Officer Michael Lee of the Navajo Nation police department died of the coronavirus this week. He was 50 years old, not the first Navajo officer to be ill with it—there have been at least a dozen—but the first to die. The news appeared in two small Southwest papers when I Googled “Navajo and coronavirus.”
The BBC was there a week ago to chronicle the death of a 29 year-old Navajo woman who had once been a beauty pageant winner. I see by Google that CBS broadcast from Navajo in mid-June, and I know that the New York Times had a couple of stories from the Navajo Reservation before that. That’s when I started paying attention to it—and as far as I can tell, when the NYT stopped.
In a weird kind of addiction, I check the stats on US States daily, and Navajo Nation, which is, population wise, smaller than any state, gets its own line. They are at 350 deaths now, ticking away, 2-3-4 a day, climbing the ladder past the states, a week ago with 11 states below them in number of deaths, today 15. They are well past Oregon (202), Nebraska (267), and Kansas (270), and will undoubtedly soon pass New Hampshire and Oklahoma. Oregon is still up on Navajo with 8,094 total cases to 7,320—but the Navajo Nation’s total population is only 175,000!
Covid news has its own trajectory—Seattle started it; New York soon dominated with high numbers and astounding death tolls; Dr. Fauci, with Trump tagging along, caught our daily attention for a time. And then George Floyd and an almost simultaneous release of statistics about Covid Black deaths and Brown deaths turned White America’s attention to Black Lives Matter. Latinos caught a bit of it, but now it’s Florida and Texas with the big numbers.
A few Indian tribes have had local attention; the Navajo had their day with the national news. The Navajo—and other tribes—will survive. They’ve been down this road many times.
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