News & Views of Phillips Since 1976
Sunday January 11th 2026
A Culturally Grounded Approach
By GREGG HARRISON, Vice President of Clinic Administration at NACC
South Minneapolis is facing a persistent crisis: opioid addiction and homelessness often go hand in hand. Many in our community live without housing because of addiction, and this is not new. These challenges stretch back generations, rooted in broken treaties, land theft, boarding schools, and other traumas that stripped Native people of family, culture, and place. The 1950s “relocation” policy, aimed at uprooting Native Americans from reservations and assimilating them into cities, further isolated families, disrupted traditions, and laid the foundation for today’s struggles. You can see the roots of our current crisis in these failed policies.
Since opening our doors in 2003, we at the Native American Community Clinic (NACC) have worked to address these harms, guided by an understanding of history and a belief in culture as medicine. This perspective shapes how we respond to today’s crisis. We began providing medication for opioid use disorder in 2017, knowing that treatment must go beyond prescriptions. Our approach combines clinical tools with spiritual care, access to ceremony, and traditional medicine, because healing must also restore connection, dignity, and culture.
We offer long-acting buprenorphine injections that reduce cravings and prevent withdrawal. These medications can ease people onto buprenorphine without triggering precipitated withdrawal.… Read the rest “A Culturally Grounded Approach”
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Review: Let Me Tell You About Al Flowers
Dwight Hobbes’ Let Me Tell You About Al Flowers (ETO/Even The Odds Press) is an interesting and insightful read. Brother Al has been through some experiences that eventually led up to his transformation to a path of truth and justice. As most transformations do, the pain, the suffering and the witnessing of human tragedy and the injustice brought upon himself, his family and community finally allowed the ancestors’ spirits to burst out of him. Since this awakening Al has been on a mission to rebuild the Black community. Often being a thorn in the sides of Black and White people in the struggle for justice, Brother Flowers can have an intrusive and blusterous way of engaging the status quo. This book is a story of the transformation of a kid from the projects of Chicago to his migration to Minnesota in the 70s to a leading activist for social, economic and political justice in the Black community in Minneapolis.
Hobbes’ (dwighthobbes.weebly.com), author of Something I Said and longtime Twin Cities journalist and essayist, finger prints are throughout this autobiography helping bring out the context, history and cultural nuances surrounding Al’s footsteps throughout his engagements and relationships with the various people, organizations and government entities in his quest for justice.… Read the rest “Review: Let Me Tell You About Al Flowers”