Debra Valentino is an enrolled member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, and descendent of the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin who has dedicated her life to those who express an interest in getting a clean and sober lifestyle. Dr. James Flowers, Robin French and Debra Valentino discuss combating the Opioid struggle in Indian Country along with the immediate need to understand what this all entails and what other struggles it brings to our communities.
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“Yukwatsistay^” Our Fire, Our Spirit, Within Each One Of Us With Debra Valentino [Episode 27]
Welcome to the show.
I’m so excited.
I know. Thank you for joining us. Our VIP guest is Debra Valentino, and she is the recovery coach for Yukwatsistay. I’d like to introduce you by reading a little bio about you and then we can get started on some good conversation.
I’m just going to interrupt and say Yukwatsistay means our fire, our spirit within each one of us, correct?
Yes.
That’s beautiful.
Thank you for bringing that up. Deborah Valentino is an enrolled member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and a descendant of the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin. Mother of four daughters, one son, and several children born of her heart. Grandmother of 6, 2 grandsons, and 4 granddaughters. Married for over 44 years to her husband Kermit Valentino. Deborah has 35 years in recovery from alcohol and drugs and has always promoted healing and supporting others to reconnect with their own fire for a clean and balanced life to find the good road to recovery. Thank you for joining us.
Welcome.
We’ve been looking forward to this.
What’s the weather where you are right now, by the way?
I think it’s about twenty below with the wind chill.
I cannot even remember what that was like.
I know. That’s right. Thank you so much for coming to Zoom with us. We’ve been looking forward to this so much. Opioid struggle is a personal passion of mine and my life and it’s been my work now for about 30 years and my area of expertise. As opioid struggle or as opiates really related to people who have long-term chronic pain issues and comorbid addiction as well, which is a little bit different, I think, in your world, but the opioid struggle in Indian country is a topic that needs more attention which is why we’re here. Can you share with the audience a little bit about the story you shared with Robin over the weekend about the young man in your class who lost his struggle with opioids and how that sparked your passion?
Opioid Struggle
My husband and I moved back to the reservation when he retired. That was about four years ago now. My thing was always wanting to get back into the culture. I did a lot of research on my own living in Chicago but I was away from the Oneida reservation. When I came back, I put myself in language class and culture and history. It was every day. It’s a real commitment. There was a young man who was in our class who basically, I didn’t even think he was that old. He just looked young. He was just smiling all the time, just a happy person.
I had no idea that he was struggling with this addiction. Anyway, what happened was I didn’t see him. He didn’t come to class a few times and found out that he got in a little bit of trouble. I basically told one of my fellow students that we all do things and just tell him to come back. Within a week, he OD’d, he overdosed. He died. Unfortunately, the person who found to give him the drugs is also sent away. It’s not a good thing either way. We lose a life, and the person who’s giving them these things also loses their life by going to prison.
That’s what sparked it for me, but it also sparked a huge concern for the community because this was not the first one. Basically, people said enough is enough. Generated several meetings in our community at different times. The one I went to was of course here in Oneida. We were just talking about what can we do. That’s what sparked me to get interested. My husband and I, of course, did a lot of this work in the Chicago area for the Native American community and ran meetings and that’s where we sobered up together, January 5th of 1986.
Story Of Recovery
Congrats. You’re very open about your own struggle and your own recovery. Would you mind sharing with the audience a little bit about your own story and your sobriety?
I guess started at an early age. Not as early as some but 16 drinking and then gattling into different drugs. Basically, it was just not a good thing. There is that addiction and alcoholism in my family. I grew up saying the same thing, like a lot of people, “I’m not going to do that when I get older.” Just didn’t happen. I just started drinking and like I said, it wasn’t good. My life wasn’t manageable, as they say.
Met my husband right after high school. I was 18, he was 21. We proceeded to, of course, party together, and then we started to have children. That’s the whole thing. We often talked throughout those early years of how do we stop this. How do we stop this cycle? As much as we promised, we weren’t going to drink and we weren’t going to drug again or do any of these things, it didn’t work out that way.
If it could happen to you, it could happen to anybody.
I have an older brother who basically was in recovery before us. I think about I’m going to say almost seven years. I worked for him after high school and he had a basement waterproofing business and I worked for him. My husband, actually that’s how I met him. He came and interviewed for a job there. Anyway, long story short, my brother would often say, “Are you guys ready yet? Are you guys ready?” After both our parents died of either alcoholism-related issues and three of them on holidays, my father was killed on Mother’s Day and his father died of alcoholic heart disease on Christmas Eve.
