AI/AN are exposed to the environmental risk factors for AUD that are found in all societies, including childhood trauma and living in geographically isolated communities without economic opportunities, but also stressors that are unique to indigenous populations. These stressors include historical trauma, the cross generational transmission of the cumulative emotional and psychological trauma of cultural genocide, a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of the essential foundations of a cultural group. The forced placement of children in federally mandated boarding schools was a vehicle for this genocide.
