The son of missionaries, he grew up in the Congo and was shot by the same insurgents who killed his father, forcing the rest of his family to flee. He became a doctor and a surgeon, but instead of pursing a lucrative career at a fancy hospital, he went back to Africa and tended to the people he loved for another 15 years before being forced by violence to flee again.
Now, Dr. Ken McMillan is the surgeon in the basement, providing basic medical care, counseling and advice to homeless American Indians in a windowless room equipped with a scale bought at a secondhand store, and a pile of donated bandages and cold remedies.
Sometimes, the small cluttered office goes from a walk-in clinic to a "stagger-in clinic," McMillan said, because some of his patients are still buzzed from the night before. But McMillan said he considers himself fortunate because clients are given a hot shower before they see him.
"My patients are squeaky clean," he said.
Shortly after he returned from what is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, McMillan was hired by Gordon Thayer, working at the time for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to find solutions to homelessness among Indians in the Twin Cities. During the early 1990s, 55 homeless, chronic alcoholic Indians had died on the streets. So the American Indian Development Corporation built a permanent home for that demographic, an apartment building just off Franklin Avenue in south Minneapolis called Anishinabe Wakiagun — The People's Home in Ojibwe.
While the facility discourages drinking and provides residents help, it doesn't require them to be sober in order to keep a warm place to live. The goal is to provide chronic alcoholics with a safe home while minimizing the negative consequences of their behavior and cutting the cost of services.
McMillan's office for his Kola (the Lakota word for "friend") Project is just off a community room with a television and pool table. It doesn't feature the usual charts of the human body, but rather photos of the doctor's family and pictures of wild animals that remind McMillan of his time in Africa.
McMillan's bicycle was jammed into a corner until summer. He once used it to find secluded homeless camps so he could treat patients, but now finds that too many of them are sick enough that he has to transport them to a hospital or to detox in a van.