THE NAVAJO NATION'S UPHILL BATTLE WITH THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC By
Aman Agarwal Marissa McCollum
While the Navajo Nation’s spring COVID-19 outbreak received plenty of nationwide coverage, the epidemic within the community is often presented as a single aberration, fully divorced from systemic problems and cultural context. This way of framing the problem of COVID19 in the Navajo Nation is actively harmful, as it makes current “solutions” like the federal government’s $600 million CARES grant for “necessary expenditures incurred due to the [Navajo] public health emergency” seem like reasonable responses, when in reality they completely ignore the key factors that initially triggered the outbreak. The uniquely vulnerable position of the Diné, as the Navajo people call themselves, is a product of long-term social, economic, and historical conditions that must be addressed for meaningful and lasting change to be brought about. The CARES grant has certainly helped the Diné, but community leaders had to fight a month-long legal battle to secure funding initially allocated to for-profit Alaskan corporations, and when it was finally given, it came with an important stipulation: all the money must be spent by the
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end of the year. This seemingly arbitrary restriction prevents the Diné from investing in longterm public works projects that can improve quality of life—and therefore community health—on the reservation, and it serves as yet another example of misguided federal policy that deprives the Diné people of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and public infrastructure. In 1864, the United States government implemented the “Long Walk,” forcibly removing the Diné from their Arizonan settlements in which they lived for generations to eastern New Mexico. A few decades later, the government slaughtered the vast majority of Diné livestock, claiming that the animals’ grazing eroded tillable soil. These destructive incidents, along with many others, greatly reduced Diné wealth and negatively affected their way of life. The historic mistreatment of the Diné people has real material consequences that affect the modern-day community. More than 44% of people on the reservation live under the federal poverty line, and at least one third of all households lack either running water or electricity. The presence of nuclear energy reactors and
coal mines on the reservation have exacerbated these problems, as arsenic, uranium and other poisonous elements have been detected in groundwater on Diné land. Because there are only thirteen grocery stores in the territory (which is roughly the size of West Virginia), the reservation has been classified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a food desert, making it exceedingly difficult for Diné to obtain nutritious food. Additionally, like many other Native American tribes, the Diné suffer not just from material deprivation but also cultural deprivation. During the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, Diné children were sent to boarding schools in an effort to “kill the Indian, save the man.” In practice, this meant that Diné children would be stripped of their traditions, culture, identity, rituals, and language. The multigenerational trauma from Indian boarding schools has inflicted lasting damage on the community as a whole. Due to this historic social, cultural and economic deprivation, Diné suffer from significantly higher rates of diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and obesity: chronic conditions that greatly increase the
