Wabanaki Public Health and Wellness
About Wabanaki Public Health and Wellness
Wabanaki Public Health and Wellness runs recovery homes in Bangor, Maine, and in Millinocket, both in Penobscot County. It is the public health organization of the Wabanaki tribes, and its recovery homes are built for Indigenous people from those communities.
About Wabanaki Public Health and Wellness
The organization serves four federally recognized tribes located in five communities:
- the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians
- the Aroostook Band of Micmacs
- the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Indian Township
- the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Pleasant Point
- the Penobscot Nation
Its services are available to community members living on and off reservation, across the whole state of Maine — which matters, because a large share of Wabanaki people live away from tribal land, in Bangor, Portland and the towns in between.
The Wabanaki Recovery Homes
The stated mission of the recovery homes is to provide a safe, substance-free and culturally healing living environment for Indigenous people who are ready to transition away from a life of substance use, allowing them to develop meaningful and independent lives. Three homes carry that work:
Opportunity House in Bangor, which also carries the Wabanaki name Natomuwal; the Wabanaki Women's Home, also in Bangor; and Healing House in Millinocket. Between them they cover men's and women's housing in the Penobscot region, with Bangor as the hub.
Who the Homes Serve
The homes serve Indigenous people from the Wabanaki communities throughout Maine who have a history of problematic drug and alcohol use and who are ready to change it. Because the organization works statewide and off-reservation as well as on, a resident may come from any of the five communities or from a town far from any of them.
Culturally grounded recovery is the organization's central claim, and it is not a decorative one: its wider healing program puts culture, ceremony, language and traditions at the heart of the recovery journey. For Wabanaki residents, that is the difference between a house that tolerates their identity and a house built around it.
Applying and What Is Expected
Admission runs through a written application. Applications are reviewed by an interdisciplinary team, and applicants then interview with the Recovery Home Manager and the House Coordinator.
The homes accept residents who are on medication-assisted treatment, as well as all other prescribed medications used to manage substance use and co-occurring disorders. People on the Maine Sex Offender Registry are not accepted.
Once in, residents are expected to be capable of working, going to school or volunteering at least 20 hours a week within 30 days of arrival. The average length of residency is three to six months, so these are medium-stay homes designed to move people toward independent living rather than to hold them indefinitely.
Certification and Standards
Opportunity House and the Wabanaki Women's Home are both registered under Wabanaki Public Health and Wellness in the MARR directory of certified recovery residences, and both are certified at Level 3. Level 3 is the supervised tier of the national framework used in Maine, above the peer-run levels, and certification is voluntary rather than a license to operate.
Recovery Housing in the Penobscot Region
Bangor is the service center for northern and eastern Maine and the place where hospital care, treatment providers, courts and state offices are concentrated; Millinocket sits north of it, at the edge of the Katahdin region, where services of any kind are sparse. Housing recovery in both places, rather than only in the city, keeps the option open for people whose families and communities are in the north.
Between the two Bangor homes and the Millinocket home, Wabanaki Public Health and Wellness offers something that is genuinely rare in Maine: recovery housing for men and for women, run by an Indigenous organization, reachable by tribal members whether they live on reservation or in a town far from one.
