I'll speak primarily to North America, here.

Prior to European colonization, there are few recorded examples of alcohol use among Native American populations. Some groups residing in the Southwest, primarily the Apache, Pima, and Tihono O'odham did have a tradition of using fermented cactus fruit drinks in ceremonies but that never seemed to disseminate eastward. So, with the arrival of European traders came too the arrival of rum, brandy beer and wine.

While not practically useful, alcohol was traded to native peoples at high rates because of its novelty. Natives could already make clothes, boil water and harvest foods; however, they could not, as of yet, distill spirits. Realizing this, some traders began seeking to primarily trade spirits because the profit margin approached 400% as opposed to the 100% margin seen with other goods. And, natives obliged because intoxication was an enjoyable endeavor for them.

Now, getting more to your question: at first, Native Americans enjoyed, willfully participated and worked to extend this trade. Native peoples took liquors obtained from European traders and ferried it throughout their own trading networks. In some instances, European alcohol made contact with Native peoples prior to European peoples. New words appeared in native languages to describe these drinks (ochnéca and wisachgan emerged among the Onondaga and Delaware respectively to describe brandy) and their effects ( ochnecagãschta and méeneet described, again respectively, a drunk or drunkard). And, as previously mentioned, some societies did have societal customs which included beverages consumed for various religious purposes.

An interesting example of this, and demonstrative of why alcohol took hold, are the Creek people of southeastern North America who drank a ceremonial non-alcoholic drink called "black drink." They would then vomit this drink up (intentionally or unintentionally is not known though the plant itself is not thought to lend itself to emesis) as part of their ritual. With alcohol, they found a drink that would intoxicate you rapidly and cause the consuming individual to vomit. It quickly supplanted "black drink" for ceremonial use and in cases were alcohol supplies were limited, one individual was chosen to drink all of the on-hand liquor so as best to experience its effects. In many societies, intoxication by alcohol was seen as a means through which to achieve religious enlightenment.

Visions had during intoxication were often treated as divinely inspired. Though we as westerners know they are not, the Native peoples experiencing alcoholic intoxication for the first time had no conceptual or societal framework to disprove their notion that what they saw/thought/experienced while drunk was not divinely inspired. This, in many instances, led to violent acts being perpetrated among themselves and towards others. At first, these were tolerated but as the dynamic between European settlers and Native Americans changed, so did Native views on alcohol. Unfortunately, in many ways it was too late.

The effects of alcohol addiction are well documented throughout early Native American history. And so too are the attempts at curving it. Native American-turned-missionary, Samson Occom, implored his brothers in this poetic verse:

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"Mean are our houses, and we are kept low,

And almost naked, shivering we go;

Pinch’d for food and almost starv’d we are,

And many times put up with stinking fare…

Our little children hovering round us weep,

Most starv’d to death we’ve nought for them to eat;

All this distress is justly on us come

For the accursed use we make of rum."

(Mancall, "The Bewitching Tyranny of Custom")

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But all across North America there are stories of Native peoples insatiable drive to obtain alcohol at the cost of all else. Animal populations were over-hunted for their pelts in an effort to trade for spirits. This left Native peoples without a critical resource. Planted crops were neglected for drink. And, in later stages without much left to trade to settlers, Native peoples were offered something from European traders that would be the beginning of the end in many ways: credit. Native peoples were allowed and encouraged to take on debt in trade for alcohol and other goods. In the end, the only thing left to pay back outstanding debts was their land.

Those Native American leaders who recognized the ill-effects European contact was perpetrating on their peoples tried desperately to stymie the flow of alcohol. But, much like actual viral illness, alcohol among Native populations had already gone viral. The evolution of this addiction, we can call it that, continues through today.

Sources: most of this is a paraphrasing of a graduate level original paper wrote by myself on this exact topic. Primary and secondary sources are available via request but the most frequently cited and relevant to your question are:

Mancall, Peter. Deadly Medicine: Indians and alcohol in early America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Mancall, Peter. “The Bewitching Tyranny of Custom: the social costs of Indian drinking in colonial America.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 17, no. 2 (1973): 15-42.

Medicine, Beatrice. Drinking and Sobriety Among the Lakota Sioux. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2007.

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Edit: formatting.

The term “Native Americans” comprises a huge variety of indigenous groups with their very distinct cultures – I can’t speak for British America but can add some background on this for the Aztecs of central Mexico in colonial times.

