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In California, the Yurok Tribe’s justice system is providing a path for healing.
Yurok Tribal Chief Judge Abby Abinanti says they’re also focusing on helping people off the reservation – other tribes and the urban Native population – through their close connection with the social service organization the Friendship House in San Francisco.
“We need to work more with the urban population, because many of our people went to the urban area. And a lot of the relocated people have been in the urban area. And we need to team up. Our like value systems will help them and will help the communities they live in.”
Friendship House founder, the late Helen Waukazoo, was a close friend of Judge Abby.
Peter Bratt, Friendship House Village SF Project Lead, says Judge Abby and Helen were soul sisters.
“And they were always plotting and they always had these incredible dreams and visions. And one of them was to, was to bring inpatient and outpatient recovery services to the remote northern part of the state where the Yurok Nation is. And so that vision is finally coming to fruition and so Friendship House is working with the Yurok to build inpatient services up in Northern California that will serve not just the Yurok, but the eight surrounding tribes, and then in turn a lot of the clients that come to Friendship House are from the Yurok Nation.”
Peter Bratt.
Bratt says when a Native relative goes through recovery, often they leave the program and cannot return back to their tribal community. So, they often stay in San Francisco for longer.
“They live here, they get job training, they get work. And so, we have a lot of Yurok tribal members who are part of our staff and who live in and around the Bay Area. The Yurok are also helping us build housing for tribal members here in the city and county.”
Friendship House services include substance abuse treatment, a youth program, and recovery for women with children and expectant mothers. Those involved with the Indigenous-led organization believe culture is medicine.
“It centers traditional practices, ceremonial practices, as its treatment model. And again, going back to our founder, Helen Waukazoo, she put a stake in the ground and back in the early 80s and started bringing traditional people to work with our clients. And that was a very radical thing to do back then. But that essential cultural aspect of our program, now that has become a standard throughout Indian country.”
Clayton Dumont.
Clayton Dumont is Friendship House Program Director.
“In the last three months, we’ve actually brought in nine different individual traditional practitioners to work with our clients, it’s really important to help build trust with our clients. They’re dealing with intergenerational trauma in order for them to open up and address those issues they need to trust us. We look at the healing process in terms of interconnected between the spiritual, the mental, the physical, and being able to address all those different things that comes out of a culture.”
Bratt says the Friendship House is expanding with a village project, which will also be a cultural and spiritual hub.
Friendship House Sweat Lodge.
“That will offer medical, dental, behavioral health services, we’re going to have our women’s lodge program there where young mothers, young American Indian mothers go through recovery with their small children, youth programs, other services, and a rooftop farm.”
And the village is a vision Judge Abby shares. Construction has already begun on the Village SF project.
This story is a collaboration with First Nations Experience Television with support from the Public Welfare Foundation. Listen to part one. Watch the television story below:
Courtesy U.S. Interior DepartmentThe Office of the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs announced this week the opening of the Division of Indigenous Connectivity and Technology within the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The new division will assist tribes with managing and expanding new technological and wireless services on their lands.
Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland (Ojibwe) says it will modernize the way tribal nations engage in these types of opportunities.
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