Aboriginal leaders at war against alcohol AN endangered species threatened by a deadly weapon: that's how Aboriginal community leaders have described themselves waging a war against alcohol in the Northern Territory. The Central Australian Grog Summit in Alice Springs on Tuesday heard how alcohol has been ravaging Aboriginal communities as representatives meet to discuss strategies to stop people drowning in the so-called rivers of grog. "Our people are going down like flies because the grog's just killing them," said Noel Hayes, chairman of the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service. My children are drinkers and I'm always fighting with them (about it). June Oscar, from the Fitzroy Valley community in Western Australia, said younger people were ignoring their elders' warnings about alcohol. How can we tell our kids what grog is doing to us? How can we tell them we're an endangered species," she asked. Mildred Inkamala, a community spokeswoman for Hermannsburg, said her community was running amok in Alice Springs, drinking and carousing instead of going home. "It's a very bad thing for our children - they're looking to their parents and what they're doing," she said. Grog is a deadly weapon for us. Every funeral we cry for (the drinkers). Ken Lechleitner, the First Nations Party candidate for the federal NT seat of Lingiari, said Aboriginal people needed to change the way they thought of alcohol. He said that in the Arrernte language the word for alcohol, "wama," means "nectar of the gods," and has a similar meaning in other Aboriginal languages, such as Pitjantjatjara. "When you say 'that person is an alcoholic', you're actually saying, 'that person is a nectar connoisseur'," he said. We've got to change the word, the ownership of the language to show that alcohol is poison.