Feds want justices to end Navajo fight for Colo. River water

By MICHAEL PHILLIS

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A sign marks Navajo Drive, as Sentinel Mesa, homes and other structures in Oljato-Monument Valley, Utah, on the Navajo Reservation, stand in the distance, on April 30, 2020. The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide a critical water rights case in the water-scarce Southwest. The high court will hold oral arguments Monday, March 20, 2023, in a case with critical implications for how water from the drought-stricken Colorado River is shared and the extent of the U.S. government’s obligations to Native American tribes. 

(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)



States that rely on water from the over-tapped Colorado River want the U.S. Supreme Court to block a lawsuit from the Navajo Nation that could upend how water is shared in the Western U.S.

The tribe doesn’t have enough water and says that the federal government is at fault. Roughly a third of residents on the vast Navajo Nation don’t have running water in their homes.

More than 150 years ago, the U.S. government and the tribe signed treaties that promised the tribe a “permanent home” — a promise the Navajo Nation says includes a sufficient supply of water. The tribe says the government broke its promise to ensure the tribe has enough water and that people are suffering as a result.

The federal government disputes that claim. And states, such as Arizona, California and Nevada, argue that more water for the Navajo Nation would cut into already scarce supplies for cities, agriculture and business growth.

The high court will hold oral arguments Monday in a case with critical implications for how water from the drought-stricken Colorado River is shared and the extent of the U.S. government’s obligations to Native American tribes.

A win for the Navajo Nation won’t directly result in more water for the roughly 175,000 people who live on the largest reservation in the U.S. But it’s a piece of what has been a multi-faceted approach over decades to obtain a basic need.

Tina Becenti, a mother of five, made two or three short trips a day to her mom’s house or a public water spot to haul water back home, filling several five-gallon buckets and liter-sized pickle jars. They filled slowly, sapping hours from her day. Her sons would sometimes help lift the heavy containers into her Nissan SUV that she’d drive carefully back home to avoid spills.

“Every drop really matters,” Becenti said.

That water had to be heated then poured into a tub to bathe her young twin girls. Becenti’s mother had running water, so her three older children would sometimes go there to shower. After a couple of years, Becenti finally got a large tank installed by the nonprofit DigDeep so she could use her sink.

DigDeep, which filed a legal brief in support of the Navajo Nation’s case, has worked to help tribal members gain access to water as larger water-rights claims are pressed.

Extending water lines to the sparsely populated sections of the 27,000 square-mile (69,000 square-kilometer) reservation that spans three states is difficult and costly. But tribal officials say additional water supplies would help ease the burden and create equity.

“You drive to Flagstaff, you drive to Albuquerque, you drive to Phoenix, there is water everywhere, everything is green, everything is watered up,” said Rex Kontz, deputy general manager of the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority. “You don’t see that on Navajo.”

The tribe primarily relies on groundwater to serve homes and businesses.

For decades, the Navajo Nation has fought for access to surface water, including the Colorado River and its tributaries, that it can pipe to more remote locations for homes, businesses and government offices.

It’s a legal fight that resonates with tribes across the U.S., said Dylan Hedden-Nicely, the director of the Native American Law Program at the University of Idaho and an attorney representing tribal organizations that filed a brief in support of the Navajo Nation.

The Navajo Nation has reached settlements for water from the San Juan River in New Mexico and Utah. Both of those settlements draw from the Colorado River’s Upper Basin.

The tribe has yet to reach agreement with Arizona and the federal government for water rights from the Colorado River in the Lower Basin that includes the states of California, Arizona and Nevada. It also has sought water from a tributary, the Little Colorado River, another major legal dispute that’s playing out separately.

In the U.S Supreme Court case, the Navajo Nation wants the U.S. Department of the Interior to account for the tribe’s needs in Arizona and come up with a plan to meet those needs.

A federal appeals court ruled the Navajo Nation’s lawsuit could move forward, overturning a decision from a lower court.

Attorneys for the Navajo Nation base their claims on two treaties the tribe and the U.S. signed in 1849 and 1868. The latter allowed Navajos to return to their ancestral homelands in the Four Corners region after being forcibly marched to a desolate tract in eastern New Mexico.

The Navajo Nation wants the Supreme Court to find that those treaties guaranteed them enough water to sustain their homeland. And the tribe wants a chance to make its case before a lower federal court.

The federal government says it has helped the tribe get water from the Colorado River’s tributaries, but no treaty or law forces officials to address the tribe’s general water needs. The Interior Department declined to comment on the pending case.

“We absolutely think they’re entitled to water, but we don’t think the lower Colorado River is the source,” said Rita Maguire, the attorney representing states in the Lower Basin who oppose the tribe’s claims.

If the Supreme Court sides with the Navajo Nation, other tribes might make similar demands, Maguire said.

Arizona, Nevada and California contend the Navajo Nation is making an end run around another Supreme Court case that divvied up water in the Colorado River’s Lower Basin.

“The first question in front of the court now is: why is the lower court dealing with the issue at all?” said Grant Christensen, a federal Indian law expert and professor at Stetson University.

Even if the justices side with the Navajo Nation, the tribe wouldn’t immediately get water. The case would go back to the U.S. District Court in Arizona, and rights to more water still could be years, if not, decades away. The Navajo Nation also could reach a settlement with Arizona and the federal government for rights to water from the Colorado River and funding to deliver it to tribal communities.

Tribal water rights often are tied to the date a reservation was established, which would give the Navajo Nation one of the highest priority rights to Colorado River water and could force conservation on others, said Hedden-Nicely of the University of Idaho.

Given the likelihood of a long road ahead, Kontz of the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority says many older Navajo won’t live to see running water in their homes.

Becenti, the 42-year-old mother of five, remembers shedding tears of joy when running water finally was installed in her house and her family could use a flushable indoor toilet.

It was a relief to “go to the facility without having to worry about bugs, lizards, snakes,” she said.

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The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

Despite mistrust, Native Americans’ participation in vaccine development proves vital

Navajo medicine man Timothy Lewis starts each day with a corn pollen seed offering to the creator. He prays for his family and the world’s wellbeing amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

© Michelle Tom Dr. Michelle Tom, the only Navajo emergency physician at the Winslow Indian Health Care Center in Arizona, got her vaccine this week.

“I hope that we can get back to normal,” Lewis said. “I want to see my grandkids again. I wanna hold them and I wanna hug them again.”

Lewis is one of the 463 Native Americans across the country that volunteered in one of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine trials; his was a pivotal Phase 3 trial. Both of his parents were also traditional Navajo healers, and he says they instilled in him a responsibility to help others whenever possible.

“My parents would have liked this,” Lewis said. “They would have wanted me to do this. And that's the reason why I actually volunteered. I really want us to come back to being the way we were [before the pandemic].” 

© ABC Timothy Lewis is one of the 463 Native Americans across the country that volunteered in the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trial.

The virus has ravaged the Navajo Nation, which covers an area the size of West Virginia, and is home to more than 300,000 enrolled tribal members. Despite some of the strictest lockdowns and weeks-long curfews, the communities there are still in the throes of a lasting crisis.

Just this week, the Navajo Department of Health reported 272 new cases. As 75 communities continue to face uncontrolled transmission of COVID-19, there have been a reported 21,833 total cases throughout the Navajo Nation, with over 760 deaths since March.

Several factors have contributed to the virus’ proliferation in the Navajo Nation, including an abundance of multigenerational homes where people live with their extended families in small buildings.

