September is Recovery Month, a time to talk about recovery and share a message of hope
Content Warning: As the following story contains descriptions of substance use, harms, and hardship, it may be triggering for some readers. Here is a link to our page listing mental health supports.
We are honoured to share the story of Rachel Plamondon-Assu, a member of the We Wai Kai Nation, a First Nations Recovery Wellness Champion and Senior Manager of Peer and Harm Reduction Services at RainCity Housing & Support Society.
In a conversation with Corrina Chase, Manager of Substance Use and Community-Based Initiatives in the FNHA’s Office of the Chief Medical Officer, Rachel reflects on her nine-year journey, the challenges she has overcome, and the healing she has found through culture and community.
Corrina: Can you tell me about your recovery journey and what recovery means to you?
Rachel: My recovery journey started in 2010, but it has never been a straight line. At that time, I was living in survival mode in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. I had spent many years experiencing homelessness, substance use, trauma, and navigating systems. I had been through detox and treatment many times, but in those early years I wasn’t always going because I was ready for recovery. Sometimes treatment was a way out of jail, the hospital, the street, or whatever crisis I was experiencing at the time.
Housing was one of the first things that created an opportunity for something different. RainCity provided me with housing, and looking back, I understand just how foundational that was. When you are trying to survive every day, it is incredibly difficult to think about healing. Housing gave me stability and the space to begin figuring out who I was outside of survival.
One of the biggest influences in my early recovery was my best friend. He had come from many of the same experiences I had and had found recovery. I watched him reconnect with community, attend meetings, and start helping other people. I wanted what he had. Following his example eventually led me to sharing my own lived experience and supporting others, which became the foundation of the work I do today.
Motherhood also changed the direction of my life. Four months into that early recovery journey, I found out I was pregnant with my daughter. Before that, I had spent so much of my life simply surviving. Becoming her mom gave me something to root myself in. I wanted her to experience a different life. She continues to be one of the strongest guiding forces in mine.
My journey has also included relapse. In 2016, after several years of wellness, I returned to substance use. It happened during a time when the toxic drug crisis was taking so many people from our community. I was surrounded by grief and loss, and I found myself back in the Downtown Eastside and struggling again.
What helped bring me back was community. People showed up for me. My recovery community surrounded me until I could begin showing up for myself again. My wellness journey began long before that moment, and it continues to evolve.
Today, recovery means much more to me than whether or not someone uses substances. I don’t believe someone’s wellness or worth should be measured that way.
Harm reduction and recovery are not opposing philosophies. They exist alongside each other and because of each other. Harm reduction keeps people alive, creates connection, and builds trust. Recovery can take many forms. Our responsibility is to meet people where they are and support whatever pathway toward wellness they choose for themselves.
Today my wellness is about connection: connection to culture, family, community, and myself. It is about taking care of my spirit. It is being a mom, sister, auntie, and friend. It is being on the softball field, being connected to my Nation, doing work that has meaning, and learning to give myself the same compassion that I have spent years giving to other people.
I spent almost 18 years surviving in the Downtown Eastside, and I have now spent many years learning how to live differently. My journey hasn’t been perfect, and it hasn’t been linear, but every part of it has brought me to where I am today.
Corrina: Were there particular people, teachings, cultural practices, or experiences that helped support your healing and recovery? What role has your culture, community, family, or connection to identity played in your wellness journey?
Rachel: Culture has been the most significant part of my healing. I began using substances when I was very young, around 12 years old. As I have gotten older and gained more understanding of my own story, I have recognized how deeply disconnected I was from my identity and culture.
I grew up away from my home community — I am a proud member of the We Wai Kai Nation. My dad was Indigenous and my mom is white, and racism was something I experienced and witnessed growing up. For a long time, I didn’t have the language to explain what was missing. I just knew there was a part of myself that I wasn’t connected to.
Coming home to culture changed that. When I am participating in culture, learning, being with my community and connecting with my Nation, I feel a sense of belonging and wholeness that I couldn’t articulate when I was younger. Culture is medicine. I don’t say that lightly. Culture has saved my life.
Grief and loss have also been a significant part of my healing. For several years I have participated in grief and loss retreats through my Nation. I spent so many years carrying grief, particularly from my time in the Downtown Eastside and throughout the toxic drug crisis. I had to learn that I couldn’t keep carrying all of those people and all of those losses inside of me. Culture has helped me learn how to move grief in a good way rather than allowing it to consume me.
My lived experience eventually became part of my purpose. In 2018, I moved into a lived-experience leadership role with RainCity Housing. That gave me the opportunity to take what I had learned through my own experiences and use it to help shape programs, mentor other peers, and create meaningful opportunities for people with lived and living experience.
Peer mentorship has been incredibly important to me because I know firsthand what it means to see somebody who has walked a similar path and think, “Maybe I can do that too.” Someone did that for me. Now I have the privilege and responsibility of doing that for others.
Over the years, I have continued to grow in leadership, helping develop peer programs, mentoring people with lived and living experience and creating pathways to meaningful employment and transferable skills. People who have survived homelessness, substance use, poverty, and systems carry enormous knowledge and expertise.
We shouldn’t just be invited to the table to share our stories. We should be part of designing services, making decisions, and leading the work.
That is what “nothing about us without us” means to me.
I also believe Indigenous people need access to culture without having to reach a certain point in recovery first. Culture should not be something we have to earn through abstinence. People deserve access to Elders, Knowledge Keepers, medicines, ceremony, language, and community wherever they are in their journey.
My daughter, my family, my Nation, my recovery community, the peers I work alongside and the people who have trusted me enough to share their own stories have all shaped who I am today. Healing has taught me that I was never meant to do this alone.
Corrina: What does Recovery Day mean to you?
Rachel: Recovery Day is a celebration of possibility. For me, it is a chance to honour where I came from without being ashamed of it and to celebrate the life I have today. There was a time when I wasn’t really living. I was existing and surviving from one day to the next. Today I have a life filled with family, culture, community, purpose and connection.
Recovery Day also gives us an opportunity to challenge the idea that there is only one acceptable version of recovery. My pathway is my own, and it doesn’t make it better than someone else’s. Some people are finding wellness through harm reduction. Some are reducing their substance use. Some are accessing treatment or medications. Some are reconnecting with culture. Some are simply trying to stay alive today. All of these lives have value.
For me, recovery and harm reduction belong in the same conversation. We don’t have to choose one over the other. We can celebrate recovery while continuing to fight for harm reduction, dignity, autonomy and the right of people who use substances to be safe and supported.
Recovery Day is also about remembering the people who aren’t here to celebrate with us. I have lost many people I love. I carry them with me in this work, but I have learned that honouring them also means allowing myself to experience joy.
So, I celebrate. I celebrate the journey that brought me here. I celebrate motherhood. I celebrate culture. I celebrate the people who helped me when I couldn’t help myself. I celebrate the peers who are becoming leaders. And I celebrate every person who is finding their own way toward wellness.
My recovery isn’t about becoming a different person. It has been about reconnecting with who I was always meant to be.
Corrina: Thank you for sharing your story with us. I believe it will inspire many other First Nations people.
If you or somebody care about needs support with substance use, you do not have to walk this journey alone. Learn more about pathways to healing, including harm reduction and treatment options here.
Read the stories of previous years’ recovery wellness champions:
https://fnha.ca/recovery-wellness-champion-nicolette-moore-shares-her-story-of-recovery/