Disorderly Drinking Reconsidering Seventeenth-Century Iroquois Alcohol Use

teenth century used alcohol as a shortcut to visions and dreams. Many of our most respected ethnohistorians have jumped onto this modern bandwagon: Cornelius Jaenen, W. J. Eccles, Bruce Trigger, and James Axtell, to name a few. For example, Trigger in Natives and Newcomers claimed that the Montagnais desired alcohol for its "hallucinogenic properties" and used it as a "way of communicating with the supernatural." Axtell contributed to this belief in The European and the Indian when he suggested that Indians became drunk to "achieve a dreamlike state of religious possession," a socially approved break from normal restrictions. Neither Trigger nor Axtell offered evidence or an argument for their conclusions but both cited Andre Vachon as their main source for this claim. However, Vachon's article is unreliable. In "L'eau-de-vie dans la societe indienne" Vachon claimed that alcohol was a way to become possessed by a spirit. He, too, bluntly offered this one-sentence conclusion with only one supporting quotation. However, the quotation he offered as evidence does not provide any clear connection between drinking and visions. In 1637 the Jesuit priest Father Paul Le Jeune wrote that the Montagnais "imagine in their drunkenness that they are listened to with attention, that they are great orators, that they are valiant and formidable, that they are looked up to as Chiefs." Clearly this statement does not connect drunkenness with visions.' Only one author has attempted to document a connection between alcohol and visions, but even he failed to do so. In "Alcohol in the Iroquois Dream Quest" Edmund Carpenter drew attention to similarities between the two subjects but offered little documentary proof. His argument rested on the value of excess in Iroquois culture. Carpenter claimed that the Iroquois believed they could gain closer contact with the spiritual world by removing themselves temporarily from the human world. "They pursued the conviction," he wrote,"that