One Drunk to Another The Only Requirement
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Illustration · A house on the Alkali Lake reserve in British Columbia on a winter evening in the 1970s, like the one where Phyllis and Andy C. held AA meetings. Imagined; not drawn from a photograph.

Oneida, Laguna and Alkali Lake · 1953–2025

Sobriety is traditional

AA reached Native communities a reservation at a time, and Native members made it their own.

“At an A.A. meeting on an Indian reservation, I heard the words ‘Sobriety is traditional.’”

A Native American member, in her story “Listening to the Wind” · Alcoholics Anonymous, fourth edition, 2001

A reservation at a time

The history written for AA’s office in 1985 says the first all-Indian group in the U.S. is believed to have started in Oneida, Wisconsin, in 1953. Groups like it, it says, were Indian mostly because they met on or near reservations, but they gave a Native newcomer “powerful identification.” In 1966 Hazel R. of AA’s office counted 20 Indian groups in the U.S. and 11 in Canada. By 1985 there were probably nearer 100.

The Grapevine caught glimpses along the way. On the Maliseet reserve at Tobique Point, New Brunswick, an open meeting on May 3, 1958, started a group of eighteen; by 1962 it had sixty. In 1959 the magazine reported that about sixty members from Albuquerque had visited “the small, recently-formed Pueblo Indian group” at Laguna. In December 1962 it reported that a group in Farmington, New Mexico, had set aside one meeting a week for Navajo members, with a Navajo member translating the talks. The first of a series of intertribal AA conventions met at Lapwai, Idaho, in April 1976.

In 1972, at Alkali Lake, a Shuswap reserve in British Columbia where by later accounts nearly everyone drank, Phyllis C. quit when her daughter wouldn’t come home with her until she sobered up. She reached out to Father Ed, an Oblate brother and alcoholism counselor from nearby Williams Lake. A few days later her husband, Andy C., quit too; soon after, the band elected him chief. They began holding AA meetings in their house. In 1974 some 35 people went to treatment. By 1979, AA’s newsletter says, 98 percent of the people at Alkali Lake didn’t drink at all, and the AA meetings, “adapted to fit the community’s reality,” had been “a critical rallying point.”

In 1985 AA’s General Service Conference asked for a closer look. In the survey that followed, 40 percent of AA respondents, from 55 areas, reported Native groups in their areas. Professionals who answered noted that some Native members “freely blend their religious practices with the A.A. program of recovery.” In 1987 the Conference asked for a pamphlet, and in 1989 AA printed A.A. for the Native North American.

In 2018 AA presented the first copy of its Big Book in Navajo, the book’s first 164 pages and some of its stories recorded in Navajo on 14 CDs, to the president of the Navajo Nation. Navajo has no word for alcoholic; the translators settled on “one who cannot stop drinking.” In July 2025 AA replaced its 1989 pamphlet with Indigenous People in A.A., with nine new stories and a new introduction.

Listen Sobriety is traditional About 1 minute

One place at a time

Where it took root

Six beginnings, from a group in Wisconsin believed to be the first to conventions of many nations.

Members are named as the sources name them. The 1985 history was written for AA’s office by Bob P. and never published; it is quoted from a transcription. Older words appear only inside quotations.

1953 · Oneida, Wisconsin

The first, by one account

The 1985 history says this is believed to have been the first all-Indian group in the U.S. By then it was known as the Hobart group.

Believed to be the first

Bob P., 1985

1958 · New Brunswick

A Maliseet reserve

A 68-year-old Maliseet man the Grapevine called Tall Man heard of AA through his son in Connecticut and first went to meetings at the Fort Fairfield Group, across the border in Maine. On May 3, 1958, an open meeting on his reserve started a group.

Eighteen members, then sixty

AA Grapevine, November 1962

1959 · Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico

A visit

About sixty members from four Albuquerque groups went out to the reservation at Laguna to meet “the small, recently-formed Pueblo Indian group.”

A new group, welcomed

AA Grapevine, July 1959

By 1962 · Farmington, New Mexico

One night a week

A Navajo member from Lybrook, introduced to AA at a treatment center, came to the Farmington group. It set aside one meeting a week for Navajo members, with talks put into Navajo and back.

Talks in two languages

AA Grapevine, December 1962

1972–1979 · Alkali Lake, British Columbia

A whole reserve

Meetings in Phyllis and Andy C.’s house, then treatment for dozens, and in time the reserve brought back the sacred pipe and the sweat lodge.

98 percent abstaining by 1979, by AA’s account

Box 4-5-9, Spring 2016

April 1976 · Lapwai, Idaho

Many nations

The first of a series of intertribal AA conventions met at Lapwai. By June 1977 there had been seven, in Washington, Idaho and British Columbia.

Seven by June 1977

AA Grapevine, August 1977

Carried home

One member, quoted in AA’s newsletter in 1988, observed that “the most positive results seem to occur when a Native American finds sobriety off the reservation and carries it home.” Tall Man’s group in New Brunswick began that way.

For a closer look

Go deeper

What the accounts of Alkali Lake agree on and don’t; Native members’ stories in the Big Book; and AA’s literature in Native members’ own words and languages.

How sober was Alkali Lake?

AA’s newsletter dates Phyllis C.’s last drink to 1972; the Anchorage Daily News, in 1988, to 1973. A Native newspaper, Windspeaker, put the reserve at “95 per cent sobriety” in 1986; the Daily News and AA’s newsletter say 98 percent.

A 1991 study by Marcelle Gareau calls the 98 percent what Alkali Lake “was claiming” by 1985, and notes that even the sober adults were sometimes called “dry drunks.” The AA group, led at first by the counselor from Williams Lake, “was taken over in 1978 by Band members,” she wrote. AA calls it the Serenity Group.

The reserve told its story in a film, The Honour of All, made with the Four Worlds Development Project. The Daily News dates it 1985; AA’s newsletter, 1986.

Sobriety is traditional

The Big Book’s third edition, in 1976, added “Join the Tribe!”, the story of a Maliseet man who traveled “from a Canadian reservation to overseas bars to New England lockups” before he found AA.

The fourth edition, in 2001, has a Native American woman’s story, “Listening to the Wind,” and a Mi’kmaq man’s, “A Vision of Recovery.” He wrote that he would not speak Mi’kmaq as a boy; at his mother’s deathbed he did, and she said it sounded beautiful.

In their own words

By 1988 AA’s office had adaptations of the Steps, the Traditions, the Preamble and the Serenity Prayer translated “into several Native American and Eskimo dialects.”

The Navajo Big Book took a translator almost four years to record; he finished in August 2017. AA’s store also lists an Ojibway recording of the Twelve Steps and pamphlets in Inuktitut.

Indigenous People in A.A. keeps six stories from the 1989 pamphlet. AA explains its title: “Indigenous” is meant to include “those cultures living on the land prior to colonization.”

Sources