Hundreds of Years in the Making: Native Americans' Battle Against COVID-19

Sometimes being Native American feels like you are a walking and talking mythical creature. It's as if you're not even a real person because Natives are mostly heard of only in historical contexts as well as only being known by their stereotypes. But those historical contexts have consequences for the present.

Colonization, genocide, assimilation, racism, and disease are all precedents as to why Native Americans are so far behind in being equipped with the proper resources to face COVID-19. Unfortunately, some of these sufferings are still part of their present day experience, creating a perpetuating cycle of inequality Natives struggle to escape.

Vanessa Brierty from the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico has been active during this time by linking resources for the Native communities in need as well as making masks to send them.

Brierty shared that some members of the Navajo Nation have to drive 45 minutes to access water wells that are used to fill large tanks, which are then transported by that family back to their home to use for cooking, bathing, washing hands, etc. And now that there is increased need for cleaning and washing hands, getting water is a more frequent errand that can take a toll on these families physically and financially.

Some families on the reservation also have to make a two to three hour one-way drive to the nearest grocery store. By the time some of them get there, there is an inadequate amount of food and necessities left.

Brierty shared some Native communities don’t have access to the internet, and some are even without electricity in general, but thankfully some Natives have the option to drive to certain areas where free wi-fi has been set up for public use to those who may not otherwise have access. Families are able to use this for their children that are in school, for work, or for their tele-health appointments.

The reason many tribes all over the nation live under these conditions is because they have been set to live on desolate land known as reservations.

Clementine Bordeaux is Sicangu Oglala Lakota, a Native American tribe in South Dakota, as well as a University of California, Los Angeles Doctoral Student and adjunct faculty for the American Indian Studies program at California State University of Northridge. Bordeaux explained that the reason Native Americans are on these reservations in the first place is because of treaties that were signed between Native tribes and the US government from the late 1700's to the early 1900's.

When treaties were initially signed, Native people had already lost many lives because of disease and genocide brought by settlers and colonizers. Natives felt signing the treaties would protect their people and prevent further harm.

Bordeaux said, ”A lot of the treaties will state that you’re giving up this amount of land access to these resources, usually like oil and mineral access through the land, and in return we’re ensuring that the government will provide school and healthcare.”

This sounds like a relatively fair trade except for the fact that what the government is promising is of the lowest standards for those resources, and with sub-par infrastructures. An oversimplified version of this would be paying for car insurance, but when you get in a car accident and completely total your car, you are only given a band-aid and some Elmer’s glue. Also, you’re paying for that car insurance with solid gold bars.

Technically, Natives have access to water, internet, grocery stores, and health care; but the only way that Natives can get to them is very inconvenient to say the least. These living conditions already make everyday life extremely difficult. But under a pandemic, everyday life becomes chaotic and unpredictable.

While everyone must put their trust into the good old U.S. of A. to battle COVID-19, Natives have a long history of difficulty in trusting western medicine. Brierty shared a story of how her grandfather never quite understood what doctors would tell him due to terminology he never grew up with, as well as language barriers.

“There was a point in time where hysterectomies were performed on Native women in Indian hospitals," Bordeaux explained, "I remember my grandpa being scared to go the hospital because 'when you go to the hospital you don’t come home.' So there’s this internalized history that Native people have of the health care systems and the amount of viruses that impacted Native people earlier in the history of this country.”

Bordeaux has family currently living on the Pine Ridge reservation, a branch of the Lakota, where the nearest hospital is 90 miles away. This makes dealing with COVID-19, a deadly virus that requires immediate medical care, that much harder and scarier. These people not only have to make swift decisions on whether or not they should make the trek to the hospital but they also need access to transportation and the ability to pay for gas.

Not only has the federal government underperformed on their end of the treaties, but they have also broken every single one in the lower-48 states. “There are no repercussions when the government breaks the treaties because Native people have been in such a precarious place." Bordeaux explained, "we don’t have the revenue to hire lawyers. Thankfully now we have a lot of Native people going into law.”

When tribes don’t have the revenue to combat the government in court, they are forced into a corner to allow unwanted amendments to treaties that include (but are not limited to) taking away more land due to the discovery of more natural resources or implementing more control over their lifestyles.

Unfortunately, if tribes were to break treaties it would be a similar outcome, for the government would sue them and precede to keep them in court until they are bled dry of what little funds tribes have. This is what leads to Native Americans being forgotten in the background of the injustices of the US government. Or not so much forgotten as being strategically hidden and shoved away.

“Bringing attention to Native people makes people very uncomfortable because they’ve been told their whole life that we deserved to die and the government deserved to take our resources to benefit everybody… Remembering Natives disrupts that American dream that everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they just work hard but in reality the United States didn’t even pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” Bordeaux said.

"We should all be able to have water. We should all be able to have food. We should all be able to have the care that we need to help us out and a lot of us aren’t getting that." said Brierty. "When things like this happen, we are the forgotten people and that’s unfortunate because a lot of people want to be Native. It’s romanticized. Then it’s like, 'okay live like us. Understand the hardships that we face and at that point would you still want to be us?'”

Unfortunately, in the midst of a pandemic, there is zero time to make up for these past traumas and wrongdoings that have taken place for over hundreds of years. It may not even be in our lifetime or while our current government is structured the way it is that we see a sufficient amount of reparations and justice towards Native people. Although no one was equipped to handle COVID-19, the fact that Native Americans got held back at the start of the race is proof that they are the most vulnerable and may struggle the most to battle COVID-19, as well as survive through it.