31 August 2024
Dr. Antony Stately is a fourth-generation survivor of boarding schools.
These American schools were engineered to strip Indigenous children of their culture. They created decades of historical trauma that would manifest itself into alcohol and drug usage.
When Stately sees his community suffer, his empathy is fueled by the pain of his own experience.
An enrolled citizen of Oneida with parents from White Earth and Red Lake, Stately was raised in South Minneapolis. He is now executive officer and president of Native American Community Clinic.
The clinic’s patients come from Minneapolis’s urban Native American community. By providing Indigenous medical treatments, patients are valued in a way that Western health care often overlooks.
A large part of the clinic’s mission is to treat health disparities— something familiar to many Indigenous communities. It does this through food, housing, and health insurance.
Its latest initiative is a housing complex above the clinic, at 1213 East Franklin Ave.
Sending someone away with a box of pills isn’t enough, Stately said. People need a place for safety and security. Stately believes that only assessing a physical person is what holds health care back. His clinic sees patients as more than a body.
After moving back to Minnesota to familiarize his Dakota sons with their culture, it became more clear to him that change was needed for them to grow up differently.
Dr. Antony Stately can still recall whispering to his two sons nightly: “Thank you for saving my life.”
According to a Dakota creation story, Stately said, twins helped create the world. His sons, now high school seniors, changed his perception of his own world.
“They just introduce such amazing capacity for you to imagine what is possible … such a tremendous gift,” he said.
How Stately got here
Stately grew up in a complex environment.
His grandmother was Oneida, but Stately said his parents shaped his perception of himself as an Indigenous man.
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 got his doctorate in clinical psychology.
Despite all he had been through, South Minneapolis would always be a part of Stately. Upon returning with his sons, he found his community suffering more than when he had left. “And that was heartbreaking,” he said.
After being hired by a local tribe to run their behavioral health program, Stately realized the people he treated weren’t just patients. They were relatives, and people he grew up with.
The issue at hand
High rates of substance use and alcoholism in his community had been the buildup of decades’ worth of trauma, Stately said.
Medical papers referred to them as “disorders of despair,” he said.
Besides boarding school and an occasional trip to the reservation, his life in South Minneapolis created a barrier between him and the rest of the world.
Getting out of the city helped him form relationships, which Stately said is a fundamental Indigenous principle.
“When you are sick or unwell from addiction and using substances … your relationships are not good,” he said.
With these values in mind, 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.
About this report
This story was produced as part of ThreeSixty Journalism’s Multimedia Storytelling Institute for high school students in partnership with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota. ThreeSixty is a nonprofit program dedicated to offering technical, ethical and entrepreneurial training for fulfilling careers in storytelling and civic leadership.
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