ABSTRACT
Despite widespread concern with the causes and consequences of American Indian drinking, researchers have devoted little or no attention to the predicaments of the children of these drinkers. Our goal in this chapter is to review what is known about Indian people’s experiences with alcohol in light of the theoretically and methodologically sophisticated work on children of alcoholics (COAs) that has emerged in recent years. Given the absence of comparable quantitative research in American Indian communities, our contribution is necessarily programmatic and hypothetical, but we hope it will shape and inspire future research into the experiences of American Indian COAs. As will become evident in the course of our review, there is an immense amount to be learned about the experiences of these children, and there is good reason to suspect that attention to the specificity of their situation can also lead to important insights into the predicaments of COAs more generally.
