“I’ve seen other places, and they just tend to look down on everyone and judge everyone, and there’s no empathy, no support, no care, no real concern,” says Jody, who spoke with Native News Online on the condition that her real name would not be used in order to protect her identity. But it’s also helping the tribe - both combating the crisis of addiction in its community and serving as a vital revenue stream, as well as a model for an innovative business partnership that can be replicated in other parts of Indian Country. The clinic, which opened its doors last year, offered Jody and others in similar circumstances a caring, stigma-free atmosphere and a slew of additional services to get patients back on their feet. And I’m tired of living with all this.”Īt her sister’s behest, she called WeCare Daily Clinics, an off-reservation addiction treatment clinic owned by the Muckleshoot Tribe. “I was feeling suicidal, because I’m tired of the chronic pain. “I didn’t know what I was going to do,” she says. It started progressing more and then, beginning around 2010, I was bedridden for just under three years,” she says.īy September 2019, she was hooked on the narcotics she was on and scared of going through withdrawal if she ran out of her prescriptions. “I was bedridden two or three weeks at a time. Jody moved home with her mom, who took care of her while she endured various ineffective procedures and prescriptions for her worsening pain. But debilitating back pain caused by an injury she sustained as a teen forced her to drop out of school, just a handful of credits shy of her bachelor’s degree. A member of the Muckleshoot Tribe near Seattle, she had gone from living on the streets of Seattle as a teen to nearly finishing a creative writing degree, and had plans to get her master’s degree at New York University. Jody was close to achieving her dream of becoming a writer.

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