The Mi’kmaq Nation in Maine spent about $50,000 of its opium settlement fund to build a healing facility that it will use for traditional sweat lodge ceremonies aimed at helping people recover from addiction .
Aneri Pattani / KFF Health News
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The Mi’kmaq Nation in Maine spent about $50,000 of its opium settlement fund to build a healing facility that it will use for traditional sweat lodge ceremonies aimed at helping people recover from addiction .
Aneri Pattani / KFF Health News
PRESQUE ISLE, Maine – Outside the Mi’kmaq Nation’s health department stands a dome-shaped tent, hand-built from saplings and covered with black tarps. This is one of many sweat lodges on tribal land, but this one is dedicated to helping people recover from addiction.
Maximum 10 people can enter the lodge at one time. Fire-heated stones – called grandparents, symbolizing the souls they represent – are inserted inside. Water splashed on the rocks, and the house was filled with steam. It feels like a sauna but hotter. The air is denser and darker. People pray and sing songs. It is said that when they leave the lodge, they will reappear from their mother’s womb. Has been cleaned. Easter.
Edward Peter-Paul was chief of the Mi’kmaq Nation in Maine. Decades ago, the sweat lodge session helped him improve his relationship with drugs and alcohol. He hopes the new treatment facility can do the same for other tribal citizens.
Aneri Pattani / KFF Health News
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Edward Peter-Paul was chief of the Mi’kmaq Nation in Maine. Decades ago, the sweat lodge session helped him improve his relationship with drugs and alcohol. He hopes the new treatment facility can do the same for other tribal citizens.
Aneri Pattani / KFF Health News
Katie Espling, medical director for the tribe of about 2,000 members, said the experience can be “an important tool” in healing.
She said recovering patients have requested respite for years as a cultural element to supplement counseling and medication for the tribe’s health department. provided. But insurance doesn’t cover sweat lodge ceremonies, so until now, the ministry hasn’t been able to afford them.
Over the past year, the Mi’kmaq Nation received more than $150,000 in settlements with companies that manufactured or sold prescription painkillers and were accused of exacerbating the overdose crisis. One-third of that money was spent on sweat lodges.
Higher mortality rate
Healthcare companies are pay more than $1.5 billion to hundreds of tribes over 15 years. This windfall is similar to deals many similar companies are making. pay the state governmenta total of about 50 billion USD.
For some, lower payments to tribes correspond to their smaller populations. But some tribal citizens point out that the overdose crisis has had a disproportionate impact on their communities. Native Americans had the highest drug overdose death rate of any racial group each year from 2020 to 2022. And federal officials say those statistics may be skewed. an undercount of about 34% because the race of Native Americans is often misclassified on death certificates.
Still, many tribal leaders remain grateful for the settlements and for their unique way of spending the money: Unlike state payments, money sent to tribes can be used for Traditional and cultural healing practices – anything from sweat lodges and smudging ceremonies to basket weaving and programs teaching tribal languages.
“To have these dollars to do that is truly a gift,” said Espling of the Mi’kmaq tribe. “This is absolutely fundamental to the health of our patients” because connecting with their culture is “where they will truly find the deepest healing.”
Public health experts say the underlying cause of addiction in many tribal communities is intergenerational trauma, caused by centuries of brutal treatment, including broken treaties, theft Land theft and a government-sponsored boarding school system aimed at eradicating tribal languages and cultures. Coupled with persistent underinvestment in the Indian Health Service, these factors have resulted lower lifespan and higher rates of addiction, suicide, and chronic diseases.
Using settlement money to connect tribal citizens to their traditions and instill pride in their culture can be a powerful healing tool, he said. Medley Andrea, a researcher with the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health and a member of the Haida Nation. She helped create the principles on how tribes might consider spending settlement dollars.
Medley said that respecting the traditional elements clearly stated in the settlements was “really groundbreaking”.
‘A drop in the bucket’
Of the 574 federally recognized tribes, more than 300 have received payments to date, totaling more than $371 million, according to Kevin Washburnone of three court-appointed directors who oversee tribal settlements.
