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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNative American tribes' pandemic response is hamstrung by many inequities
Published 2 mins ago on June 1, 2020
By The Conversation
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is novel, but pandemic threats to indigenous peoples are anything but new. Diseases like measles, smallpox and the Spanish flu have decimated Native American communities ever since the arrival of the first European colonizers.
Now COVID-19 is having similarly devastating impacts in Indian country. Some reservations are reporting infection rates many times higher than those observed in the general U.S. population.
We are social scientists who study many aspects of environmental justice, including the politics of food access and food sovereignty, the impacts of extractive resource industries like uranium and fossil fuels, and how Indigenous communities navigate relationships with state and federal governments to maintain their traditional practices. As we see it, Native American communities face structural and historical obstacles related to settler colonial legacies that make it hard for them to counter the pandemic, even by drawing on innovative indigenous survival strategies.
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/06/native-american-tribes-pandemic-response-is-hamstrung-by-many-inequities/
Shiv
(113 posts)watching this closely. I know it is hard not to focus elsewhere, also, with how dangerously bad this has been handled, but about the same time I realized all the displaced refugees on the Turkey Syria border and other crowded populations there would be in for some trouble, this hit me, too
K&R'd
turbinetree
(24,703 posts)We are social scientists who study many aspects of environmental justice, including the politics of food access and food sovereignty, the impacts of extractive resource industries like uranium and fossil fuels, and how Indigenous communities navigate relationships with state and federal governments to maintain their traditional practices. As we see it, Native American communities face structural and historical obstacles related to settler colonial legacies that make it hard for them to counter the pandemic, even by drawing on innovative indigenous survival strategies.
Wado........(thankyou) ....and welcome to DU