Native Americans reflect on deadly toll of opioids

Rachel Taylor's son had his Ojibwe tribe name when he was 4 — Aandegoons, which means "little cow".

In early spring more than a year ago, Taylor opened her son's bedroom door and found him face down on his bed, his body ice cold, one of more than 100,000 Americans lost to drug overdoses in 2021.

When Taylor started working at the Northwest India Community Development Center, there was a posterboard pasted with 49 faces — a collage of their dead to drugs.

Taylor's tribe, the White Earth Nation, in northwestern Minnesota, studied the lives they have lost to addiction. Later, her son's face also showed up on the poster board.

One of the questions White Earth and other Native American communities are facing is how to stop their next generations from starting the drug addiction cycle anew. For Taylor herself, she lost custody of her son and a daughter for a couple of years as she was fighting her own addiction to opioids and cocaine.

Last week, Native American tribes in the US reached settlements over the toll of opioid addiction totaling $590 million with the drug manufacturer Johnson & Johnson and the country's three major opioid distributors, AmerisourceBergen, McKesson and Cardinal Health, according to a court filing. The companies deny any wrongdoing.

Under February's deal, J&J will pay $150 million over two years, and the distribution companies will contribute $440 million over seven years. J&J reported $20.8 billion in net income in 2021.

"The dollars that will flow to tribes under this initial settlement will help fund crucial, on-reservation, culturally appropriate opioid treatment services," Douglas Yankton, chairman of the Spirit Lake Nation in North Dakota, said in a statement.

The plaintiffs in the case are more than 400 tribes representing about 80 percent of Indigenous citizens who say the opioid makers and distributors were responsible for the opioid crisis in their communities, leaving them with increased costs in health care, social services, child care and more.

The drugs, including both prescription drugs such as OxyContin and illicit ones including heroin and illegally made fentanyl, have been linked to more than 500,000 deaths in the US in the past two decades.

Taylor's son, for example, started abusing pills as a teenager because he got a prescription after surgery on an infected finger. Later, he would smoke anything that might quell his anxiety and depression — methamphetamines, heroin and fentanyl, The Associated Press reported.

Native Americans are at least twice as likely as the general US population to become addicted to drugs and alcohol, and three times as likely to die of a drug overdose, according to a study from the Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health.

Data released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in December 2021 found Native Americans had the highest drug-overdose death rate in 2020 at 42.5 deaths per 100,000.

Indian health care has been underfunded for decades. When the American government forced Native Americans off their lands, it signed treaties with tribes promising to provide for their necessities like healthcare. The dead from addiction is proof it has never kept its word, Minnesota Senator Tina Smith told the AP.

Drug-overdose deaths were a culmination of generational trauma among Native Americans, a study said. Much of the misery was passed from generation to generation, as Native Americans lost their ancestral land, their language, their culture, were relocated to reservations and mostly lived in deep poverty, according to the study published in 2021.

One of the major reasons for intergenerational trauma was in a mid-19th century federal program by which the government systematically removed Native American children from their families to attend federally run boarding schools "to assimilate them into mainstream American culture at the expense of their culture, languages, proximity to family, and often their own safety", according to the study.

In the White Earth Nation, Rachel Taylor's grandmother was sent to a boarding school where she was taught to be ashamed of her Ojibwe language. Taylor told the AP that she tried to break the cycle for years, and she said she knew how her son, who had a drug addiction, was living because she had lived it, too.

"There is no amount of money that's going to solve the generational issues that have been created from this," Chairman Kristopher Klabsch Peters of the Squaxin Island Tribe in Washington state told The Washington Post. "Our hope is that we can use these funds to help revitalize our culture and help heal our people."