There are also only 13 grocery stores throughout the 27,000-square-mile reservation, according to Dr. Loretta Christensen, chief medical officer of the Indian Health Service in the Navajo area

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© ABC Dr. Loretta Christensen is the chief medical officer at Indian Health Services in the Navajo area.

“We've been working with John Hopkins Center for American Indians for quite some time here in Navajo,” she said. “What we found through multiple vaccine trials, there [are] often vaccines that are more appropriate for our population that we do respond better to, that we get better immunity from.”MORE: Navajo Nation hospitals at 'breaking point'

Because of people like Lewis, the research on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine included data on Native Americans’ reactions to the vaccine.

“They volunteered. So they're trailblazers,” Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said. “Based on that data that's available right now, it indicates that this vaccine doesn't have the negative, adverse effect on Native Americans.”

Christensen is developing the Navajo Nation’s vaccine plan and is helping distribute and administer the shot to health care workers like EMS, medical practitioners and medicine men in the initial phase of the process

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© ABC Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez

The Navajo Nation received 3,900 Pfizer vaccine doses so far and nearly 8,000 from Moderna this week

“It’s finally the day I had envisioned,” Tom told ABC News. “It couldn’t have come soon enough. It’s a huge deal for Navajo people, for Native people, [for] all the families it hit so hard.”

© Michelle Tom Dr. Michelle Tom, the only Navajo emergency physician at the Winslow Indian Health Care Center in Arizona, got her vaccine this week.

At the height of the crisis, Tom left her family and moved to an apartment an hour away to try to minimize the risk of exposing the group of people she’s trying to save.

ABC News spoke to Tom in May, when the Navajo Nation had the highest infection rate per capita in the country

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© Michelle Tom Dr. Michelle Tom, the only Navajo emergency physician at the Winslow Indian Health Care Center in Arizona, got her vaccine this week.

“My job is immensely hard because I have such a connection to my people and to my land -- my ancestors and my grandparents,” she said at the time. “And to put me here today … Our elders are our teachers, protectors. They hold all the key elements that we need to have a strong sense of identity.”

Gwen Livingston, a Johns Hopkins American Indian Health research nurse, has been working with Pfizer and partner BioNTech on their COVID-19 vaccine trials in the Navajo Nation amid a second, deadlier wave.

“We've been trying, we've been educating, we've been doing what we can as far as social distancing, wearing our masks, sanitizing, doing what we can,” she said. “Then, our numbers are rising again. So yeah, something needs to happen. And this vaccine rolls out, and this is just another resource. This is just another tool. This is something that we need to combat this virus.”

For Livingston, the virus’ toll has been personal. She is from the Navajo Nation and the Khapo Owingeh, a Santa Clara pueblo in New Mexico.MORE: How one young activist is standing up for her Navajo community's COVID-19 relief

In June, Livingston lost her grandfather to COVID-19 and had to watch her grandmother say goodbye alone, from a distance.

“Having to explain to her why she could not see him, why she could not be with him, why we were outside of the window and could not go inside the building to see him -- that really hit home and it hit hard,” Livingston said.

“To hear the pain and the hurt just from talking with family members, or even with patients who have COVID-19,” she said. “Just the struggle to breathe alone, and the questions of, ‘What's gonna happen to me?’ And there's that fear of, ‘Am I gonna die?’”

The virus has brought to light the generational health problems that have afflicted the Navajo people.

“We got high rates of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer,” Nez said. “And as the nation saw during the first wave in April, the Navajo Nation got hit hard.”

Livingston says that even if someone with high blood pressure and diabetes has asymptomatic COVID-19, “the damage is already happening.” It’s high blood pressure and diabetes that could cause them to need dialysis.

© ABC Gwen Livingston, a Johns Hopkins American Indian health research nurse, has been working with Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 on vaccine trials in the Navajo Nation amid a second, more deadly wave.

“By the time they reach stage four [of chronic kidney disease], they're already having to think about their treatment options when it comes to dialysis,” she explained. “That is the end result of these chronic illnesses… Sometimes that reality, it's too late in some cases.”

Despite indigenous peoples’ participation in vaccine trials, there’s still a deep mistrust in the community.

Prior to the European conquest, Native Americans had never experienced smallpox, measles or the flu. Exposure to the “New World'' diseases killed nearly 90% of their population.

In the 1860s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs implemented a series of boarding schools on Indian reservations, which separated children from their families.

“It was the whole idea of assimilating Indians into the white culture,” Livingston said. “It was the whole idea of, ‘Kill the Indian, save the man.’ And bringing these children, taking them from their homes, taking them from their families, taking them from everything that they know [and] putting them in schools -- that was traumatic, too. They were punished for speaking their language, [or] anything to do with their culture.”

That intergenerational trauma is compounded by a history of forced experimentation on Native Americans.

“In the 1970s, the sterilization of Native American women was a huge traumatic event,” Livingston said. “[That] made it very, very hard for indigenous people to trust the federal government, or to even trust [the] Indian Health Service.”

Most tribal members say they are not against research, but that they want it done ethically and with consent from participants and community members.

In 2002, the Navajo Nation banned genetic research on its territory in order to prevent unethical medical experiments on Native Americans. In 2003, the Havasupai Indian tribe sued Arizona State University for sharing blood samples from a 1990s diabetes research project with researchers working on other projects without consent from the study participants. The tribe won the case in 2010.

Because of this long history, Lewis said he was met with skepticism when he told his friends and relatives about volunteering for the vaccine trial.

MORE: Navajo Nation, reeling from coronavirus, focuses attention on elections

“They were saying, ‘Don't do it.’ But I didn't listen because I wanted to help,” he said. “I wanted to help my people.”

Christensen says she believes that COVID-19 vaccine makers need to be transparent and share the data they collect in order to build trust within the Navajo community.

“We really need [the] population of the Native Americans to be represented in data and how they respond to the vaccines,” Livingston said. “We really need to take a look at that so that we are better prepared to present this data to the community, and that way they would feel more comfortable in receiving the vaccine when the time comes.”

Acknowledging the trauma inflicted on the community is only half the battle. Livingston says traditional healers and Western health care providers should come together to help Native communities through the pandemic.

“[We should] work together in understanding medication, treatment -- all of these things -- in order to keep our people healthy,” she said.

"Lewis recognizes the benefit he has in having access to both Western medicine and the traditional medicine of his culture. "I have two worlds," he said. "I'm lucky."

Nez said he’s optimistic the Navajo community will get through this as they have survived many diseases, including the hantavirus outbreak in 1993.

“We are resilient,” he said. “Remember, our ancestors got us to this point… Now it is our turn to fight hard against this virus and to think about our children and our grandchildren.”

THIRD WORLD USA

The Deadly Loss of Navajo Women


Eugenia Charles-Newton, a Navajo Nation Council delegate, at home in Shiprock with her donkey, Brandy.

BY SUNNIE R. CLAHCHISCHILIGI NOVEMBER 14, 2020

https://nativenewsonline.net/

This article was orginally published by Spotlight New Mexico. 

 All rights reserved.

On the Navajo Nation, the coronavirus is leaving children motherless, families lost and traditions in peril. But Diné women fight on.

SHIPROCK, N.M. — Sitting in the passenger seat of her husband’s pickup truck just before dusk, Eugenia Charles-Newton watched a young Navajo girl, her niece, during a traditional kinaaldá ceremony in Shiprock.

