Native American
spiritual leaders say this is a time to recalibrate for a better
future.
|
Jillene Joseph, a member
of the Gros Ventre or Aaniiih people, enjoys a moment of sunshine
at her home in Gresham, Oregon. The director of the Native
Wellness Institute is deeply worried about the effects of
the coronavirus pandemic, but she also wants people to consider
"the blessings of this virus." Because of social distancing,
photographer Josué Rivas took the portraits in this
story through videocalls.
|
"What are we going to do?" Jillene Joseph asked the board of the
Native Wellness Institute.
It wasn't a rhetorical question.
It was mid-March, and the board was holding an emergency meeting
as schools and businesses began shutting down due to the novel coronavirus.
The Oregon-based institute addresses trauma in indigenous communities,
usually through in-person trainings that are rooted in ancestral
teachings and traditions. Joseph, the executive director, knew she
had to find a new way to help community members who were adjusting
to stay-at-home orders.
Native
Americans are especially vulnerable to COVID-19 due to underlying
health issues such as diabetes and heart disease, as well as crowded
multigenerational homes. On reservations, where roughly half of
Native Americans live, not everyone has indoor plumbing or electricity,
making it difficult to follow the guidelines to wash hands regularly
in hot water. As a result, Navajo Nation, the largest reservation
in the United States, has an infection rate nearly as high as that
of New York and New Jersey. As of May 11 there have been 102 confirmed
deaths.
"An already traumatized people are being retraumatized," says Joseph,
a member of the Gros Ventre or Aaniiih people who are from Fort
Belknap, Montana. Managing the pandemic's psychological and spiritual
toll has become her focus.
As a community health practitioner, Joseph sees traditional cultural
beliefs and practices as powerful tools for helping indigenous people
understand this pandemic. She is not alone. With an emphasis on
community, resilience, and a holistic relationship with nature,
spiritual leaders from different tribes express guarded optimism
that people of all backgrounds will learn from the lessons coronavirus
has to teach.
'Blood memory'
For indigenous people, history plays an unavoidable role in interpreting
the pandemic. One elder from Michigan called Joseph to talk about
how difficult it's been for her to care for herself and her family.
After some reflection, the woman realized why: She was weighed down
by thoughts of the smallpox
epidemic that had killed
so many Native Americans. She felt she needed to forgive the
U.S. government for intentionally giving her people the illness.
While documentary evidence that Europeans or Americans purposely
spread smallpox is scarce, there's little doubt that colonizers
brought infectious diseases that killed an estimated 90 percentsome
20 million people or moreof the indigenous population in the
Americas. "Even though we may not have been alive in the time of
the smallpox epidemic, that's in our blood memory," says Joseph,
"just as historical resiliency is also in our blood memory."
(Related:
Native American imagery abounds, but the people are often forgotten.)
Those deeply rooted experiences can lead to acceptance, especially
among elders. "They have been through so much and experienced so
much that there's no need to fear or even panic," says Tiokasin
Ghosthorse, the Stoneridge, New York-based host of First
Voices Radio and a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation
from South Dakota. "It's almost like this [pandemic] is familiar."
|
Nature "has been listening
to us not listening to her," says Tiokasin Ghosthorse, from
his home in Stoneridge, New York. The radio host and member
of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation believes the coronavirus
is a wake-up call.
|
As such, indigenous communities aren't dwelling on the pandemic's
backstory. "Indigenous peoples don't always need to go and explain
what happened, why it happened," says the Reverend David Wilson,
a Methodist minister in Oklahoma City and member of the Choctaw
Nation. "We just know it's there."
"We're taught not to think of nature as separate," explains Ghosthorse,
and that includes COVID-19. "The coronavirus is a being," he says.
"And we have to respect that being in an 'awe state' and a 'wonder
state' because it has come to us as a medicine" to treat spiritual
ills.
Reconnecting with culture
At a time when people around the world are sheltering in place,
maintaining meaningful connections is vital. Native American leaders
are finding creative ways to reach out. In an effort to bring positivity,
calm, and reassurance to indigenous people, Joseph and her colleagues
tapped into the community of Native American storytellers, musicians,
healers, and even comedians to create the Native Wellness Power
Hour.