One description comes to mind for me, I’m sure there are many more: It’s from the early 17th written by the native chronicler Fernando de Alva Ixtlitlxochitl, so 100 years after European contact. Alva Ixtlitlxochitl was a descendant of the Acolhua rulers of Tezcoco, a partner of the ruling Mexica in the Aztec Triple Alliance. This meant he was writing to pass on his ancestors’ history; but also to claim certain rights for his family. The quote is from a rare passage written from his own perspective, in his Historia de la nación chichimeca (my transl.):

All these changes and rise in vices [mentioned in a previous prophecy] have all come true, because what was in those [pre-colonial] times seen as supernatural and prodigious is in this [colonial] time very current clear and ordinary and so they do not cause admiration. Because who would see in that time that when a drunkard appeared, unfortunately, after being cussed and punished, they would take his house and throw him out, not even letting him live in the village? And now it is very common that it is a daily custom. [His sentence structure is complicated]

Alva Ixtlitlxochitl then discusses further increases in vices, including how young women now left their parents’ house at a much earlier age. Here drunkenness is mentioned, but rather to show the strict colonial rule in Mexico. For the author it is part of an overall decline in morals due to European influence.

Again, since he was part of the nobility this partly connects to common themes of native chroniclers: many would invoke the decline of their families’ (often real) to receive rights to properties from the Spanish Crown. Still, this quote I think goes in a different direction. Rather than showing indigenous drunkenness as a criticism of native people, Alva Ixtlitlxochitl here uses it as merely one example to show the downsides of colonial rule in his home region.

To give some more context I’ll turn to one very common alcoholic beverage in that region now, pulque, still extremely popular in Mexico today. It is made from the fermented sap of the maguey (agave) plant

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I was just reading a short text by Felipe Fernández-Armesto on food in Spanish America. For him there was not a quick disruption of traditional food consumption through European contact. But neither were pre-Hispanic eating and drinking patterns simply continued without change until today – as official “indigenist” theories in Mexico would have it. Rather for Fernández-Armesto

The truth probably lies between the rival positions. Native diets did undergo profound changes, which, however, happened patchily and gradually, without disrupting many traditional patterns. A “mestizo diet” did emerge from the trauma of conquest, but it was at first a feature of the lives of Spaniards and urban mestizos and ladinos— the result of the encounter of European palates, digestions, and standards of behavior with indigenous ingredients and native or mulatto cooks.

So that the adoption of certain European foods happened over time, but depending also on the status and economic background of the person. An indigenous noble living in a big city would have been much quicker to adopt say wheat or European alcohol than a commoner living in a rural area. There was a gradual, long term process of adopting foods and drinks over the colonial period. With that said, Fernández-Armesto briefly discusses the introduction of sugar in modern-day Mexico and Mesoamerica:

Sugar partly displaced native honey, maguey syrup, and corn-stalk sugar, and, as a fermentation agent, probably helped boost production of native beers, especially pulque in Mesoamerica, which was an important source of protein. Distillation, a new technology in the colonial era, had little impact on the absorption of alcohol until well into the seventeenth century.

There would have been an increase in consumption of pre-Hispanic beers, especially pulque, while higher percentage types of alcohol became important only during the middle colonial period. This would presumably include liquors also made from maguey (Tequila being a famous one today) - which of course much stronger and potentially disastrous effects. It’s important to highlight here that low-percentage beverages like pulque did exist before the arrival of the Spaniards. Although it had a ritual function in pre-hispanic times and so was esp. restricted to elites; which of course ended with the Spanish attempts at eradication of indigenous beliefs. European accounts like to highlight how native people were not accustomed to alcohol, leading them to “laziness” and “vices”, etc. – a highly useful narrative to essential legitizime their inferior position in the colonial hierarchy. This is a narrative we then find in many other regions with the spread of European colonisation (and one I’ve seen repeated in some now deleted comments in here just to show how common it still is as a result).

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As a last example I want to briefly discuss another use of the “drunken Indian” narrative: how pulque was used by colonial authorities during the 1692 popular uprising in Mexico City. Daniel Nemser discusses this in an interesting article, ““To Avoid This Mixture”: Rethinking Pulque in Colonial Mexico City“.

The riot's initial cause was hunger due to a drought in New Spain and a disease attacking wheat (chiahuiztli). This was compounded by lacking reaction of the authorities to bring corn into the city due to the rising corn prices. Neither viceroy nor archbishop would directly meet the rioters, escalating tensions. Douglas Cope argues that Spanish elites continually underestimated the rioters: First they did not understand their potential for violence; and second they misunderstood the large crowd (possibly 10.000 people) as moving as one. The riots’ desctruction can still be nicely seen on this 1695 painting by Cristobal de Villalpando.

