Clinton Isham, ANR Basis Tribal Relations Guide and Co-Founder, Reclaim Sacred Tobacco Coalition
For generations, Tribal communities have honored tobacco as a sacred drugs utilized in ceremony and prayer. As probably the most essential plant medicines, defending its conventional use stays a central precedence for Reclaim Sacred Tobacco (RST). Our coalition works nationally to differentiate business tobacco from ceremonial tobacco, whereas additionally advancing Tribal-level insurance policies that help the reclamation of ceremonial tobacco. Clinton Isham stands on the forefront of this effort, guided by what he describes as “the love for his neighborhood and his folks,” which continues to encourage and maintain this work.
Isham is a citizen of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, a Tribal Relations Guide with the ANR Basis, and co-founder of the Reclaim Sacred Tobacco (RST) Coalition. His work advances smokefree insurance policies in Tribal lands and casinos whereas centering Native sovereignty and tradition with each step of the method. For greater than a decade, he has been constructing a coalition rooted locally it serves, transferring on the tempo that neighborhood units, and embraced with phrases that the Tribes defines.
“The final word profit,” Isham has stated, “is at all times restoring our medicines, restoring our tobacco, in order that it could actually convey what it was meant to convey, well being and wellness. That’s what our medicines are for.”
Business Tobacco and Indian Nation
For many years, Huge Tobacco ran focused advertising and marketing campaigns in Indian Nation, exploiting the cultural significance of conventional tobacco to normalize business merchandise. The technique was deliberate and the outcomes devastating. Native People undergo among the highest charges of lung illness, coronary heart illness, and most cancers associated to business tobacco of any group in the US.
The merciless irony is that tobacco itself was by no means the enemy. In its conventional kind, it was a present, grown and used sparingly and deliberately, and understood as drugs. Business tobacco, mass-produced, processed with extra chemical substances to make it extra addictive, is one thing else fully. A part of what RST does is assist communities maintain onto that distinction: to call business tobacco as the issue whereas affirming the sacred function of conventional tobacco in Native life.
“We’re specializing in reclaiming medicines, reclaiming tobacco,” Isham has defined. “Our campaigns are form of exterior the field. They don’t match inside common CDC programming or standard programming.”
Constructing ANR’s Work in Indian Nation
Drawing on a background in public coverage and a deep dedication to Native sovereignty, Clinton led a statewide business tobacco prevention and management program for the 11 Tribes in Wisconsin, growing deep experience in how smokefree coverage works and doesn’t work in Tribal contexts. When he started working with ANR Basis as a Tribal Relations Guide, he introduced that information right into a nationwide group and helped form how ANR confirmed up in Indian Nation.
That presence issues as a result of ANR’s mannequin in Tribal communities is intentionally completely different from how nationwide nonprofits usually have interaction with Native communities. Moderately than arriving with ready-made campaigns and coverage templates, ANR supplies technical help, assets, and funding infrastructure that enables Tribes to guide their very own efforts. Clinton is the connection on the heart of that mannequin, the one who reveals up at conferences, facilitates conversations between Tribes which have handed insurance policies and Tribes which can be simply starting, and helps translate between the world of public well being coverage and the particular realities of Tribal governance and sovereignty.
“I’ve 100% help from ANR Basis,” Isham has stated. “I depend on that help, and the success of RST is unquestionably a results of having ANR Basis there as this nationwide nonprofit that has labored with tribes previous to RST.”
Probably the most significant components of that help, he notes, is endurance. “Although there might not be outcomes immediately, they belief that the work is getting completed. The win could look completely different in Tribal communities and it means loads when a non-tribal group, non-tribal funders can belief in us to make these issues occur.”
The Reclaim Sacred Tobacco Coalition
RST was developed in 2022 with the help of the ANR Basis and the Black Hills Middle for American Indian Well being, co-founded by Clinton Isham in direct response to rising want for smokefree coverage improvement in Indian Nation. In only a few years, it has grown from a grassroots effort right into a funded, coalition-driven motion with a nationwide community of greater than 400 companions. Coalition calls hosted on-line each different month draw a mean of 40 individuals and canopy every thing from conventional tobacco cultivation, to smokefree on line casino coverage, to restoring Indigenous names to sacred websites.
