![]() Her 75-year-old sister-in-law, Reva, who recently had open-heart surgery, also lives with several grandchildren in an isolated corner of the reservation. This winter, Standing Rock’s families are waging a lonelier battle as the virus rages through crowded multigenerational homes where elders raise children and pass along their language - a crucial role that has made them incredibly vulnerable.ĭiane Gates, 75, one of Standing Rock’s first elders to die of the virus, lived with multiple family members, relatives said. In 2016, the tribe’s fight to block an oil pipeline propelled Standing Rock to international fame, drawing thousands of activists to protest camps that sprawled along the Missouri River. Standing Rock has recorded 24 deaths during the pandemic. ![]() “It’s just lost.”Ĭemeteries are filling up on the rolling plains of the Standing Rock Sioux in western North Dakota, where families like the Taken Alives have buried multiple grandparents, matriarchs and patriarchs. Denny, a member of the association and professor at Diné College. “When they pass on, all that knowledge is gone forever, never to be retained,” said Mr. The roster of loss now includes Avery Denny’s 75-year-old grandfather and 78-year-old aunt, who both died of the virus. Now, remote meetings of the Diné Hataałii Association, a group of Navajo medicine men and women, include updates on who has died, members said. They set hand sanitizer outside traditional hogan dwellings.īut people came, seeking help with their grief or prayers for ailing relatives. They wrapped ceremonial objects in plastic. When the virus exploded across the Navajo Nation, traditional healers who use prayer, songs and herbs as treatments tried to protect themselves with masks and gloves. On the Navajo Nation, where 565 of the reservation’s 869 deaths are among people 60 and older, the pandemic has devastated the ranks of hataałii, traditional medicine men and women. It has killed members of the American Indian Movement, a group founded in 1968 that became the country’s most radical and prominent civil rights organization for American Indian rights. It killed a former chairman of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation in California who spent decades fighting to preserve Native arts and culture. It took a Tulalip family matriarch in Washington State, then her sister and brother-in-law. The virus claimed fluent Choctaw speakers and dressmakers from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. “We don’t know what happens to them until we see a funeral announcement,” said Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute. They say their deaths are overlooked or miscounted, especially off reservations and in urban areas, where some 70 percent of Indigenous people live.Īdding to the problem, tribal health officials say their sickest members can essentially vanish once they are transferred out of small reservation health systems to larger hospitals with intensive-care units. And there is deep mistrust of the government in a generation that was subjected without consent to medical testing, shipped off to boarding schools and punished for speaking their own language in a decades-long campaign of forced assimilation.Ībout a year into the pandemic, activists say there is still is no reliable death toll of Native elders. Elders who live in remote locations often have no means to get to the clinics and hospitals where vaccinations are administered. In Arizona, the White Mountain Apache sent out thermometers and pulse oximeters and taught young people to monitor their grandparents’ vital signs.Īcross the country, tribes are now putting elders and fluent Indigenous language speakers at the head of the line for vaccinations. ![]() In western Montana, volunteers led by a grocery-store worker put together turkey dinners and hygiene packets to deliver to Blackfeet Nation elders. Some now post colored cardboard in their windows: green for “OK,” red for “Help.” Navajo women started a campaign to deliver meals and sanitizer to high-desert trailers and remote homes without running water, where elders have been left stranded by quarantines and lockdowns of community centers. ![]() Tribal nations and volunteer groups are now trying to protect their elders as a mission of cultural survival. “We’ll never be able to get that back,” Mr. ![]()
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