The coming-of-age ceremony was unlike any other kinaaldá she’d ever seen. Scores of family members were missing and there was only a small cake, just enough to feed the immediate family. That morning, the girl’s female relatives hadn’t gathered to sing and tell stories as they mixed the cake batter. When the girl ran toward the east before the sun rose, she didn’t have throngs of relatives running behind her to fill the dawn air with happy screams and shouts, celebrating her transition into womanhood. Only the young woman’s brothers ran after her.


It’s hard “for a girl to have a ceremony like that and not have all the family there,” Charles-Newton said. She tried to comfort her niece, a relation by clan. “Your mom could have just said, ‘No, we’re not going to have it,’” she pointed out. “But instead, she made it happen.”

Women have long been front and center when it comes to making things happen on the Navajo Nation. But never has that role been so apparent — or so perilous — as during the pandemic. Ever since the coronavirus arrived on the 27,000-square-mile reservation, women in this matriarchal society have been putting themselves at risk, taking on ever more responsibilities, culturally and in everyday life.

“The sacred side of women has changed with COVID,” said Charles-Newton, 43, one of three female delegates on the Navajo Nation Council. Girls used to learn traditions through celebrations, face-to-face talks with elders and communal gatherings. But the pandemic has squelched those opportunities. “It’s taking away a part of the culture.”


By every measure — from economics and education to health — COVID-19 disproportionately harms women and girls “simply by virtue of their sex,” the United Nations has concluded. Women are more exposed to the virus because they’re more likely to be frontline workers, such as nurses and health care staff. They hold more than 77 percent of jobs in U.S. hospitals, health care facilities and nursing homes, U.S. labor statistics show. They hold essential jobs, albeit low-paying ones, in groceries and retail stores.

On the Navajo Nation, women are even more vulnerable to the virus, as a result of poor health care, poverty, trauma and high rates of illnesses like diabetes.

Navajo women not only hold high-exposure jobs but also are keepers of the cultural flame — and caretakers of the many people around them who’ve tested positive for the virus. When they become sick or die, the whole culture suffers.



Rena Martin, a Navajo archaeologist and ethnographer, at the office of Dinétahdóó Cultural Resources Management. She founded the consulting firm to preserve tribal history, culture and the environment.

“Women are the home — they’re matriarchs, they’re mothers,” said Navajo archaeologist Rena Martin, 67. “When people say, ‘I’m going home,’ it’s to where Mom is. If you lose a matriarch, you have no home to go to.”

The founder of Dinétahdóó Cultural Resources Management, a Navajo company dedicated to preserving tribal history, culture and lands, Martin has seen families living in some of the most remote landscapes in the Southwest. She particularly worries about the women elders — crucial to the culture — who are highly vulnerable to COVID-19.

The virus is typically more lethal for Navajo men — but that changes in the golden years, statistics show. After 70, the coronavirus death rate for Navajo women begins to accelerate. By age 80, Diné women suffer a substantially higher death rate than men.

Martin knows firsthand what the loss of an elder can do. Her maternal grandmother, matriarch to the core, boiled herbs, made medicinal drinks and carried them to families stricken with whooping cough, delivering them near and far on horseback. She succumbed to the disease when Martin’s mother was 4.

The loss left the next two generations without knowledge of their family history and teachings, Martin said. It was the need to reclaim those losses that prompted her to become an archaeologist.

“There was a loss of centeredness in the family. There was a loss of oral history.” The pandemic, she said, could leave generations of women feeling similarly at sea.

Some might feel like they’re drowning. Diné women today are juggling employment while also cooking, cleaning, babysitting, shopping, parenting, teaching, caring for relatives and tending to the elderly.

Since March, when the reservation became one of the country’s worst hot spots, women have commonly been seen making supply runs at local stores, buying not just for the immediate family but for extended family members, to meet kinship obligations.

They are carrying caskets at burial sites, typically a man’s job. They are revising the “baby’s first laugh” celebrations, dropping off salt and goodies to family and friends instead of hosting a gathering at home.

Grandmothers are helping children attend virtual classes, though most have no experience with computers. Some have set up makeshift desks in crowded houses without electricity, running water or indoor plumbing — a problem for roughly a third of households. Others sit with their grandchildren outside of schools and chapter houses so the kids will have internet access and can complete their homework.

Zoom won’t suffice

The Navajo are a matrilineal society: When they introduce themselves, they do so by clan, leading with their mother’s clan, which children take as their own. Naabeehó sáanii (Navajo women) are the center of the family, the keepers of wisdom and conservators of ancestral teachings. Navajo emergence stories tell of how women learned to be matriarchs from Changing Woman, a single mother of twin sons who became Diné heroes.

By tradition, the teachings are passed down in person, in the Navajo language. Zoom meetings are hardly a suitable replacement.

In the four-day kinaaldá, for example, the mother, grandmother and other female relatives have hands-on roles in the ceremony, held when a girl reaches puberty. The women help the girl wash and they tie and wrap her hair. They knead her limbs to symbolically “mold” her into a strong woman. They make the alkaan (Navajo cake) and bury it in the ground to cook.

It is a level of communion that’s nearly impossible during recurring waves of contagion and the accompanying public health restrictions. The Navajo Nation, a vast landscape (pop. 172,875) that spans New Mexico, Arizona and Utah, has one of the highest COVID-19 infection rates in America. As of Nov. 10, at least 12,641 cases have been confirmed there; 594 people have died.

The tribal government has tried to curb transmission by issuing strict curfews, stay-at-home orders, business and travel restrictions, and limits on gatherings. Officials have also canceled events like the Miss Navajo Nation pageant, in which contestants must butcher a sheep and cook over an open fire.

Shaandiin Parrish, the current Miss Navajo Nation, is one of the scores of women who’ve seen their roles morph in ways they never imagined. Parrish, 26, was living alone in Window Rock, Arizona, the Navajo Nation’s capital, when the virus struck. She wanted to rush home to the Kayenta area to be with her family, but the reservation was on lockdown.

So she used her time to spread health safety messages on her social media platform. When travel was allowed, she drove hundreds of miles to dispense food, water and supplies to families, along with Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez. Dressed in full traditional attire — velvet shirt and skirt, moccasins, jewelry, a sash, crown, plus a mask and gloves — she continues to give out care packages in remote Navajo communities, from Oljato


From left: Eric Trevizo, a team leader for the Northern Diné COVID-19 Relief Effort, delivers necessities to people like Emily John and daughter April, both diabetic, whose home had no electricity or running water. Eugenia Charles-Newton (far right), a Navajo Nation Council delegate and a volunteer with the relief group, also helps deliver supplies.

Acts of love

Charles-Newton, the council delegate, is among the countless other women engaged in relief work. In addition to her elected duties, she volunteers with the Northern Diné COVID-19 Relief Effort, a grassroots organization that distributes essentials to local families.

The work can get intense. In late July, before driving two hours to an emergency council meeting in Window Rock, Charles-Newton threw on her safety-approved clothing (long-sleeved T-shirt, baseball cap, pants), put on her mask, jumped in her truck and picked up cases of water to deliver to a mother and daughter in Shiprock who had no running water or electricity.

Both women are diabetic and — with no refrigerator — had to buy bags of ice every day to keep their insulin cold in plastic coolers.

