From the 1918 Spanish
flu to Covid-19, broken treaties have been the foundation of health
crises among Native people.
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Mark Ralston - AFP/Getty
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In 1868, four years after the Navajo Nation was forcibly
removed from its homelands in what is known as the Long Walk,
the nation signed a treaty with the United States. In exchange for
Diné citizens agreeing to make the reservation herein
described their permanent home and allow their children to
be assimilated through an English education, Congress
and President Andrew Johnson agreed to make annual payments to the
tribe and, through the federal governments trust
responsibilities, provide essential serviceshealth care
chief among them. In the 152 years since, the government has yet
to meet its obligations. Where health care and infrastructure costs
should have been met, the Diné have instead been forced to
largely fend for themselves while America gladly put their ceded
land to use.
This is not unique to the Navajo Nation. There is in fact no way
to understand any tribal nation in its contemporary context without
engaging with this history of displacement and treaty rightstheres
nothing that isnt touched by it. Still, it has been largely
absent from mainstream media coverage of the pandemics devastating
toll across Indian Country, and the Navajo Nation in particular.
Reporters and TV trucks drove through Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico
to explain
to their audience what
was happening in this corner of their nation. Navajo Nation
President Jonathan Nez briefly became a fixture in mainstream media.
The op-ed
section of The New York Times featured
multiple Diné voices. Celebrities like Mark Ruffalo and
Ellen Degeneres used their platforms for public
service announcements. There was even a brief sidebar storyline
in which people heaped praise upon Irish donors, who sent
nearly $1 million to the Navajo Nation as a form of goodwill
for a similar effort undertaken by the Choctaw Nation during the
infamous Irish potato famine.
These narratives all focused on the material conditions that many
Diné people were facing, often zooming in on the painful
stories of lost human lives and heartbroken families as a way to
jar readers awake. An emphasis was placed on those who lacked running
water, lived in multigenerational homes, and had been denied access
to necessary health care. The subtext was clear: How could this
be happening in our country?
What almost every piece failed to do was provide an answer that
went beyond vague allusions to congressional underfunding.
Any talk of treaty rightsand a clear explanation of what breaking
these rights meantremained absent as ever. These publications
reported that some communities in Navajo Nation and elsewhere lack
access to broadband and running water. They covered the statistics
about wealth disparities. But these conditions are often treated
as predetermined and permanent, as if they came from nowhere, when
they are the active legacy of a colonizing nation forgoing the legal
agreements it signed with a tribal government.
This is how the cycle of Native invisibility works. The United
States signed treaties with hundreds of tribal nations, offering
specific resources and services for the land. America has failed
repeatedly to abide by its own laws, and once again, tribal nations
are pointing this out. But these treaties remain an afterthought
to too many in Congress and in the mainstream media, and consequently
the American public, because acknowledging the treaties means acknowledging
that they are the foundation of cyclical crises in Indian Country.
The pandemic is just the latest example of this cycle playing out
in real time.
The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic wreaked havoc in Indian Country,
killing an estimated
24 percent of the Diné population. In South Dakota, the Pine
Ridge Reservation accounted for 13 percent of the states deaths,
despite the Oglala people only making up 5 percent of the population.
Entire Alaska Native villages, like that of Point
Possession, were decimated. On the whole, Native people suffered
a death rate that was reported
to be four times the global average.
This trend extended to more recent tuberculosis outbreaks in the
1980s,
1990s,
and early 2000s, when the infection rate among the general Native
population was over four times that of the rest of America. Starting
in 2007, there was a
reported syphilis outbreak in a southwestern tribe that required
intervention from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
and the Indian Health Service. And over the past half-century, diabetes,
which was previously never reported as a public health issue in
Indian Country, has skyrocketed to become the
fourth leading cause of death for Native peoples, afflicting
Native citizens at almost double the rate among the non-Hispanic
white population.
The coronavirus pandemic is no different. By mid-May, the Navajo
Nation, with 23.04 cases per 1,000 people, surpassed
New York with the highest per capita rate of infections in the
entire nation. By the end of May, a reported
248 people had died from the virus. (The following month, the White
Mountain Apache Tribe passed
the Navajo Nation in per capita infections, with a rate of 64.6
cases per 1,000 people.)
In late May, the Journal of Public Health Management & Practice
published an
article that was produced by four public health experts, including
Dr. Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear, a UCLA sociology professor and citizen
of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe. Reviewing publicly available data
on Native communities in Oklahoma, the article found that lack of
indoor plumbing and running water, combined with language barriers,
were the top indicators as to why Indian Country was being hit so
hard by the coronavirus.
Its a preliminary paper, but we also wanted it to be
maybe made readily available, Rodriguez-Lonebear told me.
She explained that none of the papers findings were particularly
shockingwashing your hands has been centered as an essential
personal hygiene practice, so it tracks that the lack of running
water and indoor plumbing would contribute to higher rates of infection.
Similarly, with much of the public health messaging being distributed
in English, tribal citizens that mainly speak and read their language
were at a disadvantage. Oftentimes, you know your findings
arent super novel, Rodriguez-Lonebear said. But
its important to have them to back up the narrative and the
policy changes.
But crucially, the article did not stop there. It also pointed
to the reason why these conditions existed. Funding investments
in tribal public health and household infrastructure, as delineated
in treaties and other agreements, are necessary to protect American
Indian communities, the authors concluded.
A Washington
Post
piece detailing the centuries-long history of epidemics striking
Indian Country harder than American communities did not mention
the factor of broken treaties or trust responsibilities once, concluding
merely that European colonialism and capitalism continue to
test the health and resilience of native communities. A CNN
article looking specifically at chronic underfunding of health
care facilities also failed to include a corresponding analysis
of the legal agreements that secured health care for tribal citizens.