His mother passed away on Halloween. My mother, she committed suicide. For me anyway, there’s speculation about that. Anyway, doesn’t change anything. It was just those types of things that I just kept and life was not manageable at all. I just kept thinking I’d be on the bus in Chicago because at the time we didn’t have a car. I was toting all these kids around with me on a bus but I would be always praying to myself, like how do I get out of this? How do we create a better life for our kids?
When his dad passed away on Christmas Eve, that was 1985. I don’t know exactly how that all worked, but we buried him. My husband said he wasn’t going to drink anymore. He was pretty much the whole funeral and everything because we had one in Chicago and then we had to bring him home to Oneida. The funeral up here. Said we weren’t going to drink anymore. A few years came along and I think the next day we were drinking and something happened.
My brother was a big support and he took us to our first meeting. I actually went to that meeting in support of my husband because I was thinking he was the alcoholic. The worst one. Anyway, that’s how we got started. When I went to that first meeting, I think we were pretty fortunate. It was a meeting in Chicago that was mostly of Native elders. There were a lot of older people in that meeting, and they were Native.
Were laughing and making us feel comfortable. When I walked out of that meeting the first time, I said, “I need to keep coming. It wasn’t for him, it was for me.” For me to get that right away, that was pretty amazing. My husband and I, also knew early on we had to run our own program because we joked about it and laughed about it a lot of times because it was like waking up from drinking and drugging and partying together and looking at each other like, “Who are you?” Couples don’t make it. We were very fortunate to make it.
That’s an amazing story.
That was 44 years. As I said, unfortunately, he passed away last October from COVID.
We are so sorry about that. That amazing 44 years, I hope. It sounds like it was.
Yes, it was. That’s probably what I hold on to.
Menominee Tribe’s Struggle
The resiliency that you have is amazing. Talk to us just a little bit about, not specifically about the Native American community in general, or if you want to, that’d be great, but the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin in substance use disorder, in particular, opiate disorder. How do you see that? Is it a huge problem in your community? Is it something that you see as nationwide?
It’s nationwide. I believe it’s not just native communities, but it is nationwide. It’s worldwide. The thing with our community is that SAMHSA, what did I say? Substance, substance, and health abuse. They basically have had pockets of money for different native tribal nations to help them combat this. The tribal action plan is here. That’s like when we got started again when I told you earlier about the story about how I got involved in all of this. We started to meet with the tribal action plan, behavioral health, the OPD, which is the police department here, and just interested community members and just talking about, what can we do.
The first thing was to create awareness because when I came, as I said, four years ago, I had no idea how prevalent this was on the Oneida Reservation and surrounding areas. The overdoses that were happening, you come from Chicago and you move here and I live pretty much like it’s my backyards, woods, and everything. Chicago, you hear ambulances and everything all the time, but not used to that here. I noticed that there was a lot going by the house off and on. Sometimes 2 times and 3 times a day.
I’m sure it was other issues, but the growing effects of the drug abuse and the alcohol and different things that were happening were contributing to that. We had to create awareness. One of the things that we began to do was when we met as a community, first of all, was to talk about what can we do. One of the things that came up was to have a sacred fire. That sacred fire was to create awareness. We did that in October of 2017, I believe. That fire ran 24/7 for over 100 days. We had very steady fire keepers and the men are usually the firekeepers in that aspect.
I probably cooked breakfast every morning for them. Also attended the fires and we were there just supporting that. We always try to keep 2 to 4 people at the fire at all times. Any time somebody would come in who needed help. It wasn’t just to create awareness, it was also if anybody was looking for help, they could come to that fire, put their tobacco in the fire, say their prayers, and ask for help. I could not even tell you how many people in those hundred days that came through that were looking for help that were looking to support us with food, firewood, in any way that they could.
There were people that came because they now were becoming aware, stop, and ask what were we doing there. I mean, even people from all four directions in the United States. We had people from other Native communities. I wasn’t there at that time, but I think they said a monk came in and even said his prayers. It was just a tremendous amount of support for what we were doing and it got hard sometimes but we kept it going.
I can imagine and that must be part of that avenue of opening up that you talk about a little bit right? It has to be the right avenue to open up to be able to take that step into recovery and that fire provided that avenue but can you expand on that avenue that you were talking to Robin a little bit about? Let me find it real quick.
Just so that I can understand it and the readers can understand it. The fires are to raise awareness, correct? That’s for any awareness, right?
You can use that for anything, any ceremonial.
It means we’ve got a problem here, right?
