Finally, Black Lives Matter gains traction.
Videos and stories bringing attention to the large numbers of deaths by police and illness among African Americans has led to this long-delayed confrontation with our prejudiced society. What we see with our own eyes can no longer be ignored, which makes this seem like a historic moment that could bring about real change.
The media have gone some way toward reporting the heavy impact of COVID-19 on the working poor. Solid reporting has brought out the disproportionate number of people of color working as house cleaners, health care aides, and in food processing plants, public transportation and other occupations that put them at greater risk of contagion. Poor neighborhoods, poor water and crowded living conditions have also been exposed as furthering the spread of the coronavirus.
What may not have registered is that the worldwide epidemic has also hit Native Americans particularly hard. With a population of just 173,667, the Navajo Nation had 7,549 confirmed cases and 363 deaths attributed to the virus as of July 1. That is more than 4,447 cases per 100,000 people — a higher per-capita rate than anywhere in the United States.
For comparison, New York is at 2,150 cases per 100,000 people. Put another way, at the Navajo Nation rate, my state of Oregon would have over 184,000 COVID cases and 8,970 deaths, instead of 208 deaths.
Yet the media have devoted little attention to the virus having its way among Native Americans.
The history of disease among tribes is terrible. Epidemic diseases killed more indigenous people in the Americas at the start of European colonialism than all the Indian wars. Measles, smallpox and tuberculosis devastated indigenous peoples, from fishermen-borne diseases brought to tribes along the Atlantic coast in the 16th century to the near-extirpation of the Cayuse in the 1840s. These diseases, unfamiliar to the Native Americans, continued to damage tribes through the 20th century.
Charles Mann argues strongly in “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,” that disease attacks on Native Americans had a genetic component, meaning that indigenous peoples were far more susceptible to viral diseases than white populations. And according to Native American friends, there are strong tribal memories of the devastating 1918 flu. That generational memory has some living in fear today as COVID-19 marches across America.
Historian Alvin Josephy said that when we are not lying about American Indians in our history, we are omitting them. A recent instance of omission: Politico reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has turned down tribal epidemiologists’ requests for data about the virus that it’s making freely available to states.
For Euro-Americans, it’s been a harsh road traveled over and around American Indians. Most of it has had to do with land: They had it and white people wanted it. Disease killed off Squanto’s people, and when the Puritans arrived, they were saved by caches of food remaining in what seemed like an empty landscape. Combat with superior numbers and firepower grabbed more land from Native Americans. When war didn’t work, treaties — and a continued rewriting of or abandoning of them — snatched more land.
After disease and war and treaty-making, there was government policy: the Indian Removal Act of 1830 sent tribes to “unsettled” lands across the Mississippi. The Dawes Allotment Act of 1887 tried to divide remaining Native American lands into parcels for individuals to farm, selling the “surplus” un-allotted lands to settlers. The Termination Act of 1953 tried finally to do away with all treaty and contractual relations and obligations with the federal government — freeing up more land to be purchased by Weyerhaeuser Timber and white farmers and ranchers.
But what can always be said of Native Americans, who remain invisible to many, is that they have defied deliberate attempts to eradicate them. Against all odds, against massive disease outbreaks and repeated injustices, they persevere.
Black lives matter, American Indian lives matter, and COVID-19 is teaching us more about the history of both. Any true telling of today’s pandemic and past ones, of our country’s history and vision of our future, must include the original Native Americans.
Rich Wandschneider is a contributor to Writers on the Range (writersontherange.org), a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively discussion of the West.