Coalition calls have change into areas the place cultural reclamation and public well being coverage are handled as the identical venture, not separate tracks. When Lavita Hill of the Japanese Band of Cherokee Indians joined an RST name in 2024, she spoke about her neighborhood’s profitable marketing campaign to make Harrah’s Cherokee On line casino Resort smokefree and in regards to the restoration of the normal identify Kuwohi to a sacred mountain inside what’s now Nice Smoky Mountain Nationwide Park. Each had been acts of sovereignty. Each belonged in the identical dialog.
“Plenty of instances our campaigns are siloed,” Isham has stated. “It looks as if we’re engaged on this stuff individually as a tribal neighborhood. One thing that Reclaim Sacred Tobacco is doing since our inception, we form of share that accountability. We convey everyone collectively.”
The result’s one thing extra sturdy than any single marketing campaign. “As an alternative of it’s one tribe engaged on this marketing campaign, now it’s like you have got the help from all these different tribes — tribes which have completed the work already, tribes within the course of, tribes which will have failed at passing coverage. We’re all on this collectively.”
Smokefree Tribal Casinos
A major a part of Isham’s work with ANR Basis has targeted on Tribal casinos an area the place the smokefree alternative is giant and the obstacles are actual. Tribal casinos function below Tribal sovereignty, that means that state smokefree legal guidelines don’t apply to them. Each Tribe makes its personal determination a couple of smoking coverage. That’s each a problem and a possibility: a problem as a result of there is no such thing as a single lever to drag, and a possibility as a result of Tribes can act with out ready for state legislatures.
In 2015, fewer than 5 Tribal casinos in the US had been smokefree. Ho-Chunk Gaming Madison turned a turning level when it applied a 100% smokefree coverage that 12 months, weathered a modest short-term income dip, after which surpassed its personal flagship website in Wisconsin Dells as the highest income earner. That story, which Isham has shared on the Indian Gaming Affiliation Tradeshow and Conference and on RST calls alike, has change into a mannequin for make the case to skeptical Tribal management.
The info reinforces it. Analysis persistently reveals that on line casino patrons, even together with people who smoke—desire smokefree playing environments, and that the primary think about a patron’s determination to go to a on line casino will not be the video games, the payouts, or the proximity. It’s whether or not the on line casino is smokefree and the way clear it’s.
At the moment, 169 Tribal gaming services are working smokefree by their very own sovereign coverage. That shift, constructed one Tribal determination at a time, displays years of labor by advocates like Isham, who has appeared at nationwide conferences, partnered with Tribal well being departments, co-produced movies with Tribal neighborhood members, and constructed the belief that makes these conversations potential within the first place.
More healthy Tribes, Safer Areas
As ANR marks 50 years of smokefree advocacy in 2026, Isham sees the work in Indian Nation as related to ANR’s longer arc. “After I consider ANR Basis, I at all times consider the airways that they helped go smokefree years in the past,” he stated. “It was such a giant deal. And thru that work, and thru tons of different initiatives, there’s a lot extra that we will do, there’s a lot extra essential wins like that to be completed. By means of our partnership with Reclaim Sacred Tobacco, we’re going to have much more of these wins, much more of these kinds of successes.”
RST is now planning its first in-person gathering, constructing out a Tribal Advisory Board, and growing assets that Tribes can use to run their very own campaigns. The coalition’s path displays Isham’s foundational perception: that options for Tribal well being can’t be imposed from the surface. They have to rise from inside.
What Clinton Isham and the Reclaim Sacred Tobacco Coalition are doing, in partnership with ANR Basis, is the lengthy work of undoing the harms of economic tobacco, restoring tobacco to its sacred objective, and constructing smokefree environments the place Native folks can stay, work, and breathe, with out business tobacco.
Clinton Isham is a citizen of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, a Tribal Relations Guide with the ANR Basis, and co-founder of the Reclaim Sacred Tobacco Coalition. Be taught extra about ANR Basis’s work in Indian Nation at smokefreegaps.org/sovereign-tribes. His story is a part of our 50 Tales for 50 Years marketing campaign.
Comply with the marketing campaign on Fb and Instagram for story updates all through 2026, and be a part of the dialog utilizing #ANR50.
