FISCAL SPONSORSHIP
Keex Kwaan Healing House
A community-driven healing and cultural revitalization center designed to address intergenerational trauma, behavioral health needs, and cultural reconnection for Alaska Native communities. The project integrates traditional practices, land-based healing, and culturally grounded services in a region with limited access to Indigenous-specific care infrastructure.
The Story
Kake is a Tlingit community in Southeast Alaska, held by the Tongass rainforest and the waters of the Inside Passage that have sustained our people for generations. Here, culture is lived through harvesting, processing, sharing food, and caring for one another. Healing in our community has always happened in relationship — with land, with culture, and with each other.
The Cultural Healing House grows from this understanding. It creates a place close to home where people can heal from substance abuse disorder, strengthen cultural connection, restore healthy routines, and receive support within the context of community life.This work builds on what our community has always known: when culture is active and relationships are strong, healing is possible.
What is the Healing House?
_edited.png)
The Healing House restores our people through land-based recovery, cultural teachings, and collective belonging. Located in the former U.S. Forest Service bunkhouse at Portage Bay, the building includes 16 beds, a shared kitchen, and a gathering space within walking distance of shoreline and forest.
.png)
Why it matters?
Across Southeast Alaska and beyond, many of our people must leave their homelands to access behavioral health and addiction services — often traveling far from the lands and waters that have sustained our communities for generations. Yet we know healing does not happen in isolation from place.
For Alaska Native peoples, wellness is deeply connected to land, culture, and relationship. When treatment removes people from these foundations, recovery can be harder to sustain. Punitive and abstinence-only models often miss what our communities have always known: the land itself is a teacher and a source of balance. Keex’ Kwaan Healing House is grounded in land-based healing. We are building a container where individuals reconnect with culture, community, and the living environment that supports regulation, reflection, and renewal.
Why We Built the Healing House
Colonization disrupted Indigenous systems of healing by separating people from land, language, family, and culture. Today, many Alaska Native people seeking behavioral health care are still required to leave their communities, traveling far from the very relationships that sustain them. This displacement often deepens isolation and undermines healing.
The Healing House was created as an act of restoration. Rooted in Khaach.ádi lands and guided by Indigenous values, it restores the ability to heal in place, in relationship, and with dignity. By weaving together land-based cultural practice, community care, and professional support, the Healing House revives Indigenous approaches to wellness that have sustained our people for generations—and carries them forward for those yet to come.
.png)
.png)
.png)
Kake, Clan & Community
The Healing House is located on Khaach.ádi clan lands, the homelands of one of the original and enduring clans of Kake. Long before the arrival of colonial governments, churches, or federal land systems, Khaach.ádi people governed these lands through Tlingit law—an interwoven system of clan responsibility, kinship, and stewardship rooted in place.
For generations, Khaach.ádi lands sustained village life through fishing, hunting, gathering, ceremony, and trade,
while also holding stories, names, and histories passed through clan lines. These lands are not simply geographic territory; they are living archives of relationship—where ancestors are remembered, obligations are upheld, and identity is renewed. Establishing the Healing House here affirms the continuity of Khaach.ádi presence and honors the clan’s responsibility to care for land and people together.
