FIRST NATIONS WANT INDIGENOUS-INFORMED ADDICTION RECOVERY, NOT A SAFER SUPPLY
Advocate likens giving communities more opiates to `genocide,' writes Adam Zivo.
Three months have passed since Alberta's First Nations declared a state of emergency over an addiction crisis that is crippling reserves and extinguishing thousands of Indigenous lives. While the provincial government has made significant investments into Indigenous-informed treatment options, the federal Liberals have been missing in action.
In a recent phone interview, Earl Thiessen, executive director of Oxford House (a Calgary-based addiction and housing charity), praised Alberta's investments into reserve-based “recovery communities” that fuse Indigenous cultural practices, such as sweat lodges, with abstinence-based treatment.
The United Conservative Party has already begun construction on three such communities, including a $30 million centre located in the Blood Tribe Nation, and has pledged to build several more over the coming years.
Thiessen said that, speaking as a First Nations person who found recovery after 20 years of drug abuse, he “couldn't be happier” with the provincial government's “unprecedented” investments. “There's never been support like there is now. I've been to other provinces and Alberta is a leader,” he said, noting that the construction of such healing centres was explicitly recommended in the Truth and Reconciliation report.
He was less impressed with the federal government's response — or lack thereof. “If the federal government actually got involved, we could heal a lot more of our people.”
In lieu of abstinence-based and Indigenous-informed treatment, the federal Liberals have championed “safer supply” programs that distribute free hydromorphone, an opioid as potent as heroin, under the assumption that this mitigates use of potentially tainted illicit substances.
More than 35 addiction experts, many of them leaders in their field, have alleged that these programs harm communities because clients regularly resell their hydromorphone on the black market to purchase stronger substances, such as fentanyl.
Alberta has not permitted safer supply within the province — a move which Thiessen supports as he believes these programs can only exacerbate addiction within Indigenous communities.
“Thank God there wasn't safer supply when I was in my recovery, because I may have never recovered,” he says.
His views mirrored what I heard when I visited the Calgary Stampede's Elbow River Camp in the summer, where I interviewed several Indigenous elders and community members regarding addiction. The stories they shared spoke to the devastation wrought upon the province's reserves, which appear to have been largely forgotten by the rest of society.
Among my interviewees was Rufus Pretty Young Man, who said that in every First Nations reserve that he knew of, addiction was killing so many Indigenous Canadians that funerals were happening weekly. His own cousin, who had died of an overdose, was buried just hours before we spoke — and yet it seemed to him that no one cared.
Eva Powder, a woman from the Stoney Nakoda Nation who lost her daughter to an overdose in 2017, said that diverted prescription drugs are a scourge upon her community. Although the problem “slowed down” after her reserve's health-care providers severely restricted their opioid prescribing, local drug dealers and predatory outsiders responded by procuring opioids in surrounding areas, where prescribing rules are relatively laissez-faire.
According to Powder, the most commonly trafficked prescription opioids on her reserve are oxycodone and hydromorphone (often sold under the brand names Oxycontin and Dilaudid), although fentanyl and cocaine are growing problems, too. While her community is “really scared” of the addiction epidemic, she, too, believed that First Nations reserves have been ignored.
These sentiments were shared by Alberta Otter, a recovered alcoholic of the Tsuut'ina Nation who was enjoying her 10th year of sobriety. Otter's mother had attended a residential school from age 2 to 16, and, having been deeply traumatized by that experience, passed her pain onto her daughters. The entire family struggled with addiction.
Otter believed addiction proliferates on reserves because access to treatment is very limited.
“You have to get on a wait-list, and the wait-list could be up to a year. By the time that comes up, you're either dead or in the hospital or you change your mind by then and don't want to go. So there has to be something faster for people to get into recovery,” she said.
Almost all detox and recovery services in Canada are currently based in urban areas. According to Otter, Indigenous people who live further away may be reluctant to use these services if doing so requires them to relocate from their community and support systems. She wanted to see treatment centres in every single reserve across Canada.
Anne, a palliative care nurse who works in the Siksika nation and spoke on condition of anonymity (she has been given a pseudonym), said that she was seeing an average of three to five deaths a week, primarily from overdoses. She said that, as many community members are developing addictions due to diverted prescription drugs, local health-care providers have been increasing prescription monitoring.
Anne speculated that many Indigenous patients avoid seeking treatment because they “fear they will be labelled.” She said the level of racism permeating the health-care system is “amazing” and recalled taking her granddaughter to the hospital once and being screamed at by a nurse, who told them, “You Indians are all the same. You're just here for drugs.”
