It was the original Code Talkers, Native American soldiers sent to fight in France a century ago, who carried out orders from the trenches in Cherokee to confuse the enemy and help the Allies gain victory during World War I. achieved.
Then the Germans were the enemy. Now it’s Covid-19.
While the implementation of coronavirus vaccinations was chaotic and resisted by some of the public, the Cherokee quietly mobilized their members to get as many needles into as many arms as soon as possible, starting with some of the most endangered members of the tribe – those who still speak Cherokee.
“We are introducing Cherokee fluent speakers, most of whom are elders, in line,” Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr., leader of the 385,000-strong Cherokee Nation, said in a Zoom call of the discussion in Oklahoma. “The reason is that our language is in danger.”
Tribal leaders and activists across the country have used their respect for Native American culture and tradition to vaccinate a people who have deep-rooted fears and suspicions about the US government and medical institution.
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“We run a greater risk because we had to deal with 500 years of oppression,” said Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute in Seattle, adding that some Native American women who were forcibly sterilized in the 1960s and the 1970s are still alive.
But a survey of 1,435 Native Americans across the country that spearheaded Echo-Hawk in November also revealed that 75 percent would be willing to be vaccinated, not because they suddenly trusted Uncle Sam, but because they put the “us” before the “I”. . “
‘The primary motivation for participants willing to be vaccinated was a strong sense of responsibility to protect the Indigenous community and preserve cultural ways,’ reads a summary of the report. “Despite hesitation about the vaccine due to historical and current abuse of health care and government institutions, they ultimately felt that the high cost of COVID-19 outweighed their vaccine’s potential potential for their community.”
Native American leaders therefore sell their people on vaccinations by emphasizing the good they can do for the tribe, as opposed to the individual, Echo-Hawk said. And it seems to work.
The Seattle Indian Health Board receives about 7,000 calls a month, Echo-Hawk said. On Monday, it received 4,900 calls from Native Americans seeking information about vaccine. “It ruined our system,” she said.
The Cherokee nation was able to vaccinate 12,000 people as of Wednesday.
Hoskin said: “When fluent speakers got the vaccine, I think it helped people’s anxiety. And I think people had a new obligation to try to protect the culture by being vaccinated.”
Not all of the Cherokee speakers who got the first shots are older than 65, Hoskin said. But the tribe could prefer who was vaccinated first because it responds to the Indian Health Service, a federal agency, instead of the state of Oklahoma, which put most people under 65 in phase 4 of its implementation.
“I like to think a lot of Cherokee leaders 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 out of North Carolina and migrated to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears in the 1830s. But along with other indigenous languages, such as Navajo and Choctaw, it was deployed by the US to fool the enemy in both world wars.
The pandemic hit Indigenous people like the Cherokee, the largest Native American tribe in the U.S., 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 the coronavirus than white people, the CDC found.
Why? Echo-Hawk said poverty and poor medical care, along with higher asthma and diabetes. In addition, many Native Americans live in households with many generations and often in pressures.
When the vaccines began in December and the government began encouraging Americans to be vaccinated, tribal leaders eager to protect their members volunteered to roll up their sleeves to get the first doses.
“We wanted to reassure our people that it’s safe,” said Donny Stevenson, vice president of the Muckleshoot Tribe.
The tribe, most of whom live on a reservation about 30 miles south of Seattle, also emailed a digital newsletter to computer-savvy members and held Zoom meetings that included trusted health workers.
Meanwhile, the elders received paper copies of the newsletter with the free lunches regularly delivered to their front porch.
Stevenson said that because of the strategy, which promoted the wearing of mask and social distance, there was very little community scattered on the discussion. And on Sunday, it proved that the attempt to vaccinate members of the tribe was working when hundreds of cars arrived at the reserve’s health clinic for a vaccination sponsored by the tribe.
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About a quarter of the 3,300 enrolled members of the tribe have been vaccinated, Stevenson said.
Echo-Hawk said the rest of the country can learn something from its original inhabitants.
“Our community is behaving differently,” Echo-Hawk said. “When we talk about Indians, they always seem to talk about the problems, but they have to come to us because we have the answers.
“We use our cultural power not only to survive but also to thrive in the midst of horrific obstacles,” she said.