Yeah. Other nations were doing the same thing. They wanted to create that awareness in their communities. We have a problem. If they came to the fire, we would explain what it was for and different things like that. We actually were only going to do it for 30 days, but we didn’t feel that it created enough awareness. That’s why we kept going because we just had tons of people coming every day just to sit by the fire. There was a couple that would drive by and see us all the time. That couple then decided one morning, let’s stop and see what they’re doing because actually, they were looking for some help. They thought, maybe let’s see what this is about. This opioid issue and everything, touches not just young people. This touches older people, everything all the way.
This opioid issue touches not just young people; this touches everyone.
It sure does.
When they got by the fire, basically, they were coming back all the time because they didn’t feel the need to go get anything because they felt the fire was working for them. There was a lot of different stories like that that we had there.
You got some living, breathing, billboards for it takes a village, right?
Yes, and the people that were in there were people like myself. We’re all in recovery.
All volunteer.
We’ve been volunteering for I’m going to stay going on four years almost just because it’s we understand what it is. We wanted to also create that awareness of how do you look at addiction. It’s not like you can just, because a lot of families don’t know how to deal with it as it touches, it’s not just the addict, it touches the whole family. People are like, “Why cannot you just quit?” It’s not that easy. It’s just like anything else it’s a disease and it’s basically like diabetes. You have to get help for it. You have to change your lifestyle and you have to do all these things.
Addiction touches not just the addict; it touches the whole family.
There’s no shame. Let’s talk about your volunteers for a second. Tell us about your volunteers and what you look for in a volunteer. I know you’re very proud of the volunteers that work with you.
The volunteers that we’ve been working with, my husband was a big part of it, and myself. I have two daughters who were also involved and they’re boyfriends and now husbands because we did have a couple of weddings. At the sober gathering place, it became a place for social functions too. Like we had a couple of weddings. We had just community members. There was myself, Kermit, Francine, Cassandra, Frank, Gina, Dana, Josiah,and Anita. I’m forgetting one name. That’s not good.
That is okay. They’re all important.
They’ve all been there and I used to have a schedule. They all had to give me if they were going out of town, if they were doing this, or whatever. I had to create that schedule every week so that somebody was there. We tried to have, like I said, two people to four people all the time at the fire. When we actually got a space in 2018, we tried to do the same thing because if a man comes in, you gotta have men there. If a woman comes in, you got to have women there. We always try to cover those important things as well.
The Community
Share with the readers the story that you shared with me over the weekend about her little girl who came home when she was young and she told her mom, she told Deborah, “They called me Indian.”
The whole thing with a loss of identity for Native people. I know there are a lot of people who might say, “Just get over it. This happened a long time ago.” Yes, these things happened a long time ago, but like residential schooling, where children were taken away from 6 to 16 for months at a time, and some of them never went home. To go through all, and I’m just mentioning this because this is what has been leading up with our communities of generational trauma. The residential schools, like I said, are the loss of land and it continues with foster care.
Can I ask you a quick question? Are you saying that they take children out of the nation to put them in foster care in the general community?
There’s the Indian child welfare law that is supposed to be followed. That’s another thing I was involved with in Chicago. We actually had the state of Illinois where they had to step up because in Chicago, they were not practicing that. They were not abiding by that. There was no Indian child welfare office. There was nobody they were contacting. When they take a child that’s native, they’re supposed to contact that tribe or that nation and follow those guidelines. We also started that in Chicago. They still have an office there now.
Good.
They would take children and they would be in non-native homes. Sometimes they’d go to another state. Sometimes they’d go to another country and never know who they were. The loss of identity is huge for myself growing up in Chicago. It was just in a melting pot. At the same time, there were Polish and there were Black and there was Hispanic, and Asians. I was the only one most of the time. It was like, “Where do I fit in to all of this?” I grew up with a lot of that. The story with my daughter was the fact that here I am like my husband and I now are sober.
We’re doing what we need to do. My oldest was probably in second grade maybe. The next one started in kindergarten. I think that was the time she came home. She was like, “Mom, they’re calling us Indians.” I’m like, “You are Indian. What am I not doing that you don’t know?” I don’t know. My husband, he pretty much grew up in the native community. I didn’t really find that community until I was eighteen. The American Indian Center in Chicago is one of the oldest Indian centers throughout Indian country. They’re still in existence.
Supporting The Cause
I really cannot even try to think of how long, it might be 60 years, but I’m not sure right now. They did have to move, but where it was, that’s how I got involved and started to take my children there and started to reach out to people. I even sold their own regalia so that they could dance at different pow-wows and special functions and at the Indian Center when we’d have Fundraisers or they have your own events there and just getting to know people. Doing my own research, I would come back. I knew my mother brought us home here once in a while.
