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They were the first Code Talkers, Native American soldiers sent into battle in France a century ago who relayed orders from the Cherokee trenches to confuse the enemy and help the Allies achieve victory in World War I.
Then the Germans were the enemy. Now it’s Covid-19.
While the rollout of coronavirus vaccinations has been chaotic and withstood part of the public, the Cherokees have quietly mobilized their limbs to put as many needles in as many arms as possible, starting with some of the most threatened limbs. of the tribe – those who still speak Cherokee.
“We have featured speakers who are fluent in Cherokee, most of whom are elders,” Senior Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr., chief of the 385,000-strong Cherokee Nation, said during a Zoom call from the Oklahoma reservation. “The reason is that our language is in danger.”
Tribal leaders and activists across the country have harnessed reverence for Native American culture and tradition to immunize a people who have deeply rooted fears and suspicions of the US government and the medical establishment.
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“We’re at greater risk because we’ve had to deal with 500 years of oppression,” said Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute in Seattle, who said some of the Native American women who had been forcibly sterilized in the 1960s and 1970s are still alive.
But a survey of 1,435 Native Americans across the country conducted by Echo-Hawk in November also found that 75% would be ready to be vaccinated, not because they suddenly trust Uncle Sam, but because ‘they put “we” before “me”. . “
“The main motivation for participants who indicated their willingness to be vaccinated was a strong sense of responsibility to protect the indigenous community and preserve cultivation patterns,” reads a summary of the report. “Despite the reluctance to the vaccine due to historic and current abuse by health institutions and government, they ultimately felt that the high cost of COVID-19 to their community outweighed the potential risks of the vaccine.”
So, Native American leaders are selling their people for vaccines with an emphasis on the good they could do for the tribe, as opposed to the individual, Echo-Hawk said. And it seems to be working.
The Seattle Indian Health Board receives about 7,000 calls per month, Echo-Hawk said. On Monday, he received 4,900 calls from Native Americans seeking information on vaccines. “It crushed our system,” she says.
The Cherokee Nation as of Wednesday was able to immunize 12,000 people.
Hoskin said: “When fluent speakers got the vaccine, I think it helped calm people’s anxiety. And I think people felt a kind of renewed obligation to try and protect the culture by themselves. getting vaccinated. “
All of the Cherokee speakers who got the first snaps are no older than 65, Hoskin said. But the tribe was able to prioritize who was vaccinated first because it depends on the Indian Health Service, a federal agency, rather than the state of Oklahoma, which put most people under age 65 in phase 4 of its deployment.
“I like to think a lot of Cherokee executives feel that way,” Hoskin said. “You have your ancestors behind you.”
Only about 22,000 people speak Cherokee, a language that began to decline after the tribe was forced to leave North Carolina and move to Oklahoma in the 1830s on the Trail of Tears. But along with other native languages, like Navajo and Choctaw, it was deployed by the United States to deceive the enemy in both world wars.
The pandemic has hit Indigenous peoples like the Cherokee, the largest Native American tribe in the United States, particularly hard, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Native Americans are 3.5 times more likely to contract Covid-19 and 1.8 times more likely to die from coronavirus than whites, the CDC has found.
Why? Poverty and poor medical care, along with higher rates of asthma and diabetes, are the main culprits, Echo-Hawk said. In addition, many Native Americans live in multigenerational and often overcrowded households.
When vaccines debuted in December and the government began encouraging Americans to get vaccinated, tribal leaders eager to protect their members volunteered to roll up their sleeves to receive the first doses.
“We wanted to reassure our people that it was safe,” said Donny Stevenson, vice president of the Muckleshoot tribe.
The tribe, most of whom live on a reserve about 30 miles south of Seattle, also sent out a digital newsletter to computer savvy members and held Zoom meetings attended by trusted medical professionals.
Meanwhile, alumni received hard copies of the newsletter with free lunches that are regularly delivered to their doorstep.
Stevenson said that due to the strategy, which promoted mask-wearing and social distancing, there was very little community on the reserve. And on Sunday, he saw proof that his tribal member vaccination campaign was working when hundreds of cars arrived at the reserve clinic for a tribe-sponsored vaccination drive-through.
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About a quarter of the tribe’s 3,300 registered members have been vaccinated, Stevenson said.
Echo-Hawk said the rest of the country could learn something from its original inhabitants.
“Our community behaves differently,” Echo-Hawk said. “Whenever there is talk about Native Americans it seems like they always talk about the issues, but they have to come to us because we have the answers.
“We use our cultural strength not only to survive, but also to thrive in the face of horrific obstacles,” she said.
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