Community Care: An Indigenous Response to Coronavirus

By Jade Begay, Yes! Magazine

06 April 20

n March 11, the World Health Organization announced that the coronavirus, COVID-19, is a global pandemic. With this news, it is easy and also legitimate for us to feel stress, concern, and even fear. As Indigenous peoples whose ancestors were intentionally exposed to viruses, this moment can also feel triggering and bring up ancestral trauma and even distrust and disbelief. What’s more, we live in a toxic individualistic society, a symptom of colonization and capitalism, wherein the status quo has lost its concern for the collective. 

Unfortunately, we are seeing some toxic individualism play out in response to the recent COVID-19 pandemic.  Some are hoarding materials and resources, while others respond dismissively to the pandemic with things like, “I’ll be OK; the virus is only a threat to the elderly and those with weakened immune systems,” or even going as for as framing the virus as being a good thing for the environment, as emissions go down.

According to the World Health Organization, a pandemic is declared when a new disease for which people do not have immunity spreads around the world beyond expectations. To break that down further, the symptoms of the virus have not changed or gotten worse, but rather, it’s the spread of the virus that makes this a pandemic and the fact that most people across the world do not have an immunity built for this virus, which, of course, contributes to how fast it is spreading. 

As a new strain of coronavirus, which has already existed in some different forms, doctors and health officials worldwide are still trying to get a grasp of what this outbreak of COVID-19 will entail, and how to get ahead of it. What we do know so far is that COVID-19 is especially brutal and even lethal for the elderly, for those with weakened immune systems, and those with preexisting conditions. We also know that it is spreading quickly, and as a result, a growing number of events are being canceled, while some towns hit especially hard are even going into quarantine. 

Needless to say, as Indigenous people, our elders are precious and sacred to us.  They are keepers of knowledge, and they sit at the center of so many of our cultural spaces and ceremonies. While COVID-19 might not hit all of us hard, we all have a responsibility to protect our cherished elders and those who are also vulnerable and valuable members of our communities. 

The simple truth is that this disease is causing suffering and inequity across the world, to people’s bodies, their livelihoods, their spirits and emotional well-being. Furthermore, we are only as strong as the most vulnerable person in our community, so now, more than ever, it is imperative for us to decolonize from individualism and reconnect with ways of community care. 

As stated earlier, the circumstances we are in can lead to paranoia and fear because our peoples have endured germ warfare in the past, and we’ve been misled if not outright harmed by colonial systems. While this pandemic is not being maliciously introduced to our communities, we would be remiss not to acknowledge this truth and also acknowledge that our communities are at the frontlines of inequities in health care. 

So we do not get lost or spiral into fear and stress, which can actually compromise our immune systems, we draw from our beautiful survival and our timeless knowledge, and share some traditional practices that may support our spirits in this time. We encourage you to share these with the people around you to help mitigate stress and overwhelm: 

1. Smudge and Stay Grounded

Here at NDN Collective, we start our days by smudging and grounding ourselves as we prepare to face the important daily tasks in front of us.  In moments like this, a daily smudging ritual can help ground us in prayer and spiritual fortitude. This practice gives us a moment to slow down, acknowledge what we are grateful for, release tension, and call in protection and strength. Furthermore, rituals are important to keep us anchored in our truth and in our power.

2. Connect with Traditional Medicines and Knowledge 

It’s true that our relatives and ancestors endured germ warfare at the hands of the U.S. military while suffering great losses. What’s also true is that we survived, and our connection to traditional knowledge and medicine has played a role in that survival. 

During this time when we are having to practice “social distancing,” it is a perfect time to dive into learning about your traditional medicines, whether that be tinctures and syrups, traditional foods, plant medicines, fermentation, and so on. Connect with friends and relatives and learn from each other. Use technology so you can talk about your learnings and experiments virtually, in making these medicines via text, video, or FaceTime. 

