Jim Wikel, a citizen of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, doesn’t hesitate to point out the tension he navigates around harm reduction in his line of work in peer recovery services. It’s just reality.
Painted Horse Recovery, where he is a regional director, provides culturally specific peer services for urban Native people who use drugs in the Portland area. The harm reduction kits Painted Horse distributes include the typical naloxone, condoms and wound kits – but they also include sage or sweetgrass. They work with a low-barrier housing and inpatient treatment program that doesn’t require abstinence. Wikel understands that is a touchy subject in Indian Country.
“My thinking is, if you’re dead, you have no chance of moving toward recovery,” Wikel said. “Let’s help you stay alive. Then you can move toward what your vision of recovery is.”
It has long been established that connecting with Native cultural practices and ceremonies is an important part of recovery for Tribal and urban Native populations. Cultural practices encourage holistic well-being — interconnecting physical, mental and spiritual health — foster a sense of belonging, and heal historical trauma, which is a root cause of substance use disorder.
Native communities, traditionally, also highly value abstinence, Wikel said. Many Native people abstain from substances altogether, and people in recovery often prefer the abstinence model.
“The views around Indian Country is to be in ceremony with the sweat lodge, or peyote lodge or the long house, is to be abstinent from drugs and alcohol for four days,” he said. “You have to have a clear mind to go into ceremony.”
This is changing, Wikel says, and he is part of that change.
Wikel is in recovery since the 1990s and he followed the abstinence model, which informed his thinking for many years. But he began to question the barriers for people who use drugs to participate in ceremonial rites when he began serving Native recovery populations.
He remembered a time when he participated in a recovery sweat lodge, and an individual who had been using methamphetamines the night before showed up. After discussing it with Wikel, the man running the lodge allowed the individual in, despite knowing he hadn’t abstained for four days prior. Since then, the man came back to the sweat lodge and became involved with the local Wellbriety community. He also reconnected with his Tribal community.
“What if we hadn’t let him in?” Wikel said. “Would he have been able to recover and stay in recovery?”
These experiences have cemented Wikel’s current perspective on the relationship between harm reduction and culture.
“It’s our responsibility to create safe, kind and loving spaces so people can form their own relationship with Creator,” Wikel said. “Indigenous folks struggling with substance use have the best success when they have access to culture and ceremony. That should be the basis of all our services.”
When Wikel thinks about the community he serves at Painted Horse, he is reminded of Native people’s resilience and strength. Wikel knows they can get through the hardship of substance use. Even when the Painted Horse team sees people at their lowest, they have not lost their humanity or who they are.