A splashy feature in The
New York Times made sure to note that several factorsincluding
a high prevalence of diseases like diabetes, scarcity of running
water, and homes with several generations living under the same
roofhave enabled the virus to spread with exceptional speed,
without pointing to the reasons for those factors.
Tribes are in mainstream media more than I have seen in my
life, Rodriguez-Lonebear told me. But there is maybe
a sentence or two, if youre lucky, about how Covid transmission
rates are a symptom of generational health disparities and generations
of invisibility and lack of investment on reservations.
She called this a hugely missed opportunity. Its
like, Oh, gosh, these poor Indians, theyre just dying,
how terrible, Rodriguez-Lonebear continued. Yeah,
it is terrible, but tell me why its terrible. You have to
confront white supremacy, white guilt, and the foundations of this
country having been built on Indigenous erasure in order to understand
why its so terrible.
Tristan Ahtone, editor in chief of The Texas Observer and
the president of the Native American Journalists Association, attributes
this to the fact that mainstream media outlets are not writing for
the Native communities they cover. One of the hallmarks of
mainstream and legacy media outlets is that they want to tell you
about how Covid-19 has impacted the Navajo Nation, but they also
need you to understand what your relationship is with Navajo Nation
and how they fit into your world as a non-Indigenous person,
Ahtone told me. How do these people exist in our world?
The resulting coverage has a very ward-of-the-state sort of
feel, he said.
The crucial context isnt necessarily that Congress
has underfunded, or chronically underfunded, IHS, Ahtone told
me. The crucial context is that tribal nations ceded millions
of acres of land in exchange not only for, usually, a place to live
but also access to things like health care. That crucial context
is what continues to be missing, and that complete misunderstanding
of that nation-to-nation relationship is what drives this us-versus-them
framing.
In March, I had the opportunity to speak
with Representative Deb Haaland just as reports started coming
out of Indian Country that laid bare how destructive this pandemic
could be for Native communities. At the time, Haaland, one of two
Native women in Congress, was working with her fellow legislators
to ensure that programs like the IHS would be adequately funded,
staffed, and equipped to deal with the then-blooming pandemic. But
the initial proposal from the White House made clear just how little
the current administration weighs its treaty obligations: After
Haaland and her cohorts on Capitol Hill, including the National
Congress of American Indians, estimated that tribal nations and
related programs would require $20 billion in relief, the White
House responded with $0.
The callous counteroffer struck a chord with Haaland and others
who had already been trying to rectify underfunding prior to the
pandemic. It spoke to an apathetic attitude toward tribal communities
that long predates the Trump administration, particularly as it
related to the weaponization of disease. It was hard not to
think about the disease that came when the Europeans came to this
continentthe smallpox-covered blankets that they delivered
to tribes to purposefully destroy entire communities, Haaland
told me. The government and other efforts were purposeful
in trying to destroy entire communities.
After negotiations landed on a more reasonable but still lowball
figure of $8 billion, the resulting
fracas over how Cares Act funds would be appropriated and distributed
only added to the notion that the federal government ultimately
views its treaty responsibilities as optional, at best. (Despite
the legislation being passed in March, the Treasury Department did
not begin distributing the funds to tribal nations until
May, leaving tribes in the cold for nearly three months.)
Think about why a lot of tribes are in the predicament theyre
in right now, said Haaland. Its because the U.S.
government hasnt lived up to its trust responsibilities.
This isnt any kind of a secret: In 2003,
and then again in 2018,
the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights issued reports that laid out
in painstaking detail how Congress and the White House continued
to fail Indian Country. Housing, health care, and infrastructure
funding is inadequate; the tribal consultation process, be it on
a pipeline or a border wall, is porous; and attempts at divining
any transparency or clarity that might answer why these failures
remain is muddied at best. (As Andrew Curley, a Diné professor
of geography at the University of Arizona, told me this spring,
these systems, more than just an act of deprivation, are also an
act of theft: They force tribal nations into a kind of hostage scenario,
where extractive industries like coal and resource mining become
the only available economic vehicles for Native nations. It forces
tribal governments seeking sovereignty and statehood to make harmful
short-term
plays for their long-term survival.)
Despite the structural conditions that created particular vulnerabilities
among its citizens, the Navajo Nation has been recovering over the
past two months. As reported by the Navajo
Times, cases have leveled off since the peak in mid-May,
thanks
in large part to the Navajo governments strict curfews
and mask mandates.
But as the U.S. is is well aware, the virus has not disappeared.
State governments recklessly reopening their communities have led
to a spike in cases across the nation, including in
neighboring Arizona. Tribal nations near national parks are
still concerned about vacationing outsiders bringing the virus into
their communities and threatening their elders and at-risk loved
ones. And as everyone tries to get a grip on this virus, treaties
and sovereign land, like that of the Mandan,
Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation or the Mashpee
Wampanoag Tribe, remain under attack by the American government.
There is little use to reporting on rates of infection and death
among Native citizens if the mainstream media fails to contextualize
the systemic roots of the crisis. Why report on chronic underfunding
in the IHS and subsequent poor community health conditions on a
reservation if one is not also willing and able to point out that
the IHS exists because it was a resulting term of the treaties
struck between tribal nations and the U.S.? That a breach of that
agreement is, as the
Supreme Court recently held, a violation of the law? These are
stories about theft and lawlessness that have had an obscene human
toll. And that is the context that the disastrous coronavirus response
deserves to be viewed through. It is nothing new or unexpected.
But it is, all the same, a rejection of the bedrock documents that
the Constitution declares as the supreme law of the land.
The tragedy that has been visited upon the Navajo Nation and other
tribal nations was centuries in the making. The cycle will remain
unbroken until theres an honest accounting of how we got here,
and how weve been here before.
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