After the riot was finally put down it was mainly blamed on the native population. The Spaniards used a „divide-and conquer“ strategy through a number of viceregal decrees, that served also to lessen solidarity between the rioters – e.g. no more than four Indians could walk the streets together, and sale of looted goods was prohibited. Arrests and investigations were followed by public executions of rioters, agains esp. of native people. For Cope such executions meant „a demonstration of the terrible majesty of the law, a dramatic reassertion of Hispanic power“ after „the social hierarchy had been shaken“. Sentences were carried out with remarkable swiftness and were exceptionally severe, for a colonial administation usually preocuppied with documentation and law.

Before this context Nemser discusses how colonial authorities laid the blame directly on – not their own failure to provide food but -pulque:

Instead of admitting the government’s failure to provision the city with grains, which would have provided a reasonable cause for the indigenous poor to rise up, [creole scholar Carlos Sig¨uenza y Góngora] attacked the inebriating and seditious effects of indigenous pulque. “From the very moment that the riot began,” he wrote, “everyone raised the cry, inspired by Heaven perhaps, that ‘This is the result of pulque!”’

According to Nemser, the authorities reacted by immediately banning the sale of pulque, while allowing another type of pulque, for its “medicinal qualities”. He ties this distinction to how Spaniards and creoles tried to show differences between themselves and the indigenous population. Over the long term, the ban seems to have little effect and pulque sales continued. Still, this episode shows how a) Spanish authorities were quick to shift the blame for the riots from themselves to indigenous commoners, and b) used pulque as a useful device, harking back to the “drunken Indian” stereotype mentioned above.

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So overall I’ve looked at some examples that mention how alcohol, esp. pulque was already important in pre-Hispanic times and how probably gradually its production increased. Distilled liquors in colonial Mexico became more important only towards the later 17th c.

I’ve also mentioned two different examples: the native chronicler Alva Ixtlilxochitl using drunkenness as a way to slyly criticise colonial policies in the early 17th c. And in turn how roughly 100 years later during the 1692 riots in Mexico City, colonial authorities laid the blame on indigenous commoners by invoking that most riotous of drinks: pulque.

Indigenous history with alcohol in North America varies. I’m a double major in history and native studies specializing in my province so I can only speak on my province.

The start of the history for alcohol for my area is that it was introduced during meetings between European traders and the Ojibway/Cree as an offering for ceremonies. The drinks were drank because of the ceremony, and these ceremonies were almost party-like to begin with so the introduction of alcohol paired up well with it. At first it was fine and only used ceremonial, but they started bringing stronger drinks, some even mixed with things like gunpowder and the traders would encourage the indigenous people to drink as much as they could to get a better deal for the trades. But by the time this happened it was too late, they were already used to it, and already hooked on it at this point(the later stages of the fur trade)

But, alcohol abuse as a coping mechanism is much more common from the 1940s onwards. Most people educated on the topics in my province would agree that residential school is the biggest cause of alcohol abuse with many of the First Nations people alive in our area today. Sexual, and physical abuse was common, with the last school closing in 1996, and programs to help survivors are a very recent thing. but even people who didn’t go to residential school can be affected, like the children of residential school survivors who had to grow up with parents that were distant, almost uncaring, and coping with things like drugs and alcohol. Part of the goal of these schools was set out to “kill the Indian and keep the man” by fully assimilating Indigenous people into white Canadian culture, in the book “making Aboriginal People ‘immigrants too’: a comparison of citizenship programs for newcomers and Indigenous peoples in post war Canada, 1940s-1960s.” The book talks about how Canada and Indian affairs set out to make Indigenous people the lower working class of people with no possibility for becoming higher than that, always in some level of poverty. Both the lack of possibilities for getting out of poverty, mental illness on reserve(suicide is also common on reserves) and the sexual and physical abuse experienced not only with residential school survivors but Indigenous people in Canada in general(the stats for sexual abuse are very easy to find btw) are the most common reasons for alcohol abuse in my area, as it’s used as an unhealthy coping mechanism.

But people have started to try to fix these problems. This past semester I volunteered at two tribal councils in my city for the duration of the semester, one that represented 6 reserves, and the other that represented 8 reserves. And one program they both want to implement is a GED program(reserve education only goes to grade 10) and various training programs to help their members of their bands gain the education and training needed to gain employment. They constantly do meetings with the communities to try to address issues rampant on reserves, and I was told that depression among people my age on reserve was common, and a lot of them felt like they would never have a better life so, sort of a ‘what’s the point of trying?’ Type of deal before turning to drugs and alcohol. The tribal councils also have mental health services available now to residential school survivors but their funding is so lacking, it’s really hard for them to do all the help they want to.

As others have noted, Native Americans did consume alcohol before the arrival of Europeans. I would like to direct you to these two previous posts I made on Mesoamerican alcohol if you are interested.

• What kinds of alcoholic beverages did the Native Americans/First Nations consume?

• Possible distillation in West Mexico