She suspected that some treatment centres, where patients must stay overnight and follow strict behavioural expectations, could remind older community members of residential schools. To assuage these traumatic associations, she advocated for culturally sensitive addiction programs where patients can engage in traditional practices, such as making drums and headdresses.
In front of another teepee, I spoke with Will Jerry, an older man from Siksika Nation who had become an addiction counsellor after getting sober many years ago. At the time we spoke, he estimated he was seeing overdose-related burials every two or three days. “People have stopped counting how many people are dying,” he said.
Jerry also believed that diverted prescription opioids were devastating his reserve. “Lots of users know they can get these pills — doesn't matter, any kind of pain pills — and if they're not eating them, they're selling them back to their own people,” he said. “Because with First Nations, we've got so much addiction, so much poverty and all that, that anything that can make money, like opioids, somebody's going to use it.”
With tears in his eyes, he explained he had been unable to save his own son from addiction and was now the caregiver of his grandchildren.
“This generation, the grandparents are taking care of their grandkids. The government doesn't see that either.”
Jerry wanted doctors to prescribe fewer opioids so that these pills would not filter into his community and believed that the federal government's “safer supply” programs are a terrible idea as, in his opinion, the opioids they distribute inevitably make their way to the black market, where they fuel addiction.
His fears were not unfounded. Earlier this year I interviewed Jacob, an Indigenous drug dealer in Ontario, where safer supply is available, who claimed these programs are “flooding” his reserve with opioids. A recovering Indigenous drug user who I interviewed in London, Ontario similarly claimed that diverted safer supply was being resold on her reserve and getting “a lot of kids” addicted.
I later spoke with Kyle Young Pine, a recovery coach of the Kainai First Nations Blood Tribe. He, too, grew up in a family traumatized by residential schools and consequently spent much of his youth alienated from his Indigenous heritage.
Young Pine got sober in his mid-twenties, after 12 years of struggling with addiction, and, rediscovering his cultural identity, turned to Indigenous ceremonies, mentorship and dance to help him heal.
His recovery included regular participation in sweat lodges — a ceremony wherein community members pray and fast in a sauna-like environment. These sacred rituals provided him with meaning and structure, which fulfilled the psychosocial aspects of recovery. It helped that, in Blackfoot culture, individuals must remain sober for four days before and after attending a sweat.
Young Pine also became a competitive fancy dancer (a type of Indigenous dance), which kept him sober by demanding spiritual and physical fitness. When he was younger, his mother would tell him that a good spirit lives inside his fancy-dancing outfit, and that this spirit would leave if he brought drugs or alcohol around it. Those words stayed with him.
“Dancing fancy saved my life in a way, and that's why I keep doing it, even though I'm getting older. I still love getting dressed. I still love sharing my culture,” said Young Pine. “We've always known these ways. We've always had these Indigenous approaches to wellness at our fingertips, right? We just need to get humble enough to go and ask those questions. Those doors are open.”
Trevor Pelletier, who spent six years working in the Siksika Nation's on-reserve shelter and recovery centre, said meth use was surging “like wildfire” and “crippling our people.” He said 18 people had died at the shelter over the past three years, mostly from overdoses.
Pelletier stressed the importance of using Indigenous “landbased teachings” that incorporate prayer, culture, language and community connection. “We're teaching our people how to reconnect back home, with their language and traditions — how to respect one another, care for each other,” he said, explaining that these practices address the underlying psychological wounds that drive individuals to use drugs in the first place.
Like many other Indigenous addiction workers, Pelletier condemned the federal government's “safer supply” programs, which he compared to giving sugar to a diabetic. “We don't want anything to do with safer supply. We don't condone it. You can ask any of our chiefs. We don't want that,” he said.
He said giving safer supply to Indigenous communities was “pharmaceutical colonialism” and akin to “genocide,” and the federal government may as well just open a liquor store on the reserve and get all of his people drunk.
“When alcohol came, our people sold everything that they had — any older traditional items or artifacts. They sold their bundles for five bucks to get a hand on the bottle. This opioid stuff is doing the same thing.”
Alberta's First Nations are begging for their suffering to be seen and for governments to stem the flow of dangerous substances, including diverted prescription opioids, into their communities. They are asking for on-reserve services that can break, not enable, addiction and rehabilitate their people in a culturally sensitive manner.
While tremendous service gaps persist, the provincial government is investing heavily into culturally appropriate recovery and should be credited with taking initiative in the face of federal inaction. Meanwhile, the Trudeau government seems to have few solutions beyond showering Indigenous communities with more opioids — a strategy that, for many First Nations individuals, has disturbingly colonial undertones.