On other days, Charles-Newton dispenses advice. One man contacted her because he feared he’d broken tradition: His mother and sisters had tested positive and were too sick to enter the sweat lodge alone. In violation of protocols that require women and men to sweat separately, he entered the women’s sweat to look after them.

“He was very emotional,” Charles-Newton recalled. “He said, ‘This is my mother; these are my sisters. These are the matriarchs, the strong ones in my family.’” Was it wrong to help them?

“I told him, ‘Shiyáázh [my son], what you did for your mom and your sisters is not wrong — it’s an act of love.’

Caring at a cost

Acts of love, of course, can be dangerous. In late April, the Navajo Nation mourned the loss of young mother Valentina Blackhorse, 28, a former Miss Western Navajo. Her boyfriend had contracted the virus, and she’d insisted on taking care of him, the Navajo Times reported. The death of someone so young became national news. Blackhorse was described as selfless, someone who risked her life to help another.

She would not be the last. Social media and headlines announced a growing list of health care workers who’d lost their lives to COVID-19. Other women who passed away were unsung heroes — caretakers on a land of vast needs.

They’d raised sheep and goats, weaved wool, grown food and survived on lands passed down for generations, by matriarchs who came before.

Natalie Tome-Beyale tends to the corn on her Shiprock farmland.

On a recent evening, just as the sun eased to meet the horizon, Natalie Tome-Beyale tended to the crops on Farm Road in Shiprock. With her cell phone in a back pocket and a water bottle nearby, she plucked weeds growing around her family farm. She placed the water bottle five plants ahead of her to make sure she stayed hydrated; every time she reached the bottle, she took a sip.

In previous years, Tome-Beyale and her husband planted the farmland together, but this year she had to do the work alone. About six months ago, she nearly lost her husband, Herbert Beyale Jr., to the virus.

Farming has become an act of healing, she said. With every weed she pulled, the memories sprouted.

Natalie Tome-Beyale works on her farmland.

Tome-Beyale, 63, lost her father when she was a teenager. The eldest of her siblings, she looked after her three younger brothers and at 19 became their legal guardian. She married Herb at a young age, had five children and worked as an educational assistant. “Being a Navajo woman, the big thing was that you need to care for the people around you — they come first.”

Today, she said, this presents women with an entirely new quandary: Children are defying public health orders.

“It’s really sad, because the mom — the women — will not close the door on them. And because of that, it [the virus] comes into the home,” she said. “The love that women have for their children is sometimes their downfall.”

In May, the coronavirus found Tome-Beyale’s family. She had recently become a grandmother and was staying with her daughter in Rio Rancho to help with the baby. Just as she was preparing to return home to Shiprock, Herb tested positive for the virus. He’d been exposed at work.

Tome-Beyale immediately switched gears from looking after her daughter and granddaughter to caring for her husband from a distance.

When Herb developed trouble breathing, he was admitted to a local ICU and then flown to a hospital in Santa Fe. She raced there to see him, but all she could do was watch him get wheeled in from afar.

For three tormented weeks, Herb remained hospitalized and she wasn’t allowed to visit. She rented a hotel room nearby just to be close to him.

Navajo archaeologist Rena Martin at the sheep pens by a home where she’s doing surveying work.

The weave of history

History has often changed the role of Navajo women, who’ve had a role in shaping history, as well. After the Long Walk began in 1864 — and the U.S. Army brutally removed the Diné from their homelands — women were instrumental in pushing for a return home, which was secured under an 1868 treaty.

After the return, women’s roles shifted, this time because of an influx of Christian missionaries who stressed that men — not women — needed to run the home, rule the people and control the government.

It wasn’t until 1951, when legendary public health crusader Annie Dodge Wauneka was elected to the Navajo Tribal Council, that a woman became a prominent government leader, a position Wauneka used to battle tuberculosis and other scourges. To this day, women seldom win elected office.

And while Navajo women are considered sacred, they are disproportionately victimized by violence. More than four in five Native women in the United States have experienced violence in their lifetime, studies show. On some tribal lands, women are murdered at a rate up to 10 times the national average. Navajo Nation Council delegate Amber Kanazbah Crotty has spent years calling attention to the problem of missing and murdered women, pressing for solutions at home and before the U.S. Senate. Fellow Council delegate Charlaine Tso summed up the tragedy in a report to the U.S. Department of Justice.

“The Navajo Nation views women as sacred. Yet Navajo women cannot safely go for a short jog in their own communities,” she said.

From left: Gloria Hosteen gets some exercise with grandson Logan and granddaughter Destenie, at the track of the former Shiprock High School.

Answers found

The sun had just set behind the famed Shiprock pinnacle when Gloria Hosteen, 63, took a minute for herself, sitting alone on the front porch of her double-wide trailer, facing ha’a’aah, the east — the direction that signifies birth and strength. She looked to the sky, where the Holy People are said to live, and turned to prayer.

A memory suddenly came to her. She recalled sitting next to her paternal great-grandmother in her hogan years ago. Her great-grandmother and mother had taught her all she knew about ceremonies, herding sheep, weaving, preparing traditional foods and picking herbs.

“These things will come in handy someday,” her great-grandmother told her.

That day had come, Hosteen realized. Her elder had been teaching her survival tools — tools to preserve the culture and protect her family.

For nearly 15 years, Hosteen had been the full-time caretaker for her four grandchildren, ages 10 to 15. She’d felt unsure of herself, uncertain about the future of her children, her grandchildren and the Diné. Now she knew what to do.

She began teaching her granddaughters the old ways. She taught them how to tie their moccasins, tie their sash belts and wrap their traditional hair buns. She taught them about sweat lodges and ceremonies. She also began preparing for the kinaaldá for a young granddaughter, who she expects will have her coming-of-age ceremony before a COVID-19 vaccine arrives.

She felt as if she’d become a matriarch in the truest sense, tested by the pandemic the way matriarchs in the past were tested by ravages and despair. “I have to be strong to challenge these barriers, so I take it one day at a time,” she said. “I’m sure a lot of Navajo women are saying the same thing.”

And on that day on the porch, she offered a prayer to the sky. “I looked up and said, ‘Thank you, Nalí. Thank you, Mom: I will do what you advised me to do.’ All these memories came back,"


Sunnie R. Clahchischiligi is a contributing writer at Searchlight and a member of the Navajo Nation. Her work appears in the Navajo Times, The New York Times and many other publications. She is also a doctoral student and writing instructor at the University of New Mexico.

Checkpoints, Curfews, Airlifts: Virus Rips Through Navajo Nation

Police officers from the Navajo Police setting up a road block in Window Rock, Ariz., on April 3. Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

By Simon Romero -NEW YORK TIMES- April 20, 2020

WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. — When Chad Yazzie joined the Navajo Police Department just a few months ago, he expected to issue speeding tickets or break up the occasional fistfight.

But the coronavirus is now tearing across the largest Indian reservation in the United States. The Navajo Nation’s casualty count is eclipsing that of states with much larger populations, placing the rookie cop on the front lines.

“My job is to tell our people to take this virus seriously or face the consequences,” Officer Yazzie, 24, said as he set up a police roadblock outside the town of Window Rock to enforce the tribal nation’s 8 p.m. curfew.


UTAH 25 MILES COLORADO NAVAJO NATION ARIZONA
NEW MEXICO HOPI RESERVATION

Window Rock Flagstaff By The New York Times

Faced with an alarming spike in deaths from what the tribal health department calls Dikos Ntsaaígíí-19 — or Covid-19 — Navajo officials are putting up checkpoints, assembling field hospitals and threatening curfew violators with 30 days in jail or a $1,000 fine.

