THE NAVAJO NATION'S UPHILL BATTLE WITH COVID-19

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 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

COVID-19 social distancing and mask wearing protocols issued by the Navajo Nation, which these signs outside Black Rock, Arizona highlight, were integral to slowing the spread of the disease through the community.

risk of COVID-19 complications. Furthermore, high incidences of heart disease, atherosclerosis, depression, suicide, and cancer have contributed to the lower lifespan of Diné. Such biological problems put the Diné community in a precarious position as it navigates the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic. All the systemic problems of the Diné are compounded by the inadequate healthcare the federal government’s Indian Health Services (IHS) provide. Before the pandemic, IHS only received one-third of the per capita funding of the Department of Veteran Affairs and Medicare. For this reason, the hospitals in the Navajo Area Indian Health Service region were notoriously underfunded and understaffed.

Once COVID-19 spread to the Diné, cases immediately snowballed, resulting in overfilled hospitals and a lack of supplies and healthcare professionals to adequately treat native patients. In May, the Diné Nation had the highest per capita infection and fatality rates in the United States: 1 in 43 Diné on the reservation had contracted the virus. Even today, COVID-19 continues to ravage the community.

The Diné knew that coronavirus posed a great threat to their community, so they prepared for and responded to the pandemic better than many American states. Preventative measures were adopted in early March, making the reservation one of the last places in the United States to report an official case. Lockdown measures, mask mandates, and weekend curfews were imposed in an effort to prevent the virus from spreading to the Diné community. When coronavirus cases were detected on the reservation, Jonathan Nez, the president of the Diné, and other tribal leaders were proactive in securing help and petitioned nearby nongovernmental organizations and universities for COVID-19 tests and medical aid. Partnering with UCSF, the tribe created a robust testing program and became one of the United States’ most prolific testers.

The efforts of the Diné to control the coronavirus are laudable, especially since the community was clearly working at an extreme disadvantage, but despite the community’s best efforts, it has suffered greatly during the pandemic. The plight of the Diné indicates that the federal government must engage in widespread systemic change to ensure that a similar situation will not occur in the future. Only longterm investment in better public infrastructure and healthcare services will adequately address the pervasive disparities in Native American health outcomes.

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