MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | GENRES OF PROOF | FALL 2025

Disturbing the Peace: Policing Liquor in Indian Country

Antonina Woodsum • Wesleyan University

December 1st @ 5pm • Room 100 of The Frank Center for Public Affairs

This talk considers how US federal, state, and local policing of the 'liquor trade' in Indian Country became an alibi for colonial domination that increasingly expressed itself through carceral power. From the early 19th century until the post-World War II era, US state agents leveraged the regulation of liquor in Indian Country to surveil, arrest, and incarcerate not only Native people but settlers and migrants who interacted with them. While Indian Affairs agents, reformers, and policymakers justified prohibition and segregation as necessary to protect Native peoples from settler society, this talk explores a different reading of the criminalization of alcohol production, sale, and consumption: how it worked to discipline and diminish Native nations' sovereign relations to land, kin, ancestors, and newcomers.

Genres of Proof
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