The measures are part of a scramble to protect more than 150,000 people on the vast Navajo reservation, which stretches 27,000 square miles across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, and tens of thousands of others who live in towns bordering the Navajo Nation. As of Wednesday night, the virus had killed 20 people on the reservation, compared with 16 in the entire state of New Mexico, which has a population 13 times larger.

Image“My job is to tell our people to take this virus seriously or face the consequences,” said Chad Yazzie, an officer with the Navajo Police Department.Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Navajo officials, who have traced the surge in the reservation’s coronavirus cases to a March 7 rally held by an evangelical church, warn that infections will rise in the weeks ahead, potentially reaching a peak in about a month.

Several factors — including a high prevalence of diseases like diabetes, scarcity of running water, and homes with several generations living under the same roof — have enabled the virus to spread with exceptional speed, according to epidemiologists.

SOLIDARITY IN UNEMPLOYMENT
Online communities are set up by unemployed workers to help navigate the nightmare of crashed websites and confusing regulations.


While the Navajo Nation may not technically be at war with the virus, it does not feel at peace either.

The Arizona National Guard this month began airlifting protective masks, gowns and other equipment, using Blackhawk helicopters to deliver it to Kayenta, a town of 5,200 people near the sandstone buttes of Monument Valley.

Guard members also converted a community center in Chinle into a 50-bed field hospital for quarantining people who have tested positive for the virus. And personnel visited a triage tent set up by Tuba City, near the Navajo Nation’s western edge.

Going further, Navajo authorities said their entire nation would be under curfew for 57 continuous hours, from Friday at 8 p.m. until Monday at 5 a.m. The holiday weekend offers the opportunity to practice extreme social distancing, the authorities said. Unlike many stay-at-home orders around the nation, the Navajo curfews are being enforced with checkpoints and patrols. Violators can face jail time and hefty fines.

Fearing pushback, the chief of the Navajo Police, Phillip Francisco, said that anyone knowingly exposing officers to the coronavirus would be charged with battery against a police officer.


Factors like a high prevalence of diabetes, a scarcity of running water and multigenerational living arrangements have enabled the virus to spread with exceptional speed through the Navajo Nation.Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
The Navajo Nation’s president, Jonathan Nez, who has begun wearing a mask in public, said in a telephone interview that authorities were working under the assumption that the reservation’s peak in cases could be about a month away, in early to mid-May.

Mr. Nez said he was growing exasperated with delays in receiving federal emergency funds and by the requirements that tribal nations, unlike cities and counties, must apply for grants to receive money from federal stimulus legislation. The extra hurdles have led to weeks of additional bureaucratic delays, he said.

“We’re barely getting bits and pieces,” Mr. Nez said. “You have counties, municipalities, already taking advantage of these funds, and tribes are over here writing our applications and turning it in and waiting weeks to get what we need.”

The crisis among the Diné, as many Navajos prefer to call themselves, is echoing throughout Indian Country. Around the United States, and especially in New Mexico, tribal leaders have started barring nonresidents from reservations. In South Dakota, the Oglala Sioux tribe announced a 72-hour lockdown after a resident of the Pine Ridge reservation tested positive for the coronavirus. The Blackfeet and the Northern Cheyenne tribal nations in Montana have announced curfews.

The Hopi reservation, which is surrounded entirely by the Navajo Nation and includes some of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the United States, issued its own stay-at-home order. Signaling vulnerabilities elsewhere in the Southwest, large clusters of cases emerged this week in San Felipe Pueblo and Zia Pueblo, two of New Mexico’s 23 federally recognized tribal nations.


A grocery store on the Navajo reservation in Window Rock, Ariz.Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Native American leaders say they are also dealing with the potential for racist attacks as outsiders try to cast blame for the pandemic on tribal citizens.

Police in Page, an Arizona town bordering the Navajo Nation, said this week that they had arrested a 34-year-old man, Daniel Franzen, on suspicion of attempting to incite an act of terrorism. Mr. Franzen in a Facebook post had called for using “lethal force” against Navajos because they were, in his view, “100 percent infected” with the virus, the Page Police Department said in a statement.

Infectious disease specialists say the virus is thought to have arrived on the reservation later than in other parts of the United States. It began spreading rapidly after it was detected among members of the Church of the Nazarene, an evangelical congregation in the outpost of Chilchinbeto near the Arizona-Utah border.

Families traveled from far-flung parts of the Navajo Nation to attend the rally, which included a prayer service in response to the pandemic already spreading in parts of the country.

Dr. Laura Hammitt, director of the infectious disease prevention program at the Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health, listed several factors that have made citizens of the Navajo Nation especially vulnerable to the coronavirus.

The scarcity of running water on the reservation, she said, makes it harder to wash hands. There are also pre-existing health conditions, including respiratory problems caused by indoor pollution because of the wood and coal used to heat many Navajo homes.


Facing a spike in deaths, Navajo officials are scrambling to respond. Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Exceptionally close-knit families, which have helped the Navajos endure extreme hardships, may also now heighten exposure to the virus.

“Instead of urban crowding in high-density cities like New York, you have indoor crowding with several generations living under the same roof,” she said.

That explains the special need for field hospitals where patients who have tested positive for the virus can recuperate away from their families. Officials are also searching for ways to mitigate the spread of the virus in the so-called border towns where many Diné live.

For instance, in addition to the field hospitals assembled by the Arizona National Guard, the iconic El Rancho Hotel in the town of Gallup near the Navajo Nation is planning to house homeless people who have developed respiratory problems in one of its buildings.

Despite such measures, fear is building on parts of the reservation, and some are taking it upon themselves to protect their families.

In a culture prizing communal contact, Julian Parrish, a computer science high school teacher in Chinle, said he and his girlfriend had taken the unusual step of going on Facebook to request that visitors refrain from coming to their home unannounced.

Mr. Parrish, 34, explained that he is prediabetic, his girlfriend is pregnant and her son has asthma that sometimes requires trips to the emergency room.

“We don’t want to go anywhere near the hospital at this time,” Mr. Parrish said. “No one knows where the hell this virus is going next.”


The 200-strong Navajo Nation police force is now charged with enforcing the 8 p.m. curfew every night in towns and along lonely stretches of road that connect far-flung homesteads and sheep ranches.Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

As the death count climbs, the virus is drawing grim comparisons with previous epidemics that shaped the history of the Diné. From the start of the European conquest, outbreaks of smallpox, bubonic plague and typhus ravaged the tribe.

A century ago, the influenza pandemic of 1918 spread to the most remote corners of the reservation, killing thousands. Estimates put the mortality rate as high as 10 percent; accounts from that time described how some survivors died from starvation with no one left to care for them.

More recently, a hantavirus outbreak in the region in 1993 stirred fear across the Navajo Nation. The virus, carried by deer mice, left 13 dead including young, otherwise healthy people who developed sudden respiratory failure.

Despite the rising death toll from the newest virus, epidemiologists say the Diné may have advantages in the mitigation fight that other tribal nations do not.

They point to the nation’s relatively large number of diabetes specialists, who could help with outreach or trace the spread of the virus. Robust civil society groups within the reservation have also sprung into action, with volunteers replenishing water tanks for hundreds of families.

As one of the largest tribal nations in the United States, the Diné, who number more than 330,000 on the reservation and beyond, can also draw on resources unavailable to other tribes.

