Native American Community Clinic supports Indigenous community

Antony Stately is a fourth-generation survivor of boarding schools.

These schools, which were engineered to strip Indigenous children of their culture, created decades of historical trauma that would manifest itself in alcohol and drug usage.

Now executive officer and president of Native American Community Clinic, Stately is trying to address that trauma by providing Indigenous medical treatments and showing patients that they are valued in a way that Western health care often does not. Part of the clinic’s mission is to treat health disparities by offering help accessing food, housing and health insurance to its patients, most of whom come from Minneapolis’s urban Native American community. To that end, the clinic’s latest initiative is a housing complex above the clinic at 1213 East Franklin Av.

When he sees his community suffer, Stately’s empathy is fueled by the pain of his own experience.

Stately grew up in a complex environment.

An enrolled citizen of the Oneida Nation, Stately was raised in south Minneapolis by parents from White Earth and Red Lake. Even early in his adolescence, he was introduced to the generational cycle of alcohol and drugs — something that everyone around him viewed as a part of life.

To restart his life, Stately moved to Los Angeles. There, he started a family and got his PhD in clinical psychology. Despite all he had been through, he returned to Minneapolis to familiarize his Dakota sons with their culture.

His sons, now high school seniors, changed his perception of the world. “They just introduce such amazing capacity for you to imagine what is possible … such a tremendous gift,” he said.

But he discovered that the community he had returned to was suffering more than when he had left “and that was heartbreaking,” he said.

After being hired by a local tribe to run its behavioral health program, Stately realized the people he treated weren’t just patients: They were relatives and people he’d grown up with.

Sending someone away with a box of pills isn’t enough, Stately said. People need a place of safety and security and medical care that looks beyond just the physical body.

In his community, Stately said that the high rates of substance use and alcoholism, which he considers “disorders of despair,” damage relationships.

“When you are sick or unwell from addiction and using substances … your relationships are not good,” he said.

And because strong relationships are a fundamental Indigenous principle, the clinic opened its traditional healing program in 2018. The program teaches people to be good relatives to themselves, others and all living things, Stately said.

Before starting the program, he hired a woman to smudge and bless the place. At the end of the ceremony, a man named Frank came in.

He had been a patient for eight years and dealt with homelessness for around a decade. He asked for some medicine, and the woman held the bowl of smudge to his face.

“He had big tears in his eyes,” Stately said, “He wanted that medicine. And that was a transformative and really big change moment for me, because I realized that Frank is our typical client a lot of the time.”

Additional reporting for this story was done by Anira Mohamud and Amina Said.