The coronavirus has ripped through Native American communities at a ferocious pace, and the death of many elders is inflicting an incalculable toll on the languages and traditions that are passed on through the generations.

“It’s like we’re having a cultural book-burning,” said Jason Salsman, a spokesman for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in eastern Oklahoma. “We’re losing a historical record, encyclopedias. One day soon, there won’t be anybody to pass this knowledge down.”

My colleague Jack Healy, who covers rural America, writes that among the Muscogee elders who have died were mikos, traditional leaders who knew how to prepare for annual green-corn ceremonies and how to stoke sacred fires their ancestors had carried to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. The virus has claimed fluent Choctaw speakers, a Tulalip family matriarch, and members of the American Indian Movement, a group founded in 1968 that became the country’s most radical and prominent civil rights organization for American Indians.

The virus has killed Native Americans at roughly twice the rate of white people, and the disparity is highlighting what critics call a tattered health system and generations of harm and broken promises by the U.S. government.

Now, tribal nations and volunteer groups are trying to protect their elders by delivering meals and medical supplies, and putting elders and fluent Indigenous language speakers at the head of the line for vaccinations.

But the effort is facing huge obstacles. There is deep mistrust of the government in a generation that was subjected without consent to medical testing, shipped off to boarding schools and punished for speaking their own language in a decades-long campaign of forced assimilation.
The New York Times