‘Walking the Red Road’: Center helps Native American women work toward sobriety with spiritual healing
On any Tuesday night, 13 women fill the main area of South Dakota Urban Indian Health’s downtown community center to see Shaina Yellowback.
Yellowback, 34, is one of two who lead a culturally based recovery group, Women’s Red Road Approach. After losing her grandmother in February, she decided to reconnect with her cultural teachings and traditions.
“I prayed a lot for myself and my family during that time, because it wasn’t just me hurting,” said Yellowback, who admits she has struggled with alcohol addiction. “I decided I needed to do something to pass down what my grandma taught me and to be the woman she knew I was.”
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Yellowback, now sober for a year, helps others in the women’s group “walk the Red Road” alongside her for 10 weeks, teaching them ways to use cultural practices her grandma taught her for healing. The program recently started at the center, which opened in March in downtown Sioux Falls, at 300 North Phillips Avenue.
Yellowback said she hopes the downtown center can be a space for Native Americans who feel shame for not knowing their language and culture.
The "Red Road" is a sacred path known in Native American culture for spiritual healing, emphasizing sobriety from alcohol and drugs and embracing traditional cultural values, said Yellowback, a member of the Hunkpati Oyate.
The program is meant to be a safe, healing space for Native American women to share stories of trauma, work toward sobriety and build resiliency through prayer. Rather than encouraging prayer for others, Yellowback encourages the women to pray for themselves, so they can remain strong in their journeys of healing.
Every woman who comes to group gets smudged down with sage, a traditional ceremony Yellowback’s grandmother taught her. Burning sage is a cultural practice of setting a positive intention or cleansing negative energy, said Yellowback.
“I want them to be able to come here, be themselves and know that they have somebody to talk to and cares for them,” Yellowback said.
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The program centers around discussion on recommitting to traditional cultural values, like the importance of familial relationships and relatives, and ways to work through mental barriers, like shame and denial.
Shawna Augustine, 41, has come to the group since September. Augustine initially came to support a friend and had no expectations coming in.
“We’ve grown to lean on each other,” said Augustine. “With the activities we do, saying things out loud and seeing it written in front of you, it’s easier to put in perspective and to know you’re not alone.”
Augustine, who grew up in Sioux Falls and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, said she’s never had a space like Yellowback’s group growing up.
She said she enjoys the range of women in the group, varying in age from their 20s to elders. And she looks forward to coming every week, she said.
Yellowback and her co-facilitator, Jasmine LeBeau, 24, remind the women every week, “We can’t heal anything, until we heal ourselves.”
“I can relate to a lot of the stories that women come in and tell me,” Yellowback said. “I like hearing about how much strength and faith these women have, just supporting one another and creating that safe space.”
Although Yellowback doesn’t believe she’s finished walking the Red Road herself, she is working toward it with the women in the group.
The group is expected to graduate in mid-November.
This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Sioux Falls Native American center helps women with sobriety
