The Penticton Indian Band will be knocking at the doors of the federal government seeking more resources to deal with the opioid crisis, Chief Chad Eneas told reporters Tuesday morning.
Speaking at a news conference outside the band administration office Tuesday morning, chief and council spoke on an announcement last Friday of a desire to become a dry community.
That desire was initially published in the PIB’s 2013 Comprehensive Community Plan, but band officials said a lot of work has been going on behind the scenes to get that project rolling in the small Indigenous community.
Related: Penticton Indian Band declares desire to be drug/alcohol free
“I can’t express enough how much the fentanyl crisis has affected us. Us meaning the people in the province, and here especially in the Okanagan,” Chief Chad Eneas said, calling the Okanagan a “hot spot” for overdoses in the province.
Last year, the region had been among the most severely affected in the province by the overdose crisis. And in the first four months of this year, among the 16 health services delivery areas in B.C., the Okanagan had the sixth highest rate of overdose deaths.
Last week’s announcement from the band followed the death of a young community member, which Eneas said he couldn’t comment on Tuesday out of respect for the grieving family.
At the news conference Tuesday morning, Coun. Suzanne Johnson noted research that has indicated social isolation and a lack of connections is a major factor in many addictions. That tenet has informed much of the harm reduction work being done in Penticton and broadly throughout B.C. and Canada, and Johnson said it “resonated” with the PIB community’s beliefs.
Related: As Penticton Indian Band goes dry, lessons from a northern neighbour
“The issue is that we’re looking for a medicine to relieve our hurt because of lack of connection,” Johnson said. “With the many historical traumas that our community has faced and is continuing to face, Aboriginal, First Nations, Indigenous people, on a day-to-day basis, there’s often a need to look at ways to medicate the hurts.”
Eneas added that the band will be working to address the issue by vitalizing the Syilx culture locally to enhance the connections within the community and not leave band members feeling isolated and with untreated traumas.
“We’re going to find a way to incorporate some of those customary ceremonies, and support the families, not force the families, but find ways to support the families to have ceremony and to have their own sense of spirituality and faith,” Eneas said. “I think that’s a really important fact that in today’s world — they used to say it’s 100 miles an hour, now it’s light speed.”
However, when it comes to adding more addictions and mental health counselling, he said that would have to come from the federal government, which funds First Nations communities.
“I’m just going to say it: the federal government doesn’t provide enough resources for us to adequately address the needs of our community,” he said. “There’s a lot I can say about that, but I won’t because we need to maintain a respectful dialogue with the federal government. We’ll be knocking on their doors real soon for what the community needs.”
Johnson said PIB leadership will be looking for a way to have everyone in the community contributing to the community building “to share in a way that we can, at a very basic human level, share some joy and passion with each other.” But Johnson added the community will be looking to connect with other services from outside of the PIB community.
“There’s the additional supports and services with respect to the lack of detox services — it’s really difficult to support our families when detox beds are very limited and they’re quite a distance away,” Johnson said.
“That’s a struggle within our community is to get people to detox quickly. And the whole chain of service and healing that’s required. So, youth beds for substance use bed. … Those are the kinds of things we’re working with the nation and we’re working with First Nations Health Authority to increase access to those types of services.”
On working with the nation, Eneas said the PIB will be hosting a forum on July 5 with the entire Okanagan Nation Alliance on addressing issues with drugs and addictions. However, details on that conference are currently tight, with Eneas saying more announcements on that are forthcoming.