107. Vaccines

 Vaccines

 

I’m reading Lakota Power: A New History of Indigenous Power, by Pekka Hamalainen. The Finnish author, who teaches at Oxford, has written previously about the Cheyenne, and in this book chronicles the movement of the Sioux out of the northern woodlands, south and west across the plains and into the Black Hills. 

 

The Lakota, one of seven main councils of the Sioux, seized the day with guns and steel provided by the fur trade and feral horses that roamed northward after a 1680s setback to Spanish ambitions in the Southwest. Horses and the fur trade were the fuels of Lakota expansion and tribal rivalries across the middle of the new country—expanded greatly by the Louisiana Purchase. 

 

It wasn’t an easy expansion for the Americans, with British and French fur traders to the north, and Spanish, French, and American factions competing for dominance on the Missouri and Mississippi and access to the larger trade world through St. Louis and New Orleans. 

 

In 1832, in an attempt to thwart British ambitions in the region, the Americans provided smallpox vaccine to the Lakota and a few other Siouxan groups. That same year, 4000 Pawnees, half of their population, died with smallpox. Other Indian tribes were decimated as well. The smallpox vaccine abetted the rising strength of the Lakota across the plains—and maybe helped stall the British, whose trade was with the Hidatsa and other tribes to the north, with no easy access to eastern markets. 

 

The British Hudson’s Bay Company would keep pushing west across what is now southern Canada and the bordering US—looking for access to the Pacific and another route for its trade. 

 

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106. News of the Day

In today’s New York Times, we learn that “a year into the pandemic, millions of Brazilians are going hungry.” In India, there were 276,000 new cases yesterday; the death toll—196,000—now surpasses Brazil’s and is second only to our own. Yesterday, after a string of weekly 20 % Covid increases in Oregon, there were 1020 new cases and nine new deaths; hospitalizations were 276, with 64 Oregonians in intensive care. New variants and relaxation of pre-vaccine rules for masks and distancing seem to be at the center of it.

The scientists tell us that we need 80 to 90 percent of the population inoculated or immune through having had the disease before we arrive at “herd immunity.” Given the news of the day and the continuing resistance of many to be vaccinated, that seems unlikely anytime soon. More likely is Governor Brown’s sending 12 counties back to the “extreme risk” category, and the return of restrictions on human activity across the country.

One can’t lay this situation to any one factor, but there are some common attributes of human behavior that seem to be involved. We like crowds, and we like leaders who like crowds; from     President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil to Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India to our recent President Donald Trump, followers have gathered in crowded swarms without masks to hear their leaders. But there is a kind of opposing human action—egoism, the self-centeredness that encourage us to do what seems right or advantageous for me at the moment. At the end of this egoism is hubris, the radical individualism and overweening pride that puts me and my life about all others, with a supreme—and often tragic—confidence that I am right though the world around me says otherwise.

It all adds up as a recipe for a continuing struggle with Covid. It will bounce back and forth between counties, states, and countries, dipping here and exploding there, gaining traction with stronger variants, dipping as the citizens of a county, state, or country come together to look out for each other.

There’s the key. Do we have enough herd mentality left to build herd immunity midst a moving and changing covid? My mentor, Alvin Josephy, often said that Indians were the only ones in America still capable of “group think.” The news from a few Indian friends is that tribes are doing this. 

We might look now to Lapwai and Colville and Umatilla for guidance in human health—as we are looking to them for ways to fish, water and fire health. 

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105. Possible futures

On a morning walk on this cloudy day, I thought about me at 22 and a world of possibility–for adventure and good work—and then a Vietnam descent into cynicism about the world and then turning inward to family and close community, things that would sustain me. This morning the future looked something like that.

 

The advent of Covid-19 threw a wrench at the world—and at personal plans. No trip to Turkey; hunkering down, worrying about children, grandchildren, neighbors; reading, thinking, trying to make sense of it all; then hope with the vaccines and the election. 

 

And the coronavirus now spiraling into a descent from hope. Because the numbers remain high even while death numbers decline in the country. Because all of the ideas and powers of modern medicine are running smack into people. 

 

People, institutions, and governments are opening up so that commerce can flow; the deniers and the young and reckless are making up enough of the population to open the way for mutations and new variants. Many will die; but mostly many will get sick. The American deaths will drop as older people are vaccinated or die; younger people will fight through it, maybe have the covid and then a few will have after effects and some of them will get better with the shots. Some middle-aged white Republicans and Evangelicals will get sick and deny it, or think it is God’s will, or take Hydrochlorothiazide or some other remedy and think their recoveries are because of it when in fact it’s just statistics.

 

All the while, even when the numbers of survivors and the vaccinated in our country hits some magical percentage of herd immunity, the rest of the world will struggle with enough vaccines, enough health care, enough of everything necessary in the face of it. Like the bulge in a carnival balloon, there will be quiet places where lockdowns and vaccinations squeeze, and bubbles in the big world where there is not “enough.”

 

The coronavirus will squeeze into all the easy spots, rumbling along for three or four years as did the 1918 flu, until it gets tired enough to retreat. Those of us in the lucky world will take our annual shots as we do our flu shots. Vaccinators will win the battle, as they did with smallpox and might soon with polio; or three or four generations forward there will be enough inherited immunity to render this covid non-lethal, like chickenpox or syphilis.

 

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104. It ain’t over...

I was checking out at the Safeway and casually mentioned that I was all vaccinated and had my post-vaccination two weeks in. The checker immediately told me that she was going to have nothing to do with the vaccine

 

She is white, and pollsters say that the highest percentages of vaccine resisters are among  young white Republicans and white evangelicals. I also know that there is an anti-vaccine group on the pollical left, anchored by a Kennedy. I don’t know if our Safeway friend belongs to any of above—but chances are….