I knew of Oneida and the nominee nation and where it was, but I started to do my own research and reach out. I even reached out and we started another organization in Chicago, me and my husband and two other people. I did some classes, just beginning classes with language, just words. I’m not a fluent speaker. I wish I could be. It’s a very hard language. Not as hard as Navajo, but it is hard. I’m still trying as long as I am. I’m still trying to pick it up. That was the thing. When she came home and said that my thing was, okay, I need to change this because this cannot be repeated.
From learning, I went back to school. I went to a native college in Chicago for a while, and I did learn about all of those things, about the losses. All those things that happened to us way back when, but I did not want to stay there. I got angry at first, but I didn’t want to stay there and pass that on to my kids. I wanted them to learn about it, to make them strong enough so that they make better decisions for themselves and look at solutions, not be a victim and move on and they have a good life. I think we did pretty good.
That’s amazing.
What can the audience do to help support your cause? It used to have fundraisers, but because of COVID, you cannot do that now.
We had some help from the Oneida Nation itself with small grants, and then we basically really didn’t want to tie ourselves. We’re a grassroots organization. When like these things I’ve talked about happen to people, trust is a big issue. A lot of people didn’t want to get tied into big grants where they told us what to do. We said, “We’re just going to do what we want to do.” A lot of it was basically local fundraising. I had ties in Chicago like I said, so I had good people that donated and gave to us sent us checks, and things like that. Just fundraisers.
We’d sell like food and we’d have raffles. We had once-a-year events where we thanked the community appreciation day for all the support they gave us. We just continued like that. I spoke here and there at different places and people wanted me to come tell us who we were. They would give us a donation. We worked with various groups. If we participated, sometimes they would be up the money for those who participated. We did a lot of little things like that. When COVID hit, we couldn’t do it anymore. We did have enough money.
The thing is the office, other than paying for the utilities and the nation gave us the office, we didn’t have to pay any rent. It was like this huge garage. It was a good place because it was big because whoever had it before had the garage for the antique cars. They know it was this. We just painted the whole place and made it homey. We wanted to make it relaxing where people could come and just sit and watch TV, have a meal, go to a meeting. Over the years, we added beadwork and art classes and different things for people to come to.
Every other Sunday we had somebody come and speak on their addiction, and share their story. We did a lot of different things. We connected with behavioral health so that if somebody came on a Friday because things aren’t open pass the business day and then the weekend. We weren’t a facility to be able to house people. What we would do is we just didn’t close and we stayed awake. We took turns until we could get that person in on a Monday to see somebody. That’s what the initial thing the community was asking for.
Where can people go to get help, to have a meal, to just sit? We had a pool table. Whatever we thought of, the guys would say, “Let’s jump on. This internet and see what’s out there and what’s free?” We got a free pool table and one of our guys was an artist as far as like woodwork and doing all this stuff. He did artwork on the side of the pool table for our nation and stuff like that. It was a lot of just commitment, personal relationships, and just for what people were committed to, we’re at it a strong passion for what we were doing.
You bet.
We continued our fires there too.
Speaking of fundraising, do that for you as a non-profit, you can walk into any Walmart, you can go to ten different Walmarts and walk in with your 501c3 paperwork and tell them what you’re doing and the general manager of that Walmart has the authority to write $1,100 checks to any 501C3 that he or she wants to. You can do it up to twice a year. They don’t advertise it, they don’t talk about it, but you can go to a general manager at a Walmart and ask for a $1,100 donation for your 501C3. If he likes you or she likes you, which they will, they’ll give you $1,100 on the spot. Just keep that in mind.
Like I said, we just had to pay the utilities and things like that. That’s pretty much what we covered most of the time. We still had enough money to carry us through the whole COVID thing up until I closed the office in December. We closed the office on December 31st. We still have enough to keep the account open and then we were just saying, we’re just going to continue. Once things happen, we’ll just continue to start fundraisers. Our initial goal now is to continue to work with behavioral health. We have another group called Wise Women here who do a lot of things for the homeless and different people.
We’re just going to fundraise. What we’re going to do, because we don’t have a space and don’t have those added things to pay for, we’re just going to decide as a group, who do we want this to go to? Who’s dealing with addiction is like behavioral health, they’re looking to take over a spot to somewhat have what we had. They’re going to have a sober gathering place or someplace for people to connect with and go. Presently, we still do Friday night fires. We continue that. We did stop for a little bit, but because it’s outside and it’s around a fire, we didn’t have a lot of people coming. We were pretty safe masking and then things like that. We continue to do that today.
Success Story
Could you give us a couple or even one success story of someone who’s been touched by your work in the community that has turned out to be a success? I’m sure you have many successes.
