(CN) — In the midst of a global pandemic, the legacy of federal Indian policy could once again turn deadly, forcing some tribal nations to fight the novel coronavirus with zero help from the federal government.
The Chinook Indian Nation, which for millennia controlled trade at the crucial crossroads where the Columbia River empties into the Pacific Ocean, is not recognized by the federal government as a sovereign entity despite legal battles stretching back 169 years. That means its peoples do not get the medical care or other basic services guaranteed under treaties in exchange for ceding the millions of acres of territories that became the United States.
It’s a long-simmering problem that even under normal circumstances has resulted in the declining health of Chinook people and hampered their efforts to address an epidemic of suicide. Now, the tribe is facing the Covid-19 pandemic the same way it has faced every other obstacle: without government assistance.
“As an unrecognized community without status and without a health clinic, we don’t have the means of having any agency in gaining knowledge of how the disease is operating in the community,” Chinook Tribal Chairman Tony Johnson said. “So instead we are operating as though we’ve all been exposed. We’re completely operating in the dark as to what our situation is.”
One of the Chinook Nation’s 3,000 members is viciously ill with suspected Covid-19. Johnson said he’s in contact with a 45-year-old single father of four who could not access health care through Indian Health Services because the tribe is unrecognized. Instead, Johnson said, the man is at home, dry-heaving blood.
It’s a threat that other unrecognized tribes also face. In the far northern reaches of Michigan, the 300 members of the Burt Lake Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians don’t have a tribal health clinic. They have no access to federal health care funded by Indian Health Services. Their only reprieve is an offer from a neighboring community, the federally recognized Little Traverse Bay Band, which lets Burt Lake members access its doctors.
“If we did not have that relationship, there would be a real problem,” Nola Parkey, the band’s executive director said. “It’s terrifying to think about.”
Even recently recognized tribes struggle to obtain the help the federal government is legally obligated to provide. In Montana, the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa was federally recognized through an act of Congress this past December. It was a victory in a battle waged since 1892, but Tribal Chairman Gerald Gray said the only difference he has seen so far is that he’s invited to more government meetings.
Indian Health Services told Gray in January that Little Shell will not get any funding until October to build the small medical clinic it needs.
“I’m really, really worried because we don’t have a facility,” Gray said. “So we don’t get any of this relief money coming down for PPEs [personal protective equipment], ventilators, test kits, any of that. It’s totally up to us, so we just operate like we have been for the last 130 years.”
The stakes could not be higher in Indian Country, where dread looms over a disease that is especially deadly to the elderly – a population Johnson said should be recognized as “a national treasure" – where underlying conditions and health disparities are the norm. Johnson worries about the potential loss of tribal elders in nations across the country, many of whom are the last fluent speakers of their indigenous languages.
“That knowledge could be lost because of this pandemic,” Johnson said. “It would be really difficult to come back from that.”