On August eighth and ninth, the Bristol Bay Area Health Corporation’s opioid overdose prevention program will host Why We Hurt. Community members will gather for activities and exercises that focus on topics like the science of addiction, historic trauma, Yup’ik community structure, and recovery. KDLG’s Christina McDermott sat down with program coordinator, Tiffany Webb, and learned more about the event, and how healing, culture and overdose prevention are related. This is an edited version of that conversation.
Tiffany Webb: This is Tiffany Webb and I'm the Opioid Overdose Prevention Coordinator at the hospital in Dillingham.
Christina McDermott: There's this event, Why We Hurt, [on] August eighth through ninth. Can you talk a little bit about what the event is?
Webb: The focus of our gathering August eighth and ninth is to help people feel a sense of belonging, and to remember that we come from really strong people. Our culture is powerful. That's really the main purpose of the gathering.
And of course, in that, we're hoping to prevent more harm because of drug use. We're trying to reduce the impact on people's lives who are already using opiates or other drugs. And then we're trying to prevent new people from starting to use drugs by forming better relationships with them, with ourselves [and] by forming better relationships with people that provide services. It's really all about improving relationships, and having this feeling of being safe, cared for, loved.
The way that we're going to do that is through different events and exercises [and] different activities. Everybody's going to get together, it's going to be fun, and there's going to be giveaways. And we're going to talk about really heavy stuff but we're also going to laugh and have a good time.
It's also going to be sort of a memorial. We're going to remember people that aren't here anymore. And we're going to talk about all the reasons that people pick up drugs in the first place.
Webb and McDermott discussed an exercise on Yup’ik community structure that focuses on traditional community organization and how it changed after western contact.
McDermott: I can see that there's a youth wellness gathering as well. Is that part of the event?
Webb: We have an adult track, and we have a youth track. The youth track is going to be modeled after what's called Gathering Native Americans curriculum. But anytime you have any kind of gathering where you have a lot of people come together, and you're talking about the different reasons why we hurt, why we carry so much intergenerational pain and loss, you have to be flexible. So, we have an agenda. We're going to follow that agenda. But it may not go exactly the way that we're planning because [if] somebody starts sharing, and then they need a little more time, then we're going to give them that time.
McDermott: So, some flexibility.
Webb: Yeah.
McDermott: The event is called ‘Why We Hurt.’ And it seems like there's an emphasis on healing. You guys have been doing this for a while now. Maybe could speak on the connection between healing and prevention?
Webb: If you're working on healing, it doesn't matter how well you think you're doing or not doing. You're preventing something.
Webb talked about statistics that show prevention measures work. She discussed peer work as a major means for recovery and prevention, according to public health professionals. She spoke about harm reduction – providing people with substance abuse issues with medicine and clean needles – and how it helps them move towards finding help.
We want to reduce the stigma. Stigma is the judgment that people feel when they go on and they ask for help. And stigma is one of the reasons that people would rather die and ask for help. And they do die.
At the heart of this is that anybody…anybody who’s used drugs, or even people that have perpetrated domestic violence, they're still our people. They’re still a part of us.
Webb talked about how before Native people in the region were separated from traditional culture through colonization, addiction, domestic violence and related issues did not occur in everyday life.
We have really serious teachings about not hurting each other, even not carrying resentments. Those stories are taught as a concept, and then they're demonstrated in life. Traditionally, we’ve always shown our kids how to be healthy, and how to live right, how to be a good person.
Webb spoke about linguistic evidence that demonstrates the traditional Yup’ik values of wellness and connection.
So Why We Hurt, reclaiming our ancestral community structure, is about remembering how fabulous we are, remembering how amazing we are. And it's also remembering how connected we've always been. We can get there again. We can support each other in a way that we've never experienced before.
We're going to talk about all the parts of what disconnected us and how we come back together in the ways that we want to come together, like in the ways that we hope for.
We've experienced a tremendous, tremendous amount of loss. You can have a number of the people that have passed away, but I couldn't give you a number of the people impacted that are still alive. It's incomprehensible. So, every loss that we've experienced, has changed everything in our communities. And it has happened over and over and over again, and it looks different ways from the outside. They call it different things. But it's trauma. It all comes back to trauma and the original trauma of being disconnected from who we are, like what our traditional names were, what our languages were, how we used to have relationships with each other. That disconnection is where it starts.
If we want to do anything that's really going to have an impact, we have to go back to that and rebuild.
Webb talked about making a safe environment to share traditional knowledge, after hundreds of years of messages from colonization that devalued people and modern-day messages that do the same.
We can really reclaim our ancestral community structure. We can do that. And I think that our goal in this is sharing information about how beautiful our teachings are and how special we are.
The August eighth - ninth event is free and hosted in the Dillingham High School gym. Native and state wellness service providers, and indigenous direct services advocates will also attend. Webb says they plan to stream the gathering online.
You can reach the Opioid Overdose Prevention staff at 907-842-5266 if you have questions about the event or for overdose emergency resource information. The event is posted www.bbahc.org and also on the Bristol Bay Area Health Corporation Facebook page.
Get in touch with the author at christina@kdlg.org or 907-842-2200.