That includes the 200-strong police force now charged with enforcing the curfew every night in towns and along lonely stretches of road that connect far-flung homesteads and sheep ranches.

“We have to get the situation under control,” Officer Yazzie said, between chasing down curfew violators, writing citations and telling motorists over a loudspeaker to “just go home” where it was safe.

“If we don’t do this,” he said, “it’s our own families at risk.”


Navajo officials warn that infections will surge in the weeks ahead, potentially reaching a peak in about a month.Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Simon Romero is a national correspondent based in Albuquerque, covering immigration and other issues. He was previously the bureau chief in Brazil and in Caracas, Venezuela, and reported on the global energy industry from Houston. @viaSimonRomero

A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2020, Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: Navajos Race to Shield Reservation After a Sharp Rise in Deaths. 


SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=NAVAJO

Opinion

From Water to Uranium, the US Government Continues to Fail the Navajo Nation

Kianna Pete
Fri, February 2, 2024 

Guest Opinion. The Navajo Nation is the largest land reservation held by the Diné (Navajo People) in the United States–larger than ten states. Despite this, 30% of the families in the Navajo Nation live without running water, and the opening of a uranium mine poses more risks for Native communities surrounding the Grand Canyon area. The Navajo Nation, who experience the hardships of limited access to water and uranium contamination, are advocating for change. Yet, the US government is doing little to help. 

In 2023, the US Supreme Court ruled in Arizona v. Navajo Nation that according to the 1868 treaty establishing the Navajo Nation reservation, the United States is not obligated to provide access to water for the tribe. According to the opinion of the court delivered by Justice Kavanaugh, “In the Tribe’s view, the 1868 treaty imposed a duty on the United States to take affirmative steps to secure water for the Navajos. With respect, the Tribe is incorrect. The 1868 treaty “set apart” a reservation for the “use and occupation of the Navajo tribe.” But it contained no “rights-creating or duty-imposing” language that imposed a duty on the United States to take affirmative steps to secure water for the Tribe.”

This decision was anything but respectful. It reversed the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which sided with the Navajo Nation’s claim to urge the Secretary of the US Department of Interior, Deb Haaland, to develop a plan meeting the water needs of the Navajo Nation and ensure shared tribal water rights in the Colorado River.

Moreover, the ruling based its decision on the 1868 treaty but failed to acknowledge the centuries of settler colonialism and scorched earth campaigns that destroyed the water resources of the Navajo people. Instead, the treaty history accounted for by the court omits the violent acts committed by the US government and utilizes language from the treaty that blames the Diné peoples for their condition.

Arizona v. Navajo Nation is not just a case about the affirmative duty to provide water but also includes other resources destroyed by the US government. Ironically, the court declares this themselves saying that “under the treaty, the United States has no duty to farm the land, mine the minerals, or harvest the timber on the reservation—or, for that matter, to build roads and bridges on the reservation.” Regardless, uranium mining and transport are still in effect on the Navajo Nation.

On December 21, 2023, Energy Fuels, a lead producer of US uranium mining, announced the production of the Pinyon Plain Mine located near the Grand Canyon and Sacred Red Butte, also known as the sacred lands of the Havasupai and cultural property of the 11 Associated Tribes of the Grand Canyon. The mine poses a threat to the main water sources of these tribes yet Energy Fuels claims to be “the highest-grade uranium mine, with “state-of-the-art groundwater protections.” Only a few weeks after this announcement, the Havasupai Tribal Council released a statement on January 12, 2024, declaring that Energy Fuels contaminated one of two aquifers and sprayed toxic water that spread to surrounding plants and animals.

The tribe also raised concerns about the dangers of uranium transport. Haul No!, an Indigenous-led community organizing group leading efforts to halt the production of the mine, confirmed that Energy Fuels plans to “haul up to 12 trucks per day, each carrying 30 tons of uranium from the mine to the mill. This violates Navajo Nation law which prohibits the transport of new uranium across Diné lands.” This law is a result of previous US mining extraction, in which over 1,000 abandoned mines remain in the Navajo Nation that contaminated water resources and even caused deaths.

The violation of tribal law and reinterpretation of treaty rights is a unilateral power only acceptable to the US government. On one hand, the Supreme Court claimed the US couldn’t break a treaty negotiation to provide water. On the other hand, the US mining industry disregards tribal law to transport uranium. What is the use of being the largest land reservation if two legal systems cannot protect you? From water to uranium, the US government ignores systems of governance that do not favor their interests. They fail to take accountability for destroying and extracting resources from the Navajo Nation. Unlike the Navajo Nation, the United States has the liberty to choose when it can or can’t be held liable for its intervention with tribal communities.

In an election year where Native voters are pivotal to key races in states like Arizona, how are voters supposed to trust a government that disregards water rights and tribal law? Additionally, who are Native voters going to vote for when the Biden Administration is not keeping their promises to tribal communities after just signing a proclamation designating a million acres of land near the Grand Canyon as a national monument to protect the sacred lands of the Navajo Nation and Havasupai Indian Reservation. Should these tribal communities continue to put their hopes in the ballot box?

As a Diné citizen working with her community from afar, this is a tricky question to answer as I think of my relatives who are unaware of these legal barriers and will be directly affected by the Pinyon Plain Mine. I do know, however, that my hope for a more sustainable future for the Navajo Nation is in the Diné organizing groups who continue to resist and advocate for the connected right to life and water. Although the US government may fail us time and time again, what has remained since the 1868 treaty is the love for our home, Diné Bikéyah. My Diné relatives and all Indigenous communities should be living in harmony with their homelands, not having to fight for their existence inside it.

Kianna Pete (Diné) is an Indigenous Education and Policy Research Associate at the American Institutes for Research and Political Education Specialist at Start Empowerment. She is a graduate student at Columbia University and part-time volunteer with NoHaul!  

About the Author: "Elyse Wild is senior editor for Native News Online and Tribal Business News. "

Contact: ewild@indiancountrymedia.com

FEMA field hospitals expand Navajo Nation's COVID-19 response

Care on the Navajo Nation has been expanded with recovery centers built by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA as the COVID-19 pandemic sickens more reservation residents. Photo via FB Live, courtesy of the Navajo Nation.
DENVER, April 24 (UPI) -- Expecting the cases of COVID-19 on the Navajo Nation to peak in mid-May, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Federal Emergency Management Agency are constructing three reservation field hospitals to be used as alternative care sites, the tribe said Friday.

"COVID-positive patients will be kept here isolated so they can recover here and then go home," said the nation's President Jonathan Nez said in a live video feed from the Miyamura High School gymnasium in Gallop, N.M., which had been converted into a 60-bed recovery center.

"It looks nice, but believe me, you don't want to end up here, you don't want to be away from your family for a long time. ... We're preparing for a worst-case scenario," Nez said.

Two other care sites are being built in Chinle, Ariz., and Shiprock, N.M., Nez said.

RELATED Navajo Nation extends shelter-in-place order for COVID-19 outbreak

The reservation, with a population of around 175,000 people, has been a national hotspot for reported positive cases of the coronavirus. Its an infection rate is higher than any state except New York and New Jersey, according to state health care department statistics.

The Navajo Epidemiology Center has reported 78 new cases confirmed positive cases since Wednesday, reaching a total of 1,360.

