PLHI Impact Report

PIIKANI LODGE HEALTH INSTITUTE

IMPACT REPORT 2021

FOUNDER'S STATEMENT

Given the hundreds of generations' connection to our homelands, biosystems, people, and the placebased nature of our work, we are establishing Piikani Lodge Health Institute as a permanent physical entity or “anchor organization” within the Blackfeet Nation and inviting long-standing partners to co-create a Nation building, community-led hub of training, research, and programmatic activities devoted to the Blackfeet people and their homelands, yet with access for all Montanans and beyond.

Our mission is centered on restoring the holistic state of health once experienced by America’s Indigenous people and the ecosystems surrounding them, which includes meaningful work that strengthens the sustainability and productivity of people and lands, rebuilding community assets, and restoring mental and physical health.

KIM PAUL, MIISAMI SAPAI YI

AKI, LONG TIME CHARGING WOMAN

Piikani Lodge Health Institute, Executive Director

ORGANIZATIONAL MISSION

Piikani Lodge Health Institute (PLHI) is an Indigenous-founded and led 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization focused on promoting the health and well-being of Blackfeet (properly known as ‘Amskapi Piikani’) people and lands by way of programs and research that are both translational and relevant to people and biosystems across this Nation.

FUNDING SOURCES

FINANCIAL SNAPSHOT EXPENDITURES

Since its inception in 2018, PLHI staff and leadership have grown to 22 committed professionals, 18 of them from the Blackfeet Nation, bringing to PLHI competencies and knowledge in fields highly relevant to the organization and to the Piikani people. Hiring locally brings jobs and capital to the community. PLHI programming is designed to do the same in terms of providing opportunity and reducing economic disparity.

FINANCIAL SNAPSHOT

PROGRAM REVENUE BY YEAR

$1,000,000

$750,000 $500,000 $250,000 $0

FIVE-YEAR GOAL

To grow Piikani Lodge Health Institute (PLHI) into a fully-fledged “anchor organization”, a permanently instituted health and economics systems organization that benefits the Amskapi Piikani community and region through direct basic service provision, innovative health interventions, regenerative Indigenous land management, culturally attuned research and data sovereignty initiatives, communityinformed economic development strategies, and novel data support decision tools.

The creation of a physical site for PLHI research and programs will serve as a center for job creation and career training, local business incubation, and climate adaptive agriculture training site for higher level agricultural jobs and long-term, year-round research and monitoring site for informing local management practices.

WHO WE ARE: ORGANIZATIONAL BACKGROUND

Piikani Lodge is guided by Piikani leadership and the values of the community. Piikani Lodge’s development goals for the community consider cohabitation for multiple species and ‘ini-yimm’ or respect for the natural world. Our team relies upon the process of engagement through ‘li-ta-mii-pa-ta-pi-yoip’ or positive interaction with a foci of wellbeing within an intentional diversity of community members. Our work supports landscapes for ‘tsi-ksi-ka-ta-pi-wa-tsin’ or Blackfeet ways of ‘place knowing’. Our work never fails to consider ‘a’si-ta-pi’ or embedded youth mentorship and community capacity building thereby passing Piikani “ways of being” and stewardship of land and biosystems down to our next generations in the best way we can.

WHAT WE DO: ORGANIZATIONAL PROGRAMS AND SERVICES

PLHI works holistically across both human and ecological domains to promote Indigenous health and well-being by creating models for other Indigenous populations and beyond. PLHI programming is designed to restore distressed Native lands and communities through regenerative practices and principles.

LOCAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

While the Blackfoot Confederacy is a place of natural abundance with pristine watersheds delivering water to agriculturalists throughout the state, possessing an abundance of minerals, oil and gas, over 50,000 head of cattle, over 5,000 head of iinnii, and profound cultural and spiritual wealth, the Piikani people experience high rates of unemployment and poverty. Nearly 75% of Blackfeet Nation residents fall below the poverty line due to lack of infrastructure and investments in jobs and industry.

As an organization with the ability to pursue federal, state, and private funding, PLHI seeks to advance economic development and reduce unemployment and poverty in the Blackfeet Nation indefinitely.

