Voices of Native Harm Reduction

My ancestry comes from colonial Spanish ancestry. Those ancestors unfortunately came here during the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the late 1400’s early 1500’s, in order to obtain land illegally, wealth illegally, at the cost of my Indigenous ancestors. On my mom’s side, my Indigenous ancestors come from the four corners area of Colorado/New Mexico, on my dad’s side my Indigenous ancestors come from Texas, Chihuahua, Mexico areas. In terms of which tribe, unfortunately I do not know. Around that time, my family was swept up into colonization. I’ve shared a sales receipt/baptism record from 1840. That record belonged to the grandfather of my grandfather on my mom’s side. That was the last relative my family had who was actually a part of a tribe. That ancestor was purchased and baptized. He was taken from the culture, from the community, and since that time my family has pretty much solely identified with colonial identity, culture, and spirituality.

Culture-based wellness means to understand oneself, one’s healthy traditions through a lens of their Indigenous culture. There are a lot of healing ways, a lot of traditions centered around balance that is missing in modern colonial culture. In addition to understanding oneself and ones healthy traditions, culture-based wellness also means using that knowledge of healthy culture and self as a way to live in wellness: to have wellness be a lived experience, not just a fractured component of life, but a balanced and integral part of life. What’s important also means taking all steps towards recovery possible. If a person is unable to abstain from addiction, no matter how big or small, taking steps to keep oneself safe and others safe is the structure of wellness.

Coming from Catholicism, I came from a very black-or-white thinking; you’re either a “sinner” or a “saint”. Healing, either through Catholicism or other colonial ways, just didn’t seem to be available. You either had to show up perfect or suffer in silence. The harm reduction approach for me was a way to get a start, to get a footing in my recovery. The addiction that I live with is sex addiction, where unfortunately seeing unhealthy intimate behavior from immediate family, extended family, and community made it the norm. Even as I tried to “improve upon” my unhealthy behavior, I was still unhealthy. “Meeting people where they’re at” taught me that I didn’t have to be perfect, or have all the answers of recovery to start a healing journey. That was one of the biggest barriers. It felt like I didn’t have a footing in healthiness. I had to either hide my addiction in shame, or white-knuckle it, and that didn’t help at all. Focusing on healing rather than abstinence allowed me to have conversations in a healthy way with healthy community, free from shame. I was able to just be present with what was happening with myself, with my addiction, with my challenges, but also with my strengths. I was able to see the harm that my addiction was doing to myself and my community. I was able to not just identify my own characteristics that I wanted to change, but also to normalize talking about it when other people working on themselves were sharing the same difficulties. From those conversations, that understanding, and that desire to change, I was able to begin those healthy changes within myself. I was able to have a goal, have a vision, and with this model I could have the support to learn how to make those changes.

It just so happens, and is a blessing, that the healthy communities I found which were supporting either a non-abstinence based approach or sobriety/recovery, were Indigenous. My condition had me inherently isolated. I didn’t feel like I was healthy enough to be part of any kind of healthy relationships: my friendships suffered, my family relationships suffered, and my intimate relationships suffered. I was isolating, not reaching out to folks, suffering in silence. But as I began to look for help, it was a blessing that I found it in the Indigenous community. I’ve done 12 Steps and things like that, but it was missing that cultural piece; it felt like another form of telling people what to do without facilitating the inner work and inner change that was necessary. It was about reaching out to those elders, learning from their healing knowledge, traditional viewpoints, and traditional ceremonies. Although these traditions were not of my own ancestors – mine being from the Four Corners and Chihuahua, Mexico regions, and these elders being from the Nisenan and Miwok peoples. Back in the day, after colonization began, when my ancestors would be taken from their tribes and placed into households as servants, if someone didn’t have a ceremony or prayer, they learned it from the people who were around them. If one person knew a creation story, they would share it with the people who no longer had that knowledge. If one person had an eagle prayer, they would share that. In a way, it was culturally appropriate for me to be fostered by Indigenous elders when I didn’t have access to my own. I would learn their prayers and ceremonies from the communities who still had that knowledge. Being in an urban environment obscured my ability to find healthy, Indigenous communities, but it shows that culture can grow despite the challenges of the urban setting.

Unfortunately, my family has not utilized these concepts. There’s still a lot of shame and secrecy around addiction. My family doubled-down on it. I wish that they could get some momentum in recovery through healing work, through simple but consistent and poignant steps in their lives. But unfortunately, a lot of people are just hiding their addictions, whether it’s substances or codependence or whatever... a lot of people are not interested in healing.