Since it launched on March 21, thousands have clicked into the
institute's
Facebook page to listen to prayer songs, lectures on navigating
healing associated with PTSD, especially related to the ongoing
epidemic of missing
and murdered indigenous women, or just to dance along with others
tuning in from around the country.
In Oklahoma, Native American Methodists sent videos of themselves
singing tribal hymns to the Oklahoma
Indian Missionary Conference, which incorporated them into virtual
church services. "We work hard to keep people connected to our culture
and our language," says Wilson, who is the conference's superintendent.
"Most of the people who have texted me or called me say, man, we
love thatespecially the hymns."
|
Stay-at-home orders have been particularly
difficult, says Reverend David Wilson, a member of the Choctaw
Nation and a Methodist minister in Oklahoma City. Church members
are "missing that connection in our community of powwows,
church services, and ceremonies."
|
Lessons for the future
While this pandemic is presenting an opportunity to find meaningful
ways to connect, it's also a wake-up call with important lessons
for the future. "If we don't learn from now," warns Mindahi Bastida
Muñoz, general coordinator of the Otomi-Toltec Regional Council
in Mexico, "then another thing, more powerful, is going to come."
(Related:
April saw the first coronavirus deaths reported in indigenous Amazon
communities.)
Bastida, who is also the director of the Original Caretakers program
at the Center for Earth
Ethics in New York City, says the world is out of balance and
that anthropocentrismour human-centric outlookis the
cause. "We think that we are the ones who can decide everything,"
he says, "but we are killing ourselves."
|
It doesn't matter where
the coronavirus came from, says Mindahi Bastida Muñoz,
a member of the Otomi and Tolteca people in Mexico who is
sheltering with friends in Granville, Massachusetts. "What
matters is the lesson that it's giving us as human beings
because we are not behaving properly."
|
"Mother Earth is saying, 'please listen,'" adds Joyce Bryant, known
as Grandmother Sasa, the Abenaki founder of a
healing center in New Hampshire. "We have to care about others.
You know, the grass, the trees, the plants, the air, the waterall
are extensions of ourselves. And they teach us."
"Living in harmony with Mother Earth is a lot of work," says Bastida,
but it can be done by reviving the indigenous idea that humans serve
as caregivers of nature. He's working with spiritual leaders across
the world to return to the old waysproducing food by hand,
finding medicine in plants, animals, and minerals, and performing
rituals and ceremonies that send prayers to Mother Earth.
Perhaps the biggest lesson that indigenous spiritual leaders hope
people will take from the pandemic is that it's a time to be still,
to reflect, and to listen to elders. Both Joseph and Wilson likened
this period of stay-at-home orders to a long winter, when people
would traditionally stay inside and listen to stories. According
to Joseph, it's like Earth is saying "not today, humans, you need
some more reflection."
|
Joyce Bryant, known as
Grandmother Sasa in her community, takes a moment to meditate
at her home in West Ossippee, New Hampshire. "Our elders have
known for a long time that this has been coming," says Bryant,
whose background spans the Abenaki people, the United Kingdom,
and Japan.
|
Native
Wellness Institute
The Native Wellness Institute exists to promote the well-being of
Native people through programs and trainings that embrace the teachings
and traditions of our ancestors.
https://www.nativewellness.com
First
Voices Radio
Our purpose is to help ensure the continuance and survival of Indigenous
cultures and Nations by letting "the people" tell their own story,
in their own words, and often in their own languages and ways of
speaking. FVR educates and informs, while breaking down the romanticization,
historical and current stereotypes, and begin to form real relationships
with Indigenous nations and communities, based finally, on respect
and real understanding.
https://firstvoicesindigenousradio.org
OKLAHOMA
INDIAN MISSIONARY CONFERENCE
In the United Methodist Church in the United States there are three
missionary conferences. The reason these conferences exist is as
a mission strategy to reach and be in ministry with persons who,
in the judgement of the Church, cannot be effectively reached through
the normal structure and purpose of annual conferences. Native persons
in Alaska, Appalachia, and Oklahoam (including adjoning areas) are
those so identified.
http://www.umc-oimc.org
Center
For Earth Ethics
We work to cultivate the public consciousness needed to make changes
in policy and culture that will establish a new value system that
is based on this vision of the world.
https://centerforearthethics.org
|