The re-creation of PLHI into a larger physical space will act as an activity hub for job creation and economic and health research programming, advancing the goals of the Blackfeet Nation’s Agriculture Resource Management Plan (ARMP) and the Blackfeet Climate Change Adaptation Plan (BCCAP) of which PLHI was a primary author. PLHI will act as a small business incubator and provide implementation assistance to other community-based organizations as they build the Tribal agriculture economy. To date, 43 jobs (temporary, internships, full-time, and part time) have been created at PLHI alone in only the past four years.

Pursued in partnership with the Blackfeet Community College and Blackfeet Agriculture Resource Management Plan (ARMP), projects such as a multi-species processing facility has the potential to create 80+ jobs and bring in up to $8 million dollars a year in revenue. PLHI is also working towards the creation of a Tribal IT workforce first by building decision support tools to be used for Tribal deliberation and planning.

FRONTLINE RESPONSE AND BASIC SERVICES

Piikani Lodge plays a vital role in improving health outcomes and investing in solutions that go ‘beyond the walls’ to reduce chronic disease and hopelessness while providing opportunity and growth for a region that is currently lacking critical services and infrastructure.

PLHI charged into the midst of an ongoing community crisis as precious elders, adults, and youth lost their lives to COVID, children and families were quarantined in already overcrowded conditions, and social, recreational, and economic opportunities were significantly reduced.

Organizations like PLHI are critically needed “anchor organizations” not only in times of global pandemic, but to strengthen and build America’s rural foundation, its food and income stability. In the first nine months of COVID, PLHI staff:

Traveled well over 27,000 miles to deliver more than 40,000 hot meals prepared by Blackfeet Tribal Eagle Shields Senior Center to elders and partnered with FAST Blackfeet to deliver 13,000 food boxes to families in need. Mapped routes to collect data on vulnerable persons living remotely who were unable to access community resources. Distributed CDC-approved information, personal protective equipment, toys, bikes, games and sweetgrass braids to residents throughout the Blackfeet Nation. Assisted 109 agriculture producers, economic pillars of the community, with applications for emergency grants and loans. The program helped attain 120 grants and loans totaling $1,594,277 for our community members.

The success of this campaign led to PLHI being awarded a cooperative agreement through the USDA Farm Service Agency to lead yet another campaign that would extend outreach and assistance to producers interested in applying for grants and loans.

FRONTLINE RESPONSE AND BASIC SERVICES CONTINUED...

To combat social isolation and the stress from being under the Tribe’s long-term shelter-in-place order, PLHI created Ski Piikani, Ssto Ipapoki Tsiimaan, the Winter Family Wellness Project. This vision continues to provide safe cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, and traditional games experiences towards reconnection with the land in both novel and traditional ways here within Blackfeet homelands for as many of the 17,000 residents of the Blackfeet Nation as possible each winter.

Ski Piikani began with outreach to Tribal members, partnerships with schools, and building outwards to positively impact families and the entire Tribe. With initial polling, more than 150 local residents and families indicated an interest in participating. Balancing this level of interest with safety considerations, staff accommodated 38 community ski days for organized ski outings in groups of less than 25. Over the last year, our numbers increased exponentially.

This community wellness was overlaid upon existing grant funded work focused on food and agriculture systems to restore food sovereignty, mental health and opioid response work throughout Tribal communities in Montana, and conservation efforts to preserve the sacred lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy.

The disruptions brought about by COVID make it evident that if Piikani Lodge is to carry out this programming indefinitely and also be present to care for vulnerable community members in times of emergency, a physical center for activities and operations would be necessary. Investing in organizations like PLHI means that our community will be better prepared to cope and recover from emergencies and will be able to grow and thrive during ‘normal’, non-emergency conditions.

AGRICULTURE AND FOOD SOVEREIGNTY

The Blackfeet Nation located in Northwest Montana is one of the largest intact ecosystems in North America.

PLHI facilitates increased access to affordable, nourishing foods within Blackfeet food delivery systems to promote healthy living. While increasing agriculture production to feed our people, we also seek to preserve the ecological and cultural uniqueness of this region. Relying on ancient regenerative land management principles, Piikani Lodge conducts research and programming within agriculture systems that play a key role in improving the food economy of the Blackfeet Nation and surrounding Rocky Mountain prairie lands.