While that may sound like a lot of money, it pales in comparison to what the addiction crisis has done to tribes. There are also hundreds of tribes excluded from payments because they are not federally recognized.
“These mitigation funds are like a drop in the bucket compared to what they spent, compared to what they expected to spend,” said. Corey Hinton, an attorney representing several tribes in opium litigation and a citizen of the Passamaquoddy Tribe. “Mitigating is a cheap term when we are talking about a crisis that is still engulfing and devastating communities.”
Even leaders of the Navajo Nation — the largest federally recognized tribe in the United States, which has received $63 million so far — say the settlements cannot match the severity importance of the crisis.
“It will make a little bit of an impact but it will only go so far,” said Kim Russell, executive director of the Navajo Department of Health.
The Navajo Nation is trying to use the money to improve its overall health system. Officials plan to use the settlement money to hire more coding staff and pay for tribally run hospitals and clinics. Russell said those workers will help ensure reimbursements continue to flow to health systems and will help maintain and expand services, including addiction treatment and prevention.
Navajo leaders also want to hire more clinicians who specialize in substance use treatment, as well as primary care physicians, nurses and epidemiologists.
“Building buildings is not what we want” from the opioid settlement fund, Russell said. “We are building the country.”
The stakes are high for small tribes
Smaller nations such as the Poarch Band of Creek Indians in southern Alabama were also strategizing to earn more settlement money.
For the tribe of about 2,900 members, that means investing $500,000 — the most money it has received to date — into a tribe. statistical modeling platform which its creators say will simulate the opioid crisis, predict which programs will save the most lives and help local officials decide how to best use future settlement money .
Robert McGhee is vice president of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians in Alabama. The tribe has spent its opioid settlement fund on a statistical modeling platform to help it invest future dollars wisely.
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Robert McGhee is vice president of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians in Alabama. The tribe has spent its opioid settlement fund on a statistical modeling platform to help it invest future dollars wisely.
Aneri Pattani / KFF Health News
Some restoration advocates have questioned the value of the model, but the tribe’s vice chairman, Robert McGhee, said it will provide the data and evidence needed to choose among competing efforts for resources, such as recovery housing or peer support specialists. The tribe wants to do both, but realistically, they will have to prioritize.
“If we can have this model and we invest the necessary money into it and get the support, it will work for us,” McGhee said. “I just felt it in my gut.”
The stakes are very high. In smaller communities, each death affects the entire tribe, McGhee said. The loss of a leader marks decades of lost knowledge. The death of a speaker means the native language is increasingly eroded.
For Keesha Frye, tribal court and sober living facility supervisor for the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, using settlement money effectively is a personal matter. “It means a lot to me to make this community better because this is where I live and this is where my family lives,” she said.
Erik Lamoreau of Maine also brings personal connections to this work. More than a decade ago, he sold drugs on Mi’kmaq land to support his own addiction.
“I did harm to this community and it was really important for me to go back and try to right some of those mistakes,” Lamoreau said.
Erik Lamoreau is the peer recovery coordinator for the Mi’kmaq Nation health department. Note his license plate number.
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Erik Lamoreau is the peer recovery coordinator for the Mi’kmaq Nation health department. Note his license plate number.
Aneri Pattani / KFF Health News
Today, he works for the tribe as a peer recovery coordinator, a new role created by the opioid settlement fund. He uses his experience to connect with others and help them recover – whether that means driving someone to court, working on their resume, working out together at the gym exercise or organize a cribbage club where people play cards and socialize without having to do anything. alcohol or drugs.
Starting this month, Lamoreau’s job will also involve connecting customers looking for elements of recovery culture with the new sweat lodge offering — an effort he finds promising.
“The more in tune you are with your culture — no matter what culture it is — it connects you to something bigger,” Lamoreau says. “And that’s really what we look at in recovery, when we talk about spiritual connection. It’s something bigger than you.”
KFF health news is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism on health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF.