Here are just a handful of traditional medicines that support immune and respiratory systems and are also anti-viral:  Osha, fire cider, garlic, elderberry, lemon balm, and oregano. 

3. Build Community

When we are able to quiet all the worries, the media, and public frenzy of this time and think about the big picture, we can see that this moment is an opportunity to come together in community, in care and preparation. Grave threats like climate change are real and these types of scenarios may become more frequent and perhaps more extreme. This is why building with community is critical for how we respond to these types of events. 

In times like this, we need to identify who in our community is most vulnerable and strategize the best ways to protect them. We need to think about food security, and not in a capitalist and individualistic sense, but in a collective sense. We need to reflect on some important questions, such as: Are we growing crops in the summer to store and feed our communities during times like this? What are our most fundamental values that our community has to draw upon in high stress moments like this? How do we make decisions? And how do we not turn on each other? 

This is all decolonial work: getting back to community and even matriarchy, honoring the interdependence of all beings, and valuing the collective over our own ego. 

We are learning from communities that are at ground zero of devastation, such as Italy and Washington state, that “social distancing” is a critical strategy in curbing the spread of this new disease. For Native communities “social distancing” can be challenging because many of us live closely with our relatives, our elders, and our young ones, often in the same household, so this strategy will require some “Indige-nueity” and conversations as a community for how to care for elders and each other.

In closing, we will survive COVID-19. And by the time the pandemic has been managed, we will have learned so much from this moment and how we can better prepare for these types of scenarios; we will see where we have gaps in our communities, cities, nations, and where we have strengths. When all of this has stabilized, we encourage you to not to forget the feelings and the lessons that this moment is giving each and everyone one of us. Write them down so as to not forget this moment.

We can not go back to business as usual after this experience. We have to apply what we learned to our lives, to our politics, and to our relationships, so that if and when this happens again, whether it’s a pandemic or a climate catastrophe, we can be fully prepared as communities. This might look like voting in November, or working for Medicare For All in your state or region, or working within your community to build gardens and food banks, bringing in renewable energy so we are not dependent on grids or oil and gas. 

This moment can feel scary and strange. But again, when you quiet worries and the fears, moments like this really urge us to become strong, innovative, holistic-minded, and resilient peoples.

A Conservationist's Guide to "Tiger King": Keep Wildlife in the Wild

By Zak Smith, Natural Resources Defense Council

06 April 20

t is pretty amazing that in this moment when the COVID-19 outbreak has much of the country holed up in their homes binging Netflix, the most watched show in America over the last few weeks has been focused on wildlife trade — which scientists believe is the source of the COVID-19 pandemic. Make no mistake: Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness is about wildlife trade and other aspects of wildlife exploitation, just as surely as the appearance of Ebola, SARS, MERS, avian flu and probably COVID-19 in humans is a result of wildlife exploitation. As a conservationist, this is one of the things I've been thinking about while watching Tiger King. Here are five more:

1. We are in a biodiversity crisis. 

A million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction, many within decades, including tigers. The leading drivers of species decline and the impending collapse of ecosystems are ocean and land use changes (like converting wildlands into other uses, usually agricultural) and the direct exploitation of species (like taking animals out of the wild for eating, "medicinal" purposes, or status motives). It is for these exact reasons that there are more tigers in cages in the United States than there are in the wild. Developers continue to destroy tiger habitat and, in the not-so-distant past, hunters shot and killed tigers for sport or for trade in tiger products (and some still do illegally).

2. We must fundamentally change our relationship to nature. 

Transformative change is necessary to limit species extinctions and secure human well-being (functioning ecosystems provide the clean air, clean water, carbon sequestration, flood control, healthy soils, pollination of plants and healthy coastal waters humans need to survive). Transformative change in this context means "a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic, and social factors, including paradigms, goals, and values." We aren't going to halt the loss of species and strengthen ecosystems if we continue to treat wild plants and animals as expendable and renewable resources that we can use however we want. The tigers and other animals in Tiger King are exploited for profit and personal interests. Regardless of how they may be respected, coveted, or cared for, they are still treated as exploitable objects, which reinforces other destructive attitudes toward nature. A tiger cub is something to be held and photographed, a wetland is something to be filled and built upon, a rhino is something to be killed so we can use its horn for fake medicine. It's a view of nature as being in service to human wants, an attitude that is destroying our planet and one that must change.

