The Montana Consortium for Urban Indian Health (MCUIH) has partnered with JG Research & Evaluation (JGRE) to promote wellness in urban Indian communities in Montana with the aid of an Other Transaction Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). NIDA, an institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), launched the Native Collective Research Effort to Enhance Wellness (N CREW) Program in 2024 after holding tribal consultations in 2018 and 2022 to seek input on research needs for addressing chronic pain and opioid use in Native communities in the United States. The N CREW Program supports local community research project aimed at strengths-based, culturally grounded, sustainable, and effective interventions.
In 2023, JGRE began collaborating with MCUIH to improve population health surveillance data among urban Indian populations in Montana with a focus on Native data sovereignty. MCUIH is a non-profit organization providing technical and educational support to the five Urban Indian Organizations (UIOs) and their health care centers across the state in Billings, Butte, Missoula, Helena, and Great Falls. Building upon this early collaborative work, a Data Governance Committee has been developed with representatives from each of these health care centers.
The current collaborative project between JGRE and MCUIH focuses on identifying community needs, strengths, and health disparities to create culturally adapted interventions for chronic pain and substance misuse. JGRE will work with UIOs to better understand the prevalence of opioid use disorder, the prevalence of chronic pain, and the proportion and characteristics of patients receiving existing interventions. JGRE will also conduct interviews with current and former clients and focus groups with staff members to better understand community needs, barriers to service utilization and strengths-based assets in communities. JGRE and MCUIH will also work to understand how current substance misuse and chronic pain may be related to a history of intergenerational trauma and ways that Indigenous Ways of Knowing and traditional cultural practices may be integrated into existing interventions for urban Indigenous communities in Montana.