Virus Hits Native Americans Hard

By FRANK LINGO

Native American reservations all over America have been deprived of fast action on COVID-19 assistance, despite serious outbreaks of the virus.

Already overwhelmed by chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease, the reservations’ health facilities are getting little help from the federal government to treat victims of the virus.

The Navajo Nation, spanning 17 million acres, has been the hardest hit with over 2,200 cases and dozens of deaths. Many Navajos live far from the small, poorly equipped clinics on the reservation.

An April 27 article in USA Today said that despite $10 billion being earmarked for tribes, they have to wait for it to funnel through layers of federal agencies.

After the bad publicity and some pressure from a bi-partisan group of senators and representatives, some stumbling blocks in the legislation were corrected and should lead to distribution of the funding, according to the article.

If this sounds like a day late and a dollar short, it’s more like a century late and billions of dollars short.

When white Americans consider Native Americans, which is almost never, they probably think of the casinos, mostly in the West and Midwest. The casinos have provided jobs for some tribes, but most reservations don’t have them or other business and educational opportunities, so the majority of Indians have nearly zero prospects for making a living.

America has a caste system like in India, although here it’s not recognized and accepted as such. Native Americans are at the bottom. How ironic it is that laid-off whites are driving their $40,000 SUVs to get donations at the free food pantry, while many thousands of Indians live their whole lives without electricity or running water. And as bad as blacks and Hispanics have it, life is worse for our aborigines.

Now the Coronavirus outbreak has brought these inequalities into sharp focus.

“We know from past pandemics … that Native peoples have had more severe cases and more deaths, in some cases four to five times more deaths,” said Allison Barlow, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health, according to congressional newspaper The Hill.

Native nations have been required to file reams of complicated paperwork to access the emergency funding, said The Hill, while the states have no such hoops to jump thru.

A group of Native tribes is suing the Treasury Department, as reported May 1 in the New York Times. The stimulus law mandated that $8 billion be provided to them by the end of April, but they had not received any of the money.

Let’s hope their lawsuit is heard by a fair judge instead of one of the many inexperienced, white and ultra-conservative judges Trump has appointed.

The lives of many people depend on a just outcome.

Frank Lingo is an old paleface living on land that belonged to the Kansa (People of the South Wind) Tribe. Email lingofrank@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2020

Populist.com