3. Most wildlife trade should be banned and we should protect more wild places. 

As noted above, ocean and land use changes and direct exploitation of species are causing an extinction crisis and threaten the ecosystems we depend on for human well-being. In line with our exploitative mindset, we've been stuck for centuries with economic and social patterns that allow unfettered use of wild places and wildlife until there's a problem. We need to flip that model on its head and only use wild places and wildlife if we can affirmatively demonstrate that such use won't contribute to the biodiversity and climate crisis. Tigers and the other animals appearing in Tiger King wouldn't be endangered today and wouldn't require "sanctuaries" if we hadn't destroyed their habitat and taken them from the wild for food, pets, "medicine" and trophies.

To set things right, we should ban most wildlife trade and protect more of the natural world. I say "most" wildlife trade to account for the exception of well-managed fisheries. NRDC has long sought to limit irresponsible wildlife trade (fighting for imperiled species internationally, supporting state efforts to limit trade, providing recommendations to China on revisions to its wildlife law), and now we must go further by banning most trade. In addition, we should support efforts to set aside vast swaths of ocean, land and terrestrial water to rebalance the functioning of our natural world. That's why NRDC and others support an initial call of protecting 30 percent of the world's oceans, lands and water areas by 2030. In China, we're protecting areas in a way that helps tigers by supporting the government's development of a National Park system, with targeted efforts on one of its pilot parks, the Northeast Tiger and Leopard National Park, which provides an important habitat for China's struggling populations of Amur tigers and leopards.

4. Not all sanctuaries are sanctuaries. 

A lot of so-called sanctuaries are dumpster fires; they serve no purpose other than exploitation of animals for profit, and the animals suffer needlessly. It doesn't look like the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park — the park formerly owned by Joe Exotic — is a sanctuary, though it styles itself as being one, so the public may be confused. According to the International Fund for Animal Welfare, legitimate sanctuaries "do not breed, allow public contact with, sell, or otherwise exploit the animals that they take in." Legitimate sanctuaries can play an important role in saving imperiled species, promoting animal welfare, and educating the public. But those that do not meet strict standards are part of the problem, not the solution. The Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries (GFAS) provides accreditation for sanctuaries that abide by a set of policies, including the maintenance of a nonprofit/noncommercial status. Big Cat Rescue, which is featured in the Tiger King series, "has held GFAS Accreditation status since 2009."

5. Changing our relationship to nature must include a just transition. 

Throughout the world and in the United States, millions of people use nature in destructive ways for their livelihoods. I don't say this with judgement; often, people are just doing what we've always done — business as usual — which is unfortunately destroying the planet. Workers in the fossil fuel industry, fishermen in unsustainable fisheries, clearcutters in the tropics and boreal forests, and even people working at fake sanctuaries depend on the current system of exploiting nature to provide for themselves and their families. Unfortunately, it's at the expense of other people who depend on healthy, thriving ecosystems for their livelihoods and at the expense of human well-being overall. If we want to succeed in charting a new path for our planet, we must commit to making people and communities whole. The rampant exploitation appearing on the screen in Tiger King isn't just of wildlife — it is also of many desperate people brutalized by a political and economic system providing few options. We're not going to successfully realign our relationship with nature if we don't provide the necessary support for people and communities to transition to more sustainable, ethical means of providing for themselves and their families.

So, watch Tiger King and see if for you, like me, it informs the horror of the current moment, then maybe think about building a different world when we come out of this — a vibrant, natural world filled with wildlife and wonder, where we orient ourselves around preserving nature, not exploiting it, and embark on a new human journey.