shoes of the
people checking into rehab. “I managed to maintain a job for 10 years,
but toward the end, I would get up and go to work, and I just couldn’t
wait to get off work so that I could get some beer on the way home. Go
home, drink all night. Sometimes I would get daring enough to drink
ALL night until I had to jump in the shower and go to work. I would
not sleep at all. That’s when I knew something was wrong. I knew there
was a problem, but I didn’t know how to get out of it.
“I was always unhappy but trying to appear happy on the outside.
That’s not how I wanted to live – having to drink, to numb myself to
forget about what happened at work that day. If someone said something
mean to me, I’d go home and drink. If something didn’t go my way, I
would numb myself. Any excuse…I would get angry and want to numb
myself with alcohol.”
She lost her job when she called in sick too many times. “I
couldn’t get another job because all I wanted to do was spend all my
money on alcohol.”
Homeless and Hungry: “I finally hit rock bottom. I lost
everything. I had my car repo’d. Then my electricity got shut off.
Then the water got shut off. I lived in fear. Any time someone knocked
on the door, it was going to be the police, saying you gotta get out.”
Michael’s mom sent her a one-way bus ticket back to Idaho and she
moved home, but as soon as her unemployment kicked in, she was back to
her addiction, living in and out of motels for six months with her
boyfriend. It was during this time that she met Rich Copeland, a
former board member of the Union Gospel Mission and current board
member at The Roc Rescue Mission in Lewiston, Idaho.
“We would run out of money, but we’d have like a week left in the
motel before we jumped to another motel or the money would come in and
we could buy another week, so we’d drink all our money up, and then
we’d be hungry, so we would go to the rescue mission to get food. And
it was so ridiculous because we would never spend our money on food.
It was only meant for a motel and beer.”
During that period, Michael developed a relationship with the
staff at The Roc and Rich in particular. Eventually, the unemployment
checks stopped coming. Michael got evicted from the last motel, and
she and her boyfriend were in trouble with the police.
“With drinking comes violence, anger. You’re only worried about
your next drink, and if you can’t have your next drink or even a
cigarette, you become violently angry, and I often would get violent
and angry if there was no more money, no more alcohol, no more
cigarettes.”
Healing Begins: After one domestic violence call, Michael’s
boyfriend ended up in jail. She was homeless and alone and turned to
Rich for help. He took her to the Crisis Shelter for Women & Children
in Spokane.
“And that’s where my healing began. I started to build a
relationship with Christ, and I wanted to move forward.” She heard
about the long-term recovery program at Anna Ogden Hall.
“I wasn’t really sure if I could commit to 18 to 24 months, but I
knew God wanted me there, and now I know why – to really fully heal
and build the most intimate relationship with Him. Because if I was
out of that shelter and got a job, I would have been back to falling
down again.”
Addiction has no cultural bounds: In UGM Women’s Recovery,
Michael began a lifelong process of replacing false beliefs with the
truth.
“What I found out at Anna Ogden Hall was that drug addiction, any
addiction, affects any race, any color, anybody.” She also recognized
that her worth was not based upon her performance. “It was all Satan’s
lies, thinking my self-worth equaled my performance and other’s
opinions of me.
“I came to Anna Ogden Hall as a broken person. What impacted my
life was getting out of the worldly values and the secular world and
finding out that I was still loved and completely forgiven, fully
pleasing in Christ, that I could move forward and start building a new
life. Now that I built an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ and
having him in my life and keeping him #1, I am deeply loved, I am
completely forgiven. I have a strong identity in Christ.”
Miscellaneous Fun Fact: Michael finished the Spokane Half-Marathon
while she was at Anna Ogden Hall, thanks to a partnership with Up and
Running Again and Fleet Feet Spokane. “By me running the half marathon
the first time and saying the Scripture, ‘I can do all things through
Christ’ and believing in that and having that come to fruition made me
realize all things really are possible with God.”
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