The successes can be, because as recovery coaches, because we took recovery coach training, most of us, and one of the things I think that it teaches you is that we don’t tell them what they recover from. If they think that their drinking ain’t that bad, but as long as they stay away from heroin or different things like that, synthetic opioids and whatever, then we just try to get them to where they need to be.
As recovery coaches, we don’t tell them what they recover from. We just try to get them where they need to be and they think about the other later.
If they think about the other later, they think about that. I feel like we’ve had quite a few successes. One that always comes to mind is a young lady. She pretty much started off coming early on up by the fire that we had for a hundred days. She decided she wanted to go back to school. She went back to school and she decided she was going to go back for nursing. She started taking classes and she was always coming up there and she let us know, “I got to go home this time because I got to work on this.”
She always wanted to be around the fire. One day she came in, and she said, “I’m so nervous. I got to do a presentation in my class.” My husband was sitting there and he said, “Do it.” We’re in this teepee up on a hill around a fire, and she had it in her car. She goes and gets it and she displays it up there and she proceeds to do her presentation. She did it, I think some other people showed up. She did it like 2 or 3 times and she was ready to do it at school.
That’s amazing. That’s fantastic.
There’s just different things like that.
Is there anything else you would like to tell us about the work that you do and that you’d like the readers to know?
Basically, I guess what I would like people to understand, you just threw me with that question.
I know.
From my perspective coming from a native person, there are a lot of things that native people have went through. I think it’s important for you to maybe start doing your own little research and coming up with those things. If you look at all of it, because I was just looking at some of the things throughout my lifetime and everything, and just looking at the different things that happened, like if you would Google massacres, what happened, there’s over 2 to 300.
All these things have led up, that I talked about trauma for many people. We are still in some of that. The Indian child welfare stuff is still happening. To really just take some time, and do a little research. I love when shows actually do and listen to what we have to say. I wish talk show hosts would do that a little bit more. Not just with the bad stuff, with the good stuff.
Our new president mentioned the Indian community in his inauguration.
At the inauguration, I forgot who the gentleman who was speaking. It wasn’t the president, but it was somebody else. He actually said, native people.
He did, yeah, native people. I remember that day. I noticed that day.
I was busy interviewing someone and you got to watch it. I didn’t.
I know. I’m sorry.
It’s all right. You’re the boss.
When you think about First Nations people just do some research or even go to a nation, talk to somebody. We’re not all those stereotypes.
I don’t even know what perspective this is, but I noticed that you don’t refer to yourself as a Native American.
I mean, it depends on who you speak to. It could be Native American. It could be an Indigenous woman. I mean, I’m learning different things all the time about myself. I guess I just look at myself as a proud Native, you say Native American, but I just look at myself as a woman of Haudenosaunee and I just want to be proud of that. I want my girls to understand that they need to be proud of that. As I said, I think my husband and I have done a good job. They’re very strong women. There have been a lot of strong women in my family and regardless of all of the things that we went through. I just want to pass that on and I have to say my grandchildren are doing exceptional.
That’s amazing. Again, you’re an amazing woman.
You are. We have run over time and we can talk for days with you. You’re just really great to talk to and thank you for doing this with us. This is really an important cause.
Thank you for having me.
Question, before we hop off here, how can someone reach you? Do you want to give us an email, a phone number, or an address?
If someone wants to make a donation.
You could probably email us and email it TogetherSober@gmail.com. I cannot give you the number because we don’t have the number there anymore. I still have the email on my computer.
Together Sober.
It’s basically handled by me.
Thank you.
It’s TogetherSober@gmail.com because I’m the recovery coach, and I was also the treasurer for the group.
Are you on Facebook?
Yes.
You’re pretty active on it too, I noticed.
Yes, we also have you got you say, if you type in you what you say. I could tell you how to spell that if you need it too. It’s Our Fire, Our Spirit Within Each One of Us. If you type that in, you should probably get to our page. I think that’s the other thing that has kept me going through all of this too. It’s like for a while I was off after my husband, but that’s the important thing. You have to stay connected. You have to keep busy. You have to keep doing things when we go through these types of things. That’s basically what has pulled me through. I’m on there just about every day, putting some comment or some story or some picture or something relating to let’s stay in recovery.
You’re an inspiration. Thank you.
Thank you so much for what you do every day for so many people. It’s great to meet you and we hope to have another conversation.
That’d be awesome. Dr. Flowers, if they want to reach you, how do they reach you?
Go to our website and it’s JFlowersHealth.com.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Have a great week.
Thank you.
Important Links
- Debra Valentino – Facebook
- Yukwatsistay
- Email – Debra Valentino