 

I think back to getting my shots at Cloverleaf, the local fair hall. It was a super-efficient affair from check-in to shot to the required 15-minute post-vaccination wait.  I didn’t know everyone in the room, but I recognized several and talked to some. We were all in the 70+ category, and there were Republicans and church-goers among us.

 

All this went through my mind at the Safeway checkout. And it immediately occurred to me that those of us over 70—of all political and religious persuasions—have been exposed to polio stories if not the virus itself. As it turned out, one of my fellow vaccinees told me her own polio story during our 15-minute wait. Together we remembered the “dog days” of August, and, in my case, an end to the Minnesota swimming season. 

 

And we remembered chickenpox and measles—how our moms took us to a neighbor’s house to be exposed and infected so that we got chickenpox young, when it was less severe. I’m not sure on measles before it got its vaccine; I know I had it and was kept in a dark room for a week, my parents worried about the impact of measles on the eyes. 

 

We in the 70 + crowd have personal memories and experiences of diseases, and of vaccinations that work: measles, chickenpox, polio, smallpox—we got the vaccination; it’s no longer necessary as smallpox is eradicated! Most of us automatically okayed the new vaccines for our children. Now it appears that some 30-40 percent of those children are no longer believers. Enough of them to give our coronavirus the time and space it needs to keep mutating and moving among us, like the “1918 Flu” did a hundred years ago, when it went on for three or four years. 

 

It ain’t over till it’s over, as Yogi Berra said.

 

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103. Lion’s Milk

I don’t know why it’s never occurred to me to write about the biggest impact of the pandemic on my life, but today, with a zoom call from Turkey, I’m reminded. My long-ago roommate, now teaching at a university in Ankara, and another Peace Corps friend from the time, who is now in Seattle, spent an hour this morning trading old stories—but mostly catching up on where we, our kids and grandkids are today. How we and our families are coping with the pandemic. Speculating on once again meeting in person in Ankara, Seattle, Portland, or somewhere on the East Coast. 

 

In April of 2020 I was slated to spend ten days in that Ankara university with the American Studies Department, talking about the Nez Perce and other Western Tribes, about the history and cultural lessons I’ve learned from books, notes, and Indian friends over the past 50 years. 

 

I had tickets, and gift copies of Alvin Josephy’s 500 Nations packed and ready to go, notes for talks, and a DVD or two that I might use in telling Turkish college students about another side of American history. Turks—and Germans, the French and others around the world—are sometimes more interested in these chapters in American history than we are. I’d get a chance to explore why.

 

And I would eat lamb kebabs, white cheese, fresh melons, baklava, lentil soup, and the olives that had once tasted bitter but grew sweet in my almost five years in Turkey, 1965-70. 

 

The covid crushed all of that. I was reminded today of how, when covid hit, we summarily changed important plans, how we hunkered down away from friends and family members—and of how we, over the course of a year, have learned new tricks, and can now visit across continents in real time. 

 

Still—the lentil soup I make is not the same as the ones I drank in Turkey (yes, in Turkish we “drink” soup rather than eat it). I can hear faintly, in my mind’s ear, the cries of Ankara street vendors and shared taxi drivers, and see in my mind’s eye the minarets of Istanbul and the shops in the covered bazaar.

 

I’ll maybe dream in Turkish again tonight, the words and pictures in my mind rolling back the 50 years, from a time when three new friends, one Turk and two Americans, discussed our futures over glasses of absinthe, the drink the Turks call raki, or “lion’s milk.”

 

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102. Clarifications

After my last pandemic post, called “Sores,” two readers close to me wrote to say that women have known all along that there are huge pay disparities between men and women performing the same or similar work—and that women have for decades reminded men of that. I casually replied that I should have said “white men” became more aware of the differences during the pandemic.

 

But that’s wrong. The point is that the pandemic has given the entire population pause, and has resulted in widespread general awareness of gender pay disparities; and of the water situation on the Navajo Reservation, the conditions of health and wealth on other reservations; and of the overwhelming numbers of black and brown Americans working in low-wage service jobs. We now collectively realize that the entire population depends on these workers for food, health, transportation, garbage removal, and any number of activities now seen as “essential” to the functioning of the body politic. 

 

I was also called out for not explicitly naming Latinos. I plead guilty, having allowed the “people of color” words to stand for many. In fact, one of my current curiosities is trying to understand who the Genizaros were and are. But I blithely skipped over Latinos on my way to discussing the pandemic’s laser lens on white racism aimed at Blacks, Asians, and Indians. 

 

My first ten years were lived minutes away from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, where we knew nothing of treaties, allotments, and boarding schools; most of us were Lutherans, “we” all were white, and we knew no Indians… And then we moved to California.

 

In California we lived with and went to school with Catholics and Mormons, Negroes—the word at the time Clarifications—and Mexicans. The Pala Indian Reservation was close-by, but we knew no Indians. Now, sixty years on, I know that there were Indians among the Mexicans we went to school with, know that those we called Mexicans and those who called themselves Mexican had diverse family genealogies, reaching not only to Spain and modern Mexico, but to an old Mexico that is now California, to Indian tribes across the Southwest, and to globetrotters from everywhere who chased one boom or the other to California. 

 

And most recently I’ve learned about Genizaros, “detribalized Native Americans” who had been enslaved and/or indentured by other tribes and Euro-American settlers through war or payment of ransom, who melded into and comprised “up to a third of the population of New Mexico and southern Colorado.” This particular kind of slavery persisted well past the 13^th amendment, and now some Mexican-Americans are reclaiming this