Llangarwik: A Place of Awakening

Chugachmiut is a consortium of federally recognized tribes located within the Chugach Region of Alaska.  Chugachmiut represents the following tribes for the purposes of this grant application Chenega, Nanwalek, Port Graham, Qutekcak, and Tatitlek.  With this funding, Chugachmiut will:

Chugachmiut seeks to continue providing viable treatment options for addicted tribal members to Tribal Courts within our region and support traditional residential care and continuing care for substance abuse.  This funding ensures accessibility of Native traditional behavioral health care for addictions on a local village level and would support ongoing recovery. Chugachmiut would maintain an Addictions Coordinator to run and organize the village-based camps four times per year, meet with tribal councils within the region to promote the options available to them and do addictions counseling for tribal members in between camps.  The Addictions Coordinator would seek means to provide distance care delivery and would do or arrange with other addictions providers within Chugachmiut to perform follow-up calls and visits with past group and camp participants to ensure the sobriety “sticks.”  The basic services will be:

1.  Camps:  A total of four village-based residential Recovery Camps per year within the Chugach Region.  Two would be conducted within the community of Port Graham at a facility donated for this purpose by the Port Graham Village Council.  Two would be administered in other regional villages and traditional sites, if available or practical.  These camps would utilize the Sugpiaq traditions, bring in Native foods, have campfires and storytelling on the beach in the evenings, bring into camp the skills of participants, and last roughly two weeks each.  For the time that COVID-19 restrictions remain in place, we will utilize other media options and conduct Zoom Pro meetings, but we will continue to conduct “virtual camp” sessions on the same schedule.

2.  Ongoing Groups:  The Addictions Coordinator will ensure that there is ongoing Alcohol and Drug Recovery Groups in between camps.  We will incorporate local traditional practices such as the utilization of elders and storytelling while incorporating modern distance delivery to the villages.  The Evidence-Based Practices that will be used for the in-person and the online groups will be a mix of two EBP’s: Twelve Step Facilitation Therapy and the Matrix Model, both recognized by the National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (NREPP).

Follow-up and research:  These are vital portions of the recovery process, and we will be watching for program success based upon this component.  We will have at least one Addictions staff member assigned to doing continual follow-ups with past and current clients so that we will have the traditional approaches of “always one of the tribe” and “always strengthening our people.”  As people graduate from the program, they will be given calls the first day out and daily for the first three months (90 days) with a tapering back to periodic “check-ins” at a client-counselor negotiated rate to ensure that sobriety efforts are long-lasting.