Fifty-two deaths on the reservation have been attributed to the virus, and about 7,500 tests have been completed. The average age of positive virus patients was 43, and the average age of death was 65, the health agency said.

RELATED Navajo leaders self-quarantine after COVID-19 exposure

As the reservation prepares for a third weekend curfew and stay-at-home orders, the tribal government on Thursday organized a drive-through distribution of care packages, food supplies and firewood to about 250 remote reservation residents in Jeddito, Ariz.

The Window Rock, Ariz.,-based Navajo Times newspaper has published a list of resources and non-profit groups that were providing emergency relief to tribal members.

The Navajo Nation, about the size of the state of West Virginia, has only 13 grocery stores, and about 30 percent of residents lack running water or electricity.

RELATED Solar-powered cisterns bring running water to Navajo homes

The Hopi Nation, located within the Navajo Nation, has three villages with no running water, Cassandra Begay, communications director for the non-profit Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund, said in a video.

The group has delivered 1,500 food baskets across the two reservations and is coordinating volunteers to sew masks for residents, especially the elderly.

"In many homes on the reservation, there are multi-generational families that live there," Jessica Stago, who coordinates water for the relief effort, said in a statement. "The virus is attacking this important family unit by spreading among entire families who cannot isolate from each other," she said.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the Navajo Nation joined a multi-tribe lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that asks the U.S. Treasury Department to exclude 230 Alaska Native corporations from the $8 billion in federal COVID-19 relief of CARES Act funds.

Three Sioux tribes, the Cheyenne River, Oglala and Rosebud Sioux, and others, including three Alaskan native tribes, say the corporations are for-profit entities, owned by shareholders, many of them non-Indian.

"Allocating funds from the Coronavirus Relief Fund to the Alaska Native corporations will severely impact the Navajo Nation's ability to fight COVID-19, and will impact every other tribe, as well," Navajo President Nez said in a statement.

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=NAVAJO

Navajo Nation communities clean up after heavy flooding washes out roads, damages homes

Arlyssa D. Becenti,
Arizona Republic
Fri, August 19, 2022

Residents of several Navajo Nation communities are cleaning up after heavy rains flooded homes in what chapter officials say are some of the worst conditions they've seen in years.

Powerful storms hit the community of Sheep Springs, New Mexico, which sits in the foothills of the Chuska Mountains. Unlike the Chuskas, Sheep Springs isn’t covered with trees or greenery, but is mostly dry, with little vegetation, and covered with sand and brown hills.

Sheep Springs chapter president Brian Yazzie said although the community has experienced flooding before, it's not been at the severity they had seen in recent weeks. The extent of the flooding in the area was captured in a video, taken by a community member and shared on social media, that shows flowing water covering a large part of the astonished family’s property and rising halfway up to their horse trailer.

“We’ve had smaller floods, but we never come across anything like this,” said Yazzie. “We are fortunate we didn't lose anyone in the community, that is the most important thing. Everyone was accounted for.”

He said there have been 15 families affected by the flood in a community with a little less than 1,000 in population. The chapter has received donations from different entities, and has distributed water and food to families in the area.

"This flooding did a lot of damage," said Yazzie. "Its something you don't really expect. Previous flooding we'd get water washing out the road or come near some residents, but this one actually went through a couple of houses. We weren't prepared for something like this. It has opened up our eyes at the chapter to better prepare for something like this."

On Aug. 1, the Navajo Nation Commission on Emergency Management declared a state of emergency due to flooding caused by the monsoon rains. The declaration allows local chapters to access additional resources to help mitigate the effects of heavy rainfall. Emergency Management officials strongly recommend that all Navajo Nation entities implement their emergency response plans and funding.

Tribal leaders visited Sheep Springs the day after the flooding. President Jonathan Nez said the tribe has seen heavy rain throughout the past few weeks and officials are working to make sure everyone is safe, stressing that the priority is the health and well-being of residents.

Nez said they visited the family who posted the video of the flood and he said they were in good spirits. Officials brought food and water and said the family’s home didn’t wash out, but they found damage to the bottom of their trailer. Items belonging to the family were damaged or washed away, but they told Nez were thankful no one was hurt.

Nez said they will have to re-evaluate the flood plain of the area where several other families live

“Sheep Springs had a significant amount of rain,” said Nez. “We had a heavy downpour, hail, the water that came out of the mountains went into the lower areas of the Navajo Nation and that includes Arizona and New Mexico.”

Navajo Nation: Family of murdered Navajo woman want justice in her death

Although prayers for rain to end the drought on the Navajo Nation have been made, the rain is creating a lot of road damage and property damage, said Nez. He said that in Chilchinbito, a community near Kayenta, the Navajo Department of Emergency Management had to rescue an elderly couple who were stranded on an impassable road.

“Our message has been to be prepared for the heavy rains,” said Nez. “Throughout the week, we are going to be seeing more rain. We are letting everyone know to prepare. If you don’t need to travel don’t go out.”

Delivering wood to elders throughout the Navajo Nation has been nearly impossible because roads have been washed out due to the flooding, according to Loren Anthony from the volunteer group Chizh for Cheii.

He said the new truck the organization got to haul wood in has been stuck in the mud numerous times and now the check engine light is on. Getting stuck in the mud is becoming a day-to-day norm for people who live miles off the main road and whose roads to their homes aren’t paved, which is most Navajo citizens.

“It’s only exposed more problems we have on Navajo Nation,” said Anthony. “There’s a lot of rural Navajos in these areas that need assistance. We have zero preparedness on Navajo Nation. Zero emergency management preparedness for anyone. There’s no education. No training. We are handing out PPEs like crazy. Cover your face, making these announcements, but when it comes to everyday life on Navajo how do you prepare yourself for something like this?”

Chinle, with about 3,500 in population and one of the largest communities on the Navajo Nation, has also experienced some intense difficulties during the monsoon flooding this month, according to Shawna Claw, Chinle chapter vice president and Chinle Unified School District board member.

“Recently during the monsoon, we have had flooding that has displaced families within our school district,” said Claw, referring to teachers' homes that had been hit by flooding earlier this month. “We had families moving at midnight. A lot of our families had to be put into hotel arrangements for the weekend. A lot of the families are moved out to the vacant housing.”

Arizona weather: Storm damage, power outages close schools, roads

Roads in the community have been affected, making it challenging not just for regular cars but for school buses. Claw said AmeriCorps volunteers are helping with calls they are receiving from communities dealing with flooding.

Earlier this year, a restored and improved 2-mile berm along the west side of the Chinle wash was completed. The project's primary purpose is to help prevent flooding in the local residential areas, which have experienced significant water damage in the past from monsoon rains and spring runoff from the Chuska Mountains.

Like Sheep Springs, the severity of the flooding in Chinle has been caught on video and posted on social media, where it has become widely viewed. In one video, a red four-door pickup truck is seen stuck in mud and water after driving through the flooded wash near Canyon de Chelly. Claw said the vehicle doesn't belong to any local resident and said the video is disappointing and reflects badly of the community.

“Those types of things are hard to take in especially when it paints a derogatory picture for our community,” said Claw of the truck. “That vehicle was not a community resident, or a chapter vehicle, it was actually a conservation group under the National Park Service doing trail work. I think people can be educated with that. When people see those precautions of not going into the water, I think people need to take that seriously.”

She said in all her years living in Chinle, this year's monsoon has brought flooding that have risen the highest within the washes and moved more swiftly. She said climate change that the Navajo Nation is experiencing plays a large factor in what is happening.

