LUMMI NATION — Sit with the family, give them hugs, tell them they’re loved.
Lummi Nation Chairman Tony Hillaire was moving from home to home on the tribe’s lands one week last month, comforting those who had just lost loved ones to fentanyl overdoses.
“I didn’t even make my rounds to every house, and I got a call from the chief of police, sitting with one of the families,” Hillaire recalled, hands cupping his face as he leaned over the dais in tribal council chambers on Wednesday. The police chief reported yet another overdose.
Lummi Nation has lost dozens of tribal members to fentanyl overdoses this year, Hillaire said. Emotions are still raw after losing five members of the community in just one week in September. With little time to sit with the news, Lummi leaders declared a state of emergency and mobilized efforts to arrest those bringing drugs to the reservation, along the Salish Sea west of Bellingham.
“I’m just sick and tired of watching my aunties bury their children. But it’s not just us,” Hillaire said.
Native communities across the country continue to experience disproportionate increases in overdose deaths despite efforts to prevent and treat drug addiction and overdoses in their communities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that American Indians and Alaska Natives had the highest drug overdose rates in both 2020 and 2021 of any racial or ethnic groups.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., this week called for a congressional hearing to address the disproportionate impacts of the crisis on Indigenous people.
This isn’t the first time Lummi, with a population of about 5,000 people, has grieved like this. About two decades ago, the opioid epidemic launched a previous generation of tribal leaders into action; they found some success in breaking a generational cycle of trauma and addiction within families. But the losses felt today show challenges remain.
The particularly acute effects of the fentanyl crisis in this community illustrate the nationwide struggle to get the deadly drug off the street, reduce the risks to people living in addiction and, ultimately, heal.
“We just want empathy. We want people to understand the true history of this place that we call home,” Hillaire said. “Despite the policies that were put in place, the direct attempts to get rid of us, we’re still here, and that shows our strength and resilience.”
“We’re not asking for people to feel sorry for us,” he said. “We’re asking for people to change their values, change their perceptions, change the way that they view the world and the way they view our home.”
“It takes a generation”
Bella James hit the brakes as her tires crunched onto her family’s gravel driveway, rolling her window down to wave to a baby cousin.
Generations of the James family have lived here, on this plot of land near the bay’s shore, since the signing of the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855. Her dad, Josepheus, grew up with his eight older siblings in a home near the family cemetery.
He raised James just up the road, in a deep-green house that looks out over lush red alders, ferns and berries. When James was around 4 years old, her parents divorced and she moved out with her mom.
As she grew up, she said, she saw things in her life that she shouldn’t have, and saw her parents go through things she shouldn’t have seen. She started acting out as she began to understand the reality. James’ mom moved her into the Lummi Youth Academy where she knew it would be a safe place for her — so she wouldn’t go down a bad path.
“I don’t think I’d be sitting here today if I didn’t have a place to go to like that,” she said. “Both of my parents were lost in their addiction.”
A combination of nonprofits helped fund the planning and construction of the $2.1 million youth academy, a vision of former Lummi Chair Darrell Hillaire, Tony Hillaire’s father. Kids could live at the academy for free, receiving room and board, around-the-clock mentoring and support, academic advising, mental health counseling and cultural and spiritual support.
The academy was born from times like today.
Two decades ago, tribal council members were sitting in a meeting behind the dais.
“We got a phone call and somebody overdosed in the parking lot at the clinic and died,” Darrell Hillaire recalled. “And then a little baby was crawling on the floor and ate OxyContin and died. And then another person died on Cagey Road.”
Of 170 babies born on the reservation in 2003, nearly 30 were believed to have been affected by alcohol or drugs.
“The council said no, you’ve got to do something about this,” Darrell Hillaire said. “There was a pall in the air.”
Tribal council members threw everything they could at the opioid epidemic: detectives, prosecuting attorneys, testing, substance use treatment and wellness programs, and banishing dealers from Lummi.
They revised the tribal code to state that children are the most important resource in the nation; they traveled to Canada to see a source of the drugs; they burned down a drug house to ceremonially cleanse the ground.
They opened up forums for community listening sessions, inviting in tribal members, police, school officials and health care workers. Many suggested supportive housing for the dozens of kids displaced from their families.
Before becoming chair, Darrell Hillaire called elder Danita Washington, a longtime youth outreach coordinator in the community; he wanted to know how many beds a youth shelter would need. She said 100, but he didn’t believe it.
As she drove the reservation, she would count how many homes she knew of with kids who were couchsurfing — about 90.
“We made a lot of mistakes, and insulted a lot of people along the way,” Darrell Hillaire recalled. But after a few years, things were starting to look up, and kids were breaking the cycle within their own families.
“I think at least we had a clue about something to do with opiates,” Washington said in her home on the reservation Wednesday. “But I don’t think we know what to do about fentanyl.”
About a month ago, her brother Daniel Washington called her from jail.
He was remorseful for hurting her over the years. When her brother was using drugs before, Washington said, it was harder to tell whether he was sober. But with fentanyl, he was combative and unrealistic, she said. She had recently kicked him off the family property.
He forcibly spent a few days off of fentanyl in that jail cell, she said. Another relative would soon bail him out.
“We buried him on the day he was supposed to be in court,” she said, less than a week later.
The effort Washington and Darrell Hillaire began takes more than one or two years, Hillaire said. “It takes a generation.”
“While we had a lot of failures,” Hillaire said of efforts to address substance use disorder in the community, “we kept going.”
He pointed to Bella James as an example of where things went right.
“What healing is”
Black lines began pouring onto an iPad screen from Jason LaClair’s stylus as James and twins Free and Raven Borsey spoke. LaClair, a Coast Salish artist and instructor, has claimed four years of sobriety.
“This all is related to one thing,” Free Borsey said of the recent deaths in the community. “It’s colonialism.”
Darrell Hillaire said that on a macro level, the changing ways of life and inability for people to keep their hands busy fishing, learning and restoring Lummi’s legacy, can contribute to an unmoored existence on the reservation.
Traditional types of fishing, like reef netting, or sxwo’le in the Lummi language, fell away after white settlers banned the practices until they nearly died out.
White settlers introduced commercial fishing to the waters, harvesting salmon by the thousands. They diked and drained critical habitat to create farmland, and choked off thousands of miles of fish passage with culverts for logging and travel and dams for electricity, water storage and flood control.
The twins and James’ generation are only really the second generation out of federally mandated boarding schools. Their parents, James said, went through the most, because they were raised by parents severed from their families and culture in the schools.
Everyone in that room, Free Borsey said, is actively breaking those cycles, healing the trauma and restoring community and lives.
“I want my kids to represent who they are and where they come from,” James said. “They deserve to live and thrive in our culture unlike generations before.”
Here, at Darrell Hillaire’s nonprofit, Children of the Setting Sun Productions, Lummi youth are creating Coast Salish murals that adorn walls built atop their ancestors’ village sites.
“I take inspiration from Jason because his art instills confidence in me,” Raven Borsey said. “Imagine what it’s showing all these youth that are being exposed to this and then they see tribal artwork going up at their school, they see tribal artwork going up in the community.”
They’re interviewing traditional knowledge bearers about medicinal plants, following fishermen as they haul in their nets and paddling dugout canoes across the sea to document an annual journey along their ancestral highways.
They’re documenting their culture and sharing it with the broader community. Public schools and universities are incorporating the nonprofit’s work in their curriculum.
“This organization is symbolic of what healing is,” Free Borsey said, “what re-Indigenizing is, but we’re one organization, we can only do so much.”
