I have seen a few questions here about alcohol and Native Americans. Most of them assume that alcohol was unknown in the Americas until Europeans introduced it, and some of them even imply this was meant as a way to bring Natives under European control. However, alcoholic beverages were common in Mesoamerica, and some forms of rudimentary distilleries have been found. The Aztecs had a goddess, Mayahuel, for pulque, an alcoholic beverage that is still consumed today. How did the idea that alcohol was an European introduction arise, and why is it so prevalent?
"Distillation" is actually the key word there. The alcohol that caused so many problems for Native Americans was not pulque or corn wine, but whiskey and rum.
There's currently no evidence that Native Americans independently discovered distillation, which is the necessary component to produce hard liquor. While low-alcohol wines and beers were relatively prevalent in some areas, whiskey and rum are 8 to 10 times stronger. It takes only a few ounces to equal several large mugs of native alcohol, which means that you can get someone else drunk very quickly on it. European settlers became notorious for not only selling liquor as a trade good, but taking advantage of their unfamiliarity with its strength to get them drunk during negotiations.
Some of these tribes also had no alcohol whatsoever before European contact, which made them very naive to the effects and potential for addiction. Rum and whiskey were cheap for the colonists to make and could easily be traded for furs and other resources. They had no social or legal framework for handling alcohol, especially not something that can get you trashed with a few shots, which led to rampant alcohol abuse when these communities encountered it. Accounts as early as the 1730s indicate that alcoholism was starting to ruin Indian communities, which many colonists treated as a sign of their inherently uncivilized nature. A quote from Benjamin Franklin:
[They] are extremely apt to get drunk, and when so are very quarrelsome & disorderly...indeed if it be the Design of Providence to extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed Means. It has already annihilated all the Tribes who formerly inhabited the Sea-coast.
It only got worse as the newly formed United States began moving west, forcing tribes to relocate at gunpoint. Fractured and devoid of prospects, alcohol became a coping method just like for anyone in poverty. They would trade valuable items like buffalo hide for alcohol at a fraction of their commercial value, encouraging Americans to keep supplying them. When reservations tried outlawing liquor, they switched to beer and even alcoholic stomach bitters products. This was taken advantage of to create myths that Native Americans had a predisposed appetite for alcohol and unusually high level of violence when drunk, encouraging their eradication and assimilation into Eurocentric civilization.
Today, alcoholism remains a chronic problem. A 2012-2013 survey found that 19.2% of Native Americans had an alcohol use disorder in the prior 12 months and 43.4% had one at any point in their lives (compared to 14.0% and 32.6% of whites). While this has dropped in years since, it follows a pattern of a general decrease in alcoholism among the US population and Native Americans are still at a higher rate of alcoholism.