Native tribes have been in fear of COVID-19's impact because they've been here before. 18th-century European colonizers introduced an array of new infectious diseases to Native tribers, including measles, cholera, typhoid and smallpox. Due to natives having no immunity to the foreign germs, historians believe these colonizers were solely responsible for killing more than 70% of native people.
“More than any other population in the country, the shared experience of surviving a pandemic is in our blood, it’s not historic, it’s current for American Indians, it’s our reality. We took it seriously because we had to,” said Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear, a social demographer at the University of Arizona and citizen of the Northern Cheyenne tribe in Montana. (Source: The Guardian, "Why Native Americans took Covid-19 seriously: 'It's our reality'")
Experts are drawing parallels between what happened a few centuries ago and what's happening today with the coronavirus pandemic. As Nina Lakhani states in her article, "The disproportionately high Covid-19 infection rates in Indian Country are attributed to chronic structural and economic inequalities such as overcrowded housing, understaffed hospitals, lack of running water and limited internet access – resulting from the US government’s failure to comply with treaty obligations which agreed adequate funding for basic services in exchange for vast amounts of tribal land."
