On a beautiful sunny fall afternoon on the lawn of the Never Alone Recovery Support Services Hub in Pablo, Steven Morigeau was celebrating with family, friends, and well-wishers. Morigeau is the first tribal member on the Flathead Reservation to receive a home ownership grant from the Solidarity Program of the Salish and Kootenai Housing Authority. He welcomed people to visit, learn about NARCSS Recovery Village, and hear about his journey into home ownership as well as six years of sobriety and service in recovery.  

The crowd was large, as they sat in a big circle on the grass.  

“A lot of it’s my family, my blood and my recovery family,” Morigeau said.  

The $15,000 grant will give Morigeau and his family a down payment, pay insurance, and fix any repairs the home may require.  

Morigeau has been sober for six years, and he is the program coordinator at NARSS so he’s very active in helping other people recover. His sobriety began at the Lake County Jail “for the I-don’t-know-how-many-times,’” on a bail-jumping charge with a $100,000 bond.  

“I didn’t know if I’d have a marriage left, and I knew I wasn’t going to get out soon,” Morigeau remembered. 

He sat around jail for weeks.  

“Finally, a gentleman came in with a phone card so I could call my wife,” he said.  

Katreena, his wife, gave it to him straight.  

“If you don’t stop using, the kid and I are leaving,” he remembers she said.  

“We’d been together 16 years at that time, and I didn’t want to lose that,” Morigeau said, “So I had to figure out how to stop using.” 

He put in a lot of “foot work’ while he was still in jail, filling out applications for recovery.  He pushed to go to Recovery 

Centers of Montana in Columbia Falls. He had two weeks before his bed would be open, so he went to Judge Jim Manley’s drug court in Polson, which suggested three times attending peer-led support groups. 

After he’d completed his stay at RCM, Morigeau’s first stop was an AA meeting, a closed AA meeting. New to the recovery/support landscape, he didn’t know that meant they didn’t want any drug talk; it was strictly alcohol addiction. Next, he went to the old Boys and Girls Club building in Ronan.  

“I saw people I had done drugs with, and they had been sober for five or six years,’ he said, and added that if they could do kick addiction, so could he. He’s never left recovery/support meetings, and for years he attended Drug Court on Thursday.  

Morigeau, now the program director at NARSS, said NARSS groups are always busy, from float trips to cooking for Crisis Mobile Response to attending meetings, fishing, movie nights, game nights. They recently attended a Renaissance Fair in Missoula “and now we’re all going to buy outfits for next year.” 

The outings are connections, and they all fit with Morigeau’s advice to an addicted drug user who wants to quit. "Find the connection to recovery. You have got to connect; it’s a lifestyle and not a program. Attend a meeting at least once a week.” 

( Note: This story will continue next week with more information on Solidarity Program of SKHA and more information on how NARSS began.) 

    Steven Morigeau is waiting for one signature from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and then this house will be his. (Berl Tiskus/Leader)