“Navajo Nation really needs to open their eyes in being better prepared for climate changes,” said Claw. “It’s real. It’s an actual event that is happening. We need to educate our community members. We need a better emergency response plan to be implemented across the Navajo Nation.”

Despite the flooding bringing challenges into communities, Yazzie and Claw both said they have gotten assistance from other community officials who have offered their help.

"Navajo Nation is expansive but we have a great network of K'é (kinship) happening," said Claw. "Where people feel comfortable to ask for help and in return we are trying our best to help others too."

Weather warnings remain in effect for the Navajo Nation this week due to periods of intense rainfall. If chapters need assistance with response efforts, they can email the Navajo Nation Division of Community Development at MonsoonRelief@NavajoChapters.org.

Arlyssa D. Becenti covers Indigenous affairs for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Send ideas and tips to arlyssa.becenti@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter @ABecenti.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Navajo Nation communities try to clean up from damaging floods

NAVAJO NATION
She's a doctor on the front lines of the coronavirus. At home, she has no running water.

Chiara Sottile and Erik Ortiz,NBC News•April 19, 2020

Every third day, someone from Dr. Michelle Tom's family navigates their pickup truck 14 miles over the pothole-pocked dirt roads of the Navajo Nation to a community center. There, for about $95 a week, her family fills their water tank and hauls it back home to the double-wide trailer she shares with seven relatives in northeastern Arizona.

Or at least that's how Tom was getting water before she had to cut off physical contact with her family because of the coronavirus pandemic that has raged across tribal communities. For now, she is living with a co-worker to maintain her distance and prevent spread.

Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

"I haven't hugged anyone in weeks," said Tom, who spends her days treating COVID-19 patients at the Winslow Indian Health Care Center urgent care facility in Winslow, Arizona, as well as on the Navajo reservation.
 

IMAGE: Dr. Michelle Tom (Courtesy Dr. Michelle Tom)

Tom is one of the few doctors in her Navajo community on the front lines of the pandemic, and she has taken every precaution to try to stay healthy, including buying her own protective suit, goggles and face shield. But long before the virus started threatening her people, she was already facing a different sort of crisis: limited access to running water, a severely understaffed and underfunded health care system and underlying health conditions among her patients.

Now, a month after the tribe's first confirmed case of the coronavirus, the Navajo Nation, which stretches across parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, has reached a grim milestone. At least 1,197 Navajo residents have tested positive for the coronavirus, while 44 have died, officials said.

With a steady increase in cases, people on the Navajo Nation are testing positive for the coronavirus at a rate more than nine times higher than people in the entire state of Arizona, based on reported cases and 2010 census data.

The coronavirus is exposing underlying fractures in the infrastructure of Indian Country, including health care and basic needs, like water, that have long been underfunded and, some say, ignored by the federal government.

For more on the Navajo Nation, watch "TODAY" on Monday morning.

"You're saying 20 seconds of wash your hands with water," Tom said recently. "We have to haul our water. ... We do not have plumbing. And that's how I grew up."

An estimated 30 percent of homes on the Navajo reservation, which has roughly 175,000 residents, don't have access to clean, reliable drinking water and have to haul it from local utilities, according to the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources.

"There are times when it is closed for three days," Tom said.

When that happens, her family has to make another trip on another day. That is no small task, as the Navajo Nation is under curfew orders to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

"I feel fortunate that my family can do that," Tom said. "There are some families who don't have a water truck."

IMAGE: Public tap in Thoreau, N.M. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

Tom, who practices family medicine, says that even without the strain of the pandemic, she doesn't have the resources she needs to provide adequate medical care and has access to only two ventilators.

"We cater to 17,000 Navajo, and people come from Apache, Hopi, as far as three hours away," Tom said. "Our resources are limited. Rural medicine is hard enough. We've always been short-staffed in general."

As stipulated in treaties with Indian tribes, the U.S. government has an obligation to provide health care to all Native Americans.

"Because of the land that the tribes ceded to the United States, the United States has a trust responsibility to Indian tribes, and health care is one of those," said Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., who fought to include Native American tribes in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, a $2 trillion stimulus package passed in March.

The legislation provides $8 billion for Native American and Alaska Native tribes, although the National Congress of American Indians, a public education and advocacy group, estimated that tribes would need $20 billion. Initially, Haaland said, the White House allocated no direct relief for tribes.

Despite the United States' obligation, a 2018 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that health care spending per person by the Indian Health Service was $3,332 — only a little over one-third of federal health care spending per person nationwide.

"The scarcity of the things that a lot of people take for granted, like water and electricity, is a true struggle for many, many people here," said Dr. Jarred McAteer, who practices internal medicine at Tuba City Regional Health Care Corporation in Arizona.

McAteer said his hospital has been running at capacity for weeks and has had to repurpose parts of the facility to care for coronavirus patients, many from the Navajo Nation.

Download the NBC News app for full coverage and alerts about the coronavirus outbreak

"It's really hard to follow [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's] recommendations of washing your hands if access to water is a challenge and that water is supposed to be used for drinking, for cooking, for livestock," McAteer said, noting that many Navajo families would typically have to reuse water in a wash basin at home.

Tom and McAteer agree that the lack of infrastructure — from water to electricity to paved roads — coupled with high incidences of underlying health conditions are partly why Indian Country is being hit so hard by the coronavirus.

Moreover, Native Americans require treatment for alcohol and drug use at a rate almost twice the national average, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Last week, after a request from the Navajo Nation government, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham suspended alcohol sales at gas stations, convenience stores and grocery stores near the reservation to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. (Even before the pandemic, alcohol sales were banned on the Navajo Nation itself.)

Navajo officials have been inundated with calls and emails from concerned family members who say their loved ones who battle alcoholism have been drinking during the pandemic, sharing bottles and not practicing social distancing, Navajo Nation Vice President Myron Lizer said in a statement.



It's a struggle Navajo tribe member Allie Young, 30, knows all too well.

After her younger brother died by suicide 11 years ago, her older brother started drinking and now suffers from alcoholism, she said.

"We're constantly on the phone with my brother and uncles who struggle with alcoholism and about why they have to stay away," said Young, standing beside her grandfather's horse pasture. "They have to think about the elders."

Young, who had left the Southwest for Los Angeles to work in the film and entertainment industry, returned home to her family when the coronavirus outbreak worsened. She started a Facebook group called "Protect the Sacred," hosting livestreams and leveraging her network of celebrities, such as actors Paul Rudd and Mark Ruffalo, to share recommendations for staying safe at home and away from tribal elders.

"They carry a lot of the knowledge and ceremonies that we, the young people, are still learning," Young said with her hand on her heart, adding, "Our cultures are in jeopardy right now if we lose our elders."

A big shout out to these amazing Navajo Youth, putting a great spin to the #DontRushChallenge 💚 https://t.co/AdgDWPTMzr
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) April 7, 2020

Growing up, Young spent her summers at her grandparents' home on the reservation in Arizona, where there was no running water or electricity.

Like many Navajo families, many of Young's relatives live together in a multigenerational home, which makes elders even more vulnerable during the pandemic as people are told to shelter in place and practice social distancing.

"When you have family members struggling with alcoholism and then they come home to a packed household, and then you go to a health facility that doesn't have enough resources, [personal protective equipment] or ventilators to help," Young said, "it's just a recipe for disaster."

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=NAVAJO