Piikani Lodge strengthens community economics and health through traditional cultural lifeways reclamation and creating pathways for Piikani people back into Native agriculture and land stewardship. This is being accomplished primarily through initiatives pursued in partnership with the Blackfeet Agriculture Resource Management Plan (ARMP) team, a collective of Native farmers and ranchers, policy makers, agency officials, and academics.

The ARMP is a Tribally-created holistic agriculture plan focused on improving agricultural practices in Blackfeet Territory with an emphasis on economic development, lowering health disparities of Blackfeet people, and making investments in youth. As partners, PLHI and ARMP manage community-led planning and implementation reflecting the real needs and challenges of Piikani who work the land.

AGRICULTURE AND FOOD SOVEREIGNTY CONTINUED...

High priority initiatives include the creation of a multispecies meat processing facility that will provide high-quality proteins to local institutions and create economic opportunity for Tribal ranchers.

Other initiatives include Piikani Lodge’s traditional lodge-style camps involving Tribal Knowledge Carriers in the creation of Blackfeet youth education and leadership training that will help to cultivate the next generation of land stewards (also described under the Piikani Health Program). As of January 2021, 700+ youth and their family members have participated in PLHI’s camps.

PLHI’s recent efforts around regenerative agriculture include the Piikani Regenerative Grazing Initiative and in our climate adaptive agriculture programs where PLHI staff work closely with local ranchers and partners at Blackfeet Community College, The Nature Conservancy, USDA NRCS, Montana State University, the Blackfeet Tribe, and many more.

Our work thus far has actively engaged 20-25 ranchers and specifically assessed approximately 20,000+ acres for transition to Indigenous regenerative grazing practices through rancher outreach programs, soils testing, management planning, and pilot-scale site developments. The learnings from these pilot projects are now forming the basis of a widespread adoption of regenerative grazing practices across the ~1 million+ acres of grasslands and 50,000+ acres of wetlands within the Blackfeet Nation.

Efforts are underway to restore the greater Blackfoot Confederacy wildlife corridor and land usage patterns that existed pre-contact. This effort is taking place through PLHI’s Regenerative Grazing Program in collaboration with the Innii Initiative and Wildlife Conservation Society.

PIIKANI HEALTH AND WELL-BEING

Native people have long known the ways of wholeness and health, much of which is derived from the lands and resources they stewarded since time immemorial. Piikani Lodge's Health programs aim to restore and reclaim ancient ways of holistic health and mental well-being through Indigenous-led research, evidence-based practice, and the development of translational models.

Trained in both Western biomedical research methodologies and Traditional knowledge applications, PLHI staff deliver evidence-based, culturally relevant, trauma-informed interventions. In the process, we are building local research capacity and supporting Indigenous scholarship and professional development.

In an effort to reduce the historic and generational trauma caused by mass assimilation policies resulting in the forced removal of generations of Native children for their entire lives up to and beyond their late teens and early twenties, severing identity and connection to family and land, PLHI undertook a wellness initiative to reclaim Amskapi Piikani identity and relationship to the land in all seasons.

The PLHI team inherently knew that the way to healing, the way to attack some of the highest suicide and preventable death incidence in the nation, was to reclaim connections to life before government imposed residential schools. As a result, our team has been able to combat soaring rates of suicide attempt and completion, epidemic opioid and stimulant misuse and overdose incidence and to move forward into wellness and to reduce the negative, generational affect of destroying familial structures.

PIIKANI HEALTH AND WELL BEING CONTINUED...

This work will require a longitudinal, collaborative effort. A brief testimony from a life saved in only the first traditional wellness camp testifies to the power of this work:

“I was 15 and was really sad about having no hope or future here at home, it was a really hopeless feeling and lasted a long time. I had a plan in place to kill myself. I had given my favorite things away to friends and family. My friends showed my texts to my mom and she brought me to the traditional camp out of town. I got to learn so much about our true history and how strong the people that I come from were and are. I got to learn about our traditional foods and medicines and how we valued and supported each other. I got to learn about our smudges and what they are used for and got my Blackfeet name, a gift I never expected in my whole life. This all happened only over a couple of days but changed my life forever and now I understand who I am and how I fit into this world. I will never ever consider taking my life again. I am valuable to my people, I am precious to Creator, and I am graduating high school in two days!"

