The belief that Native Americans cannot handle alcohol remains widespread among Indians and non-Indians alike. On the Navajo reservation, which covers 26,000 square miles of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah desert, 63 percent of Navajos surveyed believed "that Indians have a physical weakness to alcohol that non-Indians do not have." And 81 percent, including a substantial majority of those who drink, opposed the legalization of alcohol on the reservation, which is "dry."

May said a 1971 study reported that Indians metabolize, or break down alcohol in their blood, more slowly than non-Indians do. But its methodology and findings have been severely criticized, he said. On the other hand, a number of studies have found that Indians metabolize alcohol as fast, or faster, than non-Indians and that the livers - the main organ responsible for metabolizing alcohol - of Indians are biologically and physiologically the same as the livers of non-Indians, May said.

Such drinking, May said, is clearly a learned behavior, not something that is inherited. He believes that Native Americans learned it from the white men who introduced Indians to alcohol. These were the hard-drinking trappers, prospectors, soldiers and frontier adventurers, themselves binge drinkers who, after long spells in the back country, came to town to get drunk for days on end. This "frontier style" binge drinking was common among whites until Prohibition. After repeal, the middle class made moderate drinking - cocktails before dinner and wine with the meal - the accepted style. But rural reservations were isolated from this national change in drinking habits. The frontier style survives on the reservations, as it does among non-Indian groups living in other remote communities - western cowboy towns, northwest coastal fishing villages and Alaskan boom towns.