Coronavirus in rural America (Part XCVII): The bleak state of Native populations in the context of the pandemic; bad news on Indigenous People's Day

I've been collecting stories/links for months (since my last post, back in May), about what is happening to Native Americans in the era of coronavirus.  So I'm finally presenting them here for Indigenous People's Day, though they draw attention to an ongoing crisis and are nothing to celebrate (except the one about an uptick in farming on the Navajo Nation).  

I'll start with one of the more devastating headlines, on June 13, 2020, from ProPublica: "A Hospital’s Secret Coronavirus Policy Separated Native American Mothers From Their Newborns"  The story is by Bryant Furlow of New Mexico In Depth, and here's the subtitle:  

Pregnant Native American women were singled out for COVID-19 testing based on their race and ZIP code, clinicians say. While awaiting results, some mothers were separated from their newborns, depriving them of the immediate contact doctors recommend.

More horrible news from relatively early in the pandemic (May 22) is delivered with this headline, "The Feds Gave a Former White House Official $3 Million to Supply Masks to Navajo Hospitals. Some May Not Work."  This story, too, is from a partnership with ProPublica, and the lede follows:  

A former White House aide won a $3 million federal contract to supply respirator masks to Navajo Nation hospitals in New Mexico and Arizona 11 days after he created a company to sell personal protective equipment in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Zach Fuentes, President Donald Trump’s former deputy chief of staff, secured the deal with the Indian Health Service with limited competitive bidding and no prior federal contracting experience.

The IHS told ProPublica it has found that 247,000 of the masks delivered by Fuentes’ company — at a cost of roughly $800,000 — may be unsuitable for medical use. An additional 130,400, worth about $422,000, are not the type specified in the procurement data, the agency said.

On a more positive note (which is a low bar, admittedly), Laurel Morales reported for NPR on July 28, also out of the Navajo Nation, "Navajo Nation Sees Farming Renaissance During Coronavirus Pandemic." Here's the lede: 

Historically Navajos have lived off the land. But decades of assimilation, forced relocation and dependence on federal food distribution programs changed that.

Navajo farmer Tyrone Thompson is on a mission to help people return to their roots. He's even taken to social media to teach traditional farming techniques.

* * *  

The U.S. Department of Agriculture calls the Navajo Nation a food desert. People travel up to 40 miles to get their groceries. But Thompson says they don't have to.

"As we see the shelves emptying of food and toilet paper we kind of reconnect to our roots," Thompson says. "Some of the tools that were given by our elders and our ancestors — our planting stick and our steering sticks — those are our weapons against hunger and poverty and sickness."

Here's a Pulitzer Center story reporting on Choctaw COVID-19 deaths.  The devastating headline is "More Choctaws Have Died of COVID Than Those Who Died of the Disease in Hawaii. Or Alaska. Or Wyoming."  Here's the lede:

The coronavirus pandemic has hit the Mississippi Choctaw Band of Indians harder than any major city in the nation — and 10 times harder than the rest of Mississippi.

Of the 10,000 Choctaws served by the tribe, one in 10 — 1,092 — have tested positive for COVID-19.

“That’s worse than what we’re seeing in New York City or anywhere else in the U.S.,” said the 42-year-old Chief Cyrus Ben, who has battled the disease himself, suffering fever and chills.

By comparison, one in 34 residents in New York City has tested positive.

And it's back to the Navajo Nation for this Sept. 29, 2020 story from the New York Times.  Mark Walker reports:  "Pandemic Highlights Deep-Rooted Problems in Indian Health Service."  The dateline is Window Rock, Arizona, and the lede follows: 

Matalynn Lee Tsosie showed up at the Indian Health Service hospital in Gallup, N.M., one day in April feeling poorly and having trouble breathing. When her coronavirus test came back positive, the hospital gave her a prescription for an inhaler, an oxygen tank and orders to go home and rest.

Three days later Ms. Tsosie, a 40-year-old secretary for the local school system, was back at the hospital, this time in dire condition. But the hospital was ill-equipped to handle severe coronavirus cases. She was transferred to a hospital two hours away in Albuquerque, where she died alone after doctors tried to take her off a ventilator.

“My thought from the beginning was that it was a slow response,” said her sister, Kirsten Tsosie, fighting back tears. “I think a lot of lives could have been saved if we had a quick response to it.”

Long before the coronavirus, the Indian Health Service, the government program that provides health care to the 2.2 million members of the nation’s tribal communities, was plagued by shortages of funding and supplies, a lack of doctors and nurses, too few hospital beds and aging facilities.

Lastly, Kalen Goodluck reports from South Dakota for High Country News under the headline, "Tribes defend themselves against a pandemic and South Dakota’s state government."  Here's the lede:

As COVID-19 numbers soared across the country this spring, tribal nations began closing their reservation boundaries to non-residents. The Cheyenne River Sioux and Oglala Sioux erected checkpoints on roads entering their reservations in order to protect their citizens, even as the state of South Dakota refused to require masks or mandate social distance. By early May, South Dakota Gov. Kirsti Noem, R, explicitly told the tribes to remove their checkpoints or face the consequences.

Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Chairman Harold Frazier declined, saying that doing so would “seriously undermine our ability to protect everyone on the reservation.” But Noem persisted. Throughout the pandemic, the governor has relied on voluntary measures, dismissed epidemiological studies and eschewed lockdowns in favor of business. Now, tribes say Noem has set herself against the safety of people on tribal lands by opposing their COVID-19 checkpoints.

* * *

Since May, Gov. Noem has continued to take a heavy-handed, anti-Indigenous position, threatening to pull essential COVID-19 relief aid and end law enforcement contracts — even asking President Donald Trump for federal intervention to end “these unlawful tribal checkpoints/blockades.”

Earlier posts about the pandemic's impact on indigenous populations are here and here.  

It's just more bad news (and peripheral to the pandemic), but here is a New York Times story by Eric Lipton about Trump's coal policy and the Navajo Nation.