![]() ![]() They wrapped ceremonial objects in plastic. When the virus exploded across the Navajo Nation, traditional healers who use prayer, songs and herbs as treatments tried to protect themselves with masks and gloves. On the Navajo Nation, where 565 of the reservation’s 869 deaths are among people 60 and older, the pandemic has devastated the ranks of hataałii, traditional medicine men and women. It has killed members of the American Indian Movement, a group founded in 1968 that became the country’s most radical and prominent civil rights organization for American Indian rights. It killed a former chairman of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation in California who spent decades fighting to preserve Native arts and culture. It took a Tulalip family matriarch in Washington State, then her sister and brother-in-law. The virus claimed fluent Choctaw speakers and dressmakers from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. “We don’t know what happens to them until we see a funeral announcement,” said Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute. They say their deaths are overlooked or miscounted, especially off reservations and in urban areas, where some 70 percent of Indigenous people live.Īdding to the problem, tribal health officials say their sickest members can essentially vanish once they are transferred out of small reservation health systems to larger hospitals with intensive-care units. And there is deep mistrust of the government in a generation that was subjected without consent to medical testing, shipped off to boarding schools and punished for speaking their own language in a decades-long campaign of forced assimilation.Ībout a year into the pandemic, activists say there is still is no reliable death toll of Native elders. Elders who live in remote locations often have no means to get to the clinics and hospitals where vaccinations are administered. In Arizona, the White Mountain Apache sent out thermometers and pulse oximeters and taught young people to monitor their grandparents’ vital signs.Īcross the country, tribes are now putting elders and fluent Indigenous language speakers at the head of the line for vaccinations. In western Montana, volunteers led by a grocery-store worker put together turkey dinners and hygiene packets to deliver to Blackfeet Nation elders. Some now post colored cardboard in their windows: green for “OK,” red for “Help.” Navajo women started a campaign to deliver meals and sanitizer to high-desert trailers and remote homes without running water, where elders have been left stranded by quarantines and lockdowns of community centers. Tribal nations and volunteer groups are now trying to protect their elders as a mission of cultural survival. ![]() “We’ll never be able to get that back,” Mr.
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