Whether it was Spanish colonial or United States colonial society, and the Catholic religion that went along with that, I struggled to heal in those spaces, and in some ways I suffered under those systems. Getting involved in cultural, Indigenous communities around me allowed me to find a support network that I didn’t necessarily have. These could be people that I reach out to, or even organizations. While I was getting those teachings from elders, I was blessed to learn about healing ways and practices that guide my walk today. I felt like I was walking aimlessly in that colonial, Catholic society. The healing really did come from my cultural involvement.

In terms of addiction, it’s thrown around that “connection is the medicine for addiction”, and healthy cultural connection is the antidote for colonization. When I started to learn from my elders, I was leaving this black-or-white thinking of “I’m good or bad”. I learned about the medicine wheel teachings, systems of balance, systems where things happen in phases – not the all-or-nothing thinking – especially when it comes to someone’s healing journey. The small steps approach was the start of the healing process for me. As I learned about these traditional healing ways, a non-abstinence approach made sense. I could learn, grow, and heal without having to have everything ready or completed or figured out right away. I could leave the old colonial view of sinner or saint, clean or dirty, addict or sober. It provided me the space to learn about myself.

I grew up in domestic violence. I was witnessing sexual harm of family members and I too was harmed sexually. This completely threw off my understanding of healthy connection to self and to others. Even as I tried to improve upon that, I was still living in unhealthiness. I told my parents about my initial harm, and they got mad at me. As a kid, when I was caught hurting a peer, they got mad at me, and rightfully so… but I didn’t learn anything except shame, fear, anger. At that time, there weren’t any supports in school.But out of nowhere, a peer talking circle popped up called “Rainbows”, and I loved it. Because I had asked my parents for help, and they said no. I asked my parents for support, and they outright told me as a kid, “do it yourself, find help yourself”. I couldn’t get the help I needed when I asked, but that talking circle was great because I didn’t need anything – I didn’t need parent’s permission, they didn’t have to know what I was talking about or worry about them hearing what I discussed. That was one of the first times that I had a shame-free, supportive environment.

A lot of kids who are experiencing domestic violence, they can’t ask their parents for help. Like, “hey dad, I’m witnessing all of your abuse. Can you send me to a counselor to talk about you?” No abuser is gonna agree to that. So having more in-school support, more emotional support. And this is a little controversial, but also having healthy relationships courses for kids. Have them understand what healthy relationships look like, proactively. Have these topics be normal discourse for kids at school. In addition to peer groups, I wish I had access to counselors at school. As a kid, I can’t navigate insurance or anything, so going to school and knowing they’d be there would have been a huge support. Also, growing up I would hear about ceremonies and sweat lodges here in Sacramento, but I just didn’t have access to it. The people I did know who had access to traditional ceremonies or prayer were people who were already living in addiction, or who were incarcerated. In some ways, cultural connection was so hard to find or so diluted unless there was some sort of legal referral or people incarcerated doing sweat inside prison. And there’s more now, but I wish there was more visibility around these cultural ways. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have this supportive community as a kid when I was going through this stuff. And for the clinical support, elders have told me we live in a multi-faceted society. It’s not just all Indigenous or all colonization… if we’re experiencing afflictions in those areas, they do have their healing modalities. The clinical mental health treatment for trauma, things like that, I wish were more accessible and available, even as an adult, too. I learn and I heal in talking circles, but sometimes I wish I had easy access to clinical support to get more understanding of myself. But a lot of times it’s inaccessible, or there’s a lack of available therapists. As an adult, I’m starting to see a lot of these things happen. They’re putting counselors in schools, there’s AA/NA meetings, there’s organizations like Native Dads Network holding events like talking circles. 

The harm reduction approach, for me, is so in alignment with traditional cultural values because it supports the process of healing, the process of going within, connecting with self, connecting with Creator, connecting with community as a means to understand what our addictions are doing to ourselves and others, and to have the support to heal. That was difficult to find in colonial thinking. I couldn’t find a footing in those constructs, it just didn’t connect to me. And at the time I didn’t have the understanding of why they didn’t connect to me. Now that I’m enveloped in a lot of cultural support, it became clear that the colonial ways that I was floundering in and struggling to heal in just wasn’t the right soil for me to grow in. These traditional, healing ways were the correct soil. Even things from Erik Erikson’s Stages of Child Development to the AA structure, those were Indigenous-based; those people learned that from Indigenous communities and then tried to colonize them. For myself, when I took time to learn these cultural ways, it was that authentic soil that allowed my healing to begin and for me to grow. It wasn’t about me being perfect, but about supporting me in the process. In that way, being allowed to take gradual steps was the biggest initial footing I had in my recovery, and it was thanks to these cultural practices and cultural ways.