As COVID fueled the drug crisis, Native Americans hit worst

BEMIDJI, Minn. — The medicine man told her she should soon give her son back to the earth.

Rachel Taylor kissed her fingertips and pressed them to the crow sewn onto a leather bag nestled on the couch in the living room. "Oh, my baby," she whispered, and hugged the buckskin satchel filled with his ashes.

Nearly a year ago, she had opened his bedroom door and screamed so loud she woke the neighbor. Kyle Domrese was face down on his bed, one of more than 100,000 Americans lost in a year to overdoses as the COVID-19 pandemic fueled America's addiction disaster.

When he was 4, the medicine man had given him his Ojibwe name: Aandegoons — "little crow." She traced the outline of the black bird on the sack.

"Love you," Taylor said to the bag, as she does each time she leaves for work in this city surrounded by three Ojibwe reservations in remote northern Minnesota.

As the pandemic ravaged the country, deaths from drug overdoses surged by nearly 30%, climbing to a record high. The drug crisis has also diversified from an overwhelmingly white affliction to killing people of color with staggering speed. The death rate last year was highest among Native Americans, for whom COVID-19 piled yet more despair on communities already confronting generations of trauma, poverty, unemployment and underfunded health systems.

It is no longer an opioid epidemic, but one in which people are dying from deadly cocktails of many drugs. Deaths involving methamphetamine have nearly tripled in recent years, with Native Americans 12 times more likely to die from it.

As Taylor began her shift at the Northwest Indian Community Development Center, a posterboard propped against the wall was pasted with 49 faces — a collage of their dead to drugs.

Taylor's tribe, the White Earth Nation, studied of the lives they've lost to addiction.

"Their death certificates say they died of an overdose, but that's not right," one member of their study group said.

These deaths were a culmination of far more than that: Despite their resilience, Native Americans carry in their blood 500 years worth of pain from being robbed of their land, their language, their culture, their children. In living people's memory, children were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools with the motto, "Kill the Indian, save the man."

"What they died of is a broken heart," the study says.

For years, Taylor tried to break the cycle.

Her grandmother was sent to a Christian boarding school, where she was taught to be so ashamed of her Ojibwe language that she would only speak or sing it after drinking.

Taylor had her daughter when she was 19 and her son a few years later. She lost custody of them for a couple years as she battled her own addiction to opioids and cocaine. She told them she wished she could fix all the dysfunctional things that happened when she was using.

"Then I thought, well, then my mom would have to go back and fix things, and then my grandma would have to go back, it would have to go on like that for generations," she said.

Taylor had lived in more than 50 places before she turned 18 — foster homes, battered women's shelters, on the streets — and faced sexual, physical and mental abuse.

"The things I blame on generational trauma are not feeling good enough, not feeling worthy enough, not feeling loved," she said.

She prayed to her creator to spare her children, and she told her son every day that she loved him.

White Earth Nation too worked hard to save its people from addiction, and many years lost no one to overdoses on the reservation. But then the pandemic arrived and proved too painful for some.

And now in Taylor's shaking hands, she holds her son's picture — another face for the posterboard, lost January 11, 2021.

At first, she put his ashes in an urn, but it was sharp metal. A friend made the buckskin bag that she could hug. It's become the center of her world.

He'd always loved to laugh, so Taylor teases the bag of ashes.

"Keep an eye on the cat," she'll say when she leaves the house. Then she tells the cat to keep an eye on him.

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The wind churned snow across the prairies, so Dr. Carson Gardner, the medical director of White Earth Nation's health department, told the tale of the Windigo as a metaphor for addiction.

This story of an evil spirit in Ojibwe folklore can only be spoken with snow on the ground as a layer of protection from the monster. The Windigo is a cannibal that sings a song, and anyone who hears it must cover their ears and run away, he said. Otherwise, they develop an insatiable hunger.

"You will first eat everything in your lodge, and when that's gone, you'll eat everything in your neighbors' lodges. When that's gone, you will eat your neighbors. You will finish off by eating yourself," said Gardner.

Their reservation spans more than 800,000 rugged acres of prairie and lakes, dotted with small villages, known for glorious summers and long unforgiving winters. But despite the vast terrain, it's sparsely populated, and they live the belief that all should be loved like family.

"Those who listen to the Windigo song aren't bad people," Gardner said. "They just didn't plug their ears and walk away. They didn't know how powerful the song was."

Rachel Taylor's son once wrote her a letter because he thought his addiction was killing him: "I can't control it. I hope you can forgive me. I'm sorry, I love you, I wanted to spend more time with you."

He'd started abusing pills as a teenager when he got a prescription after having surgery for an infected finger. Then, consumed by the madness of addiction, he would smoke anything — methamphetamine, heroin, fentanyl — that might quiet his lifelong anxiety and depression.

But just before the pandemic bore down, his mother felt hopeful.

She and her son quarantined together at her home in Bemidji, a city of 15,000 people. Her son had gone to treatment, sober 168 days. His cheeks were full again, and he asked her to make his favorite peanut butter cookies.

"I'm glad I still have a chance to make my loving mom proud," he wrote in a journal.

But the months dragged on, and he told her it seemed like the pandemic would never end. He couldn't get a job. He was isolated. He said he felt like a bum.

"He just gave up," she said. He started using again, then dealing drugs to support his habit.

All around them, people were dying. On the White Earth reservation, ambulance calls for overdoses tripled, Gardner said. They posted big red signs in gas stations and tribal buildings: "overdose alert,"

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Joe Kleszyk, the commander of the region's drug task force, sounded the alarm, too: "An epidemic within a pandemic," he told the local newspaper in August 2020. The task force covers five counties and two reservations, including White Earth.

The number of overdoses it investigated skyrocketed from 20 in 2019 to 88 last year. Fifteen of those were fatal, triple the year before.

It's getting worse: This year, there's been 148 overdoses, and 24 of those victims died.

In Minnesota, as across the country, drug dealers now cut nearly every drug on the street with fentanyl, a cheap and deadly synthetic opioid so potent the equivalent of a sugar packet can make 40 doses, Kleszyk said. "It's a game of Russian roulette," he said.

At the same time, the pandemic pushed many toward addiction, called a "disease of despair."

Unemployment in Indian County surged to 26%. And with the federal government's disinvestment in Native communities, many were already living on the brink of poverty — sometimes just across the street from predominantly white gated communities and summer vacation resorts.

On top of that, the healing traditions many turn to in troubled times, like sweat lodges and talking circles, were suspended. Theirs is a communal culture, and people were suddenly isolated.

Of the 148 overdoses the task force investigated this year, 124 victims were Native.

"I'm sick of telling people that their kids are dead," Kleszyk said.

When officers on the White Earth reservation arrived on Aug. 5, 2020 to deliver the news to Betty Oppegard, her knees buckled, and she collapsed to the ground. Her daughter, Beth Renee Hill, a 32-year-old mother of three, died of an overdose involving methamphetamine.

Hill's Ojibwe name, Bebaanimadookwe, is the word for how snow sparkles in the sunshine.

"She was like that, she sparkled in people's lives, she was so beautiful," said Oppegard. "She could make a lot happen in a day."

Hill started taking methamphetamine a couple years ago and fell apart fast. She lost custody of her kids and despaired, so she did even more drugs.

Oppegard used to wake up each morning and run through the names of her eight children from oldest to youngest, imagining where they were and what they were doing. She forced herself to stop, because when she got to Hill, if felt too much to bear.

For months, Hill's father just held her picture and cried. Now he's buried next to her. He died in January, and Oppegard blames a broken heart.

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Amid all this death and dying, one of the most urgent questions White Earth and other Native