PLHI has worked in collaboration with the Blackfeet Tribe and Montana State University (MSU) Extension to extend the reach of these projects focused on reducing substance use and abuse and suicidal ideation/completion in Piikani youth and young adults and has taught opioid education and reduction programming throughout Montana High Schools serving predominantly Native youth or middle and high schools within all Montana Tribal Nations, while their partners (MSU Extension) serve all other rural Montana communities. In addition, PLHI/MSU Extension have provided six large, statewide two-day, opioid technical assistance trainings over the past three years.

These programs help practitioners statewide better understand the situations facing youth and young adults as related to substance misuse and access, and provides a structure to deliver comprehensive traditional and ‘Western’ education, technical assistance, and outreach to reduce opioid and stimulant misuse and improve mental health outcomes.

PIIKANI HEALTH AND WELL BEING CONTINUED...

From January 2021 to June 2021:

PLHI and MSU staff developed and delivered opioid and meth educational modules to 327 people and are now conducting outreach into Tribal schools in every Tribal Nation in the State of Montana.

PLHI and the Tribe offered (29) 45-minute trainings on mental health/suicide for middle school and high school students, serving 850 students within the Blackfeet Nation.

PLHI and MSU staff conduct outreach and education related to opioid use and misuse on a weekly basis, thus far reaching 197 individuals.

During COVID, PLHI staff and the Tribe delivered ‘pop-up camps’ which consisted of 402 cultural camp participant days and 38 participant days for on-the-land wellness.

As part of its efforts to expand care for youth who fall into the deadly grip of addiction, PLHI has been asked by the community to initiate the creation a family-style in and out-residence treatment living center towards providing a safe healing space for vulnerable young people who are increasingly lost to overdose, suicide, and outside predation.

Such a facility does not exist in the immediate region or is not accessible to Tribal members due to cost and/or availability. PLHI plans to work with partners to pursue federal and state funding to create this safe home for families.

RESEARCH AND PLANNING

In partnership with Montana State University and other Institutions of Higher Education, PLHI leadership developed the Indigenous Research Initiative (IRI) that seeks to empower Tribal Institutional Review Boards to better control research agendas and define the ethical framework by which research is conducted on Native lands.

PLHI’s research framework is carried out by localized planning that drives, with a Native voice and will, multiagency, multidisciplinary coordination of large research projects that fulfill Tribal priorities and lead to greater economic independence and ability to conduct research locally. A central feature of this framework is PLHI’s commitment to young Native scholars as they explore meaningful career paths in health, food and agriculture, and related topics.

PLHI sponsors and mentors young researchers as interns within PLHI programming. To date, PLHI hosts on average, 10-16 interns annually, all who have gone on to complete high school, obtain professional positions, and/or enroll in graduate school. In 2021, PLHI and MSU hosted inspiring science camps for 200+ Piikani k-12 students which featured young Piikani leaders with degrees in STEM, sharing their challenges and triumphs along their career paths.

RESEARCH AND PLANNING CONTINUED...

A research and planning solution under development by PLHI and partners is ‘Piikani Wellbeing Information Service Environment’ or Piikani WISE, a cutting edge data decision support software driven by and serving Amskapi Piikani.

In collaboration with leading software developers and data scientists at sciGaia, Piikani WISE will embed traditional knowledge and ways of knowing into a multidimensional well being-driven decision support system. Piikani WISE will capture the relations between environmental health and community wellbeing (real and financial) that can be used to support Tribal council and interagency deliberations.

Native Nations experience high unemployment rates and yet the potential to develop a remote IT workforce is extraordinarily high. While many workers would define social and economic mobility as having the ability to move away from areas of protracted poverty, many Native people prefer to stay in their communities for the sake of building economic opportunities at home. Piikani Lodge and partners are viewing this as an opportunity to train Tribal members who are equipped to participate in the IT workforce and fill large gaps in rural IT.

In the context of Tribal Nations, creating a decision support tool that can be tailored to local systems of governance, values and indicators of wellbeing, offers a translational tool for the 564 Native Nations within the United States, both during COVID-19 response and beyond.

INDIGENOUS EXCHANGE AND LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

PLHI facilitates and provides financial backing for opportunities that connect Indigenous Peoples regionally and globally through transformative, cross-cultural, and mentorship experiences vital to the development of Indigenous leaders.

Past exchange partners include the Sherpa people of the Nepal Himalaya and the Garhwali people of the Indian Himalaya. International forum experiences include participation in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) and its working groups. In 2018, the ARMP and PLHI team participated in an interactive dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the 17th Session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PFII). The PFII is the United Nation's central coordinating body for all matters relating to the concerns and rights of the world's 370 million Indigenous people. The team addressed Indigenous peoples’ collective rights to lands, territories, and natural resources.

PLHI seeks to expand upon this program through the creation of an international Indigenous equine knowledge exchange program (inspired by PLHI’s People of the Horse traditional camps) whereby Tribal youth learn from intact horse cultures around the world and develop their skills and knowledge as trainers, backcountry packers and cultural guides, veterinarians, clinicians, and other equine-related professions. Under the Indigenous Research program, Indigenous equine knowledge will be respectfully curated and protected for the purposes of better understanding the horse-human healing connection and as a means to recover aspects of culture that were lost to colonization and globalization.

THE BLACKFEET LANDS COLLECTIVE (BLC)

Piikani Lodge Health Institute (PLHI) supports several projects specific to conservation on Blackfeet lands. These efforts fall under PLHI's conservation arm, the Blackfeet Lands Collective (BLC), a Native-founded and led group that collaborates with community-based natural resource partners engaging in conversations regarding conservation within Blackfeet traditional homelands.

BLC actions are informed by a Blackfeet Conservation Area Feasibility Study (BCAFS) which is designed to identify the limitations and opportunities regarding conservation and tourism within Blackfeet lands. The BCAFS has also facilitated the collection of key resources needed for community outreach including supporting Indigenous natural resource leadership.

With Tribal Council leadership, the Blackfeet Lands Collective initiated a conservation easement of 70,000 acres along the Rocky Mountain Front and was the architect of a forestry carbon sequestration credit agreement that will bring over $100 million dollars to the Blackfeet Nation over 40 years.

HIGH PRIORITY INITIATIVES

To continue the arduous process of transitioning from “reservation” to “Nation”, we seek to accomplish the following high priority initiatives that will build needed assets within the community:

Priority 1: Build Piikani Lodge Health Institute Regenerative Research and Training Center

The creation of PLHI as a physical space will act as an activity hub for economic, ecological, and health research and programming to advance defined goals of the regional food and agricultural industry.

Priority 2: Build the Blackfeet Multispecies Processing Plant

The development a multi-species processing facility for ownership by Blackfeet Nation Stockgrowers, along with establishing an agricultural cooperative and Confederate-wide beef label are two key steps to strengthen community economics and health.

Priority 3: Restoration of Traditional Round Houses

Round Houses were places where community members would gather to receive and share information, make collective decisions, and strengthen relationships, of which the restoration will reclaim the value of thousands of generations of Blackfeet interdependent, interconnected collectivistic culture and reinforce Piikani political will.

Priority 4: Multi-family Substance Abuse Treatment Housing

Families require safe, non-clinical spaces where true healing can take place through traditional and western methods for substance abuse reduction and return to healthy, whole ways of living.

Priority 5: Piikani WISE Data and Decision Support Solution

Piikani WISE will at once address shortages in rural data management and IT and aid in Tribal organization decision support across agencies including directing investments towards promising ventures.

UPPER FLOOR

-Computer lab job skills training center

-PLHI offices and meeting spaces

-Agriculture resource library and planning spaces for accessing agricultural programming

-Work space to support farmer/ rancher management planning and peer-to-peer learning

-Community kitchen

-Elder knowledge sharing spaces

Piikani Lodge Center Main Building

A Space For Sovereign Community Decision Making

This is what our ~2000 sq. foot PLHI central building could look like. It will serve as an anchor for PLHI programming and the Piikani community. The building will fill vital needs for community event space, basic job skills trainings, community-led agricultural trainings, indigenous-led research, PLHI central offices, and community drop-in for resources in agriculture, heath and well being. While this layout is one viable option for our program needs, once we have aquired a site we will expand our architectural process to design a site and a building most specifically suited to the needs of PLHI and the community we serve.

ENTRY FLOOR

-Open and flexible community gathering and training spaces

-AV technology for presentations

-Activity space for programs in cultural health and well being

-Space for larger equipment training including vet. tech. programs, small on-farm infrastructure training, and other programming

-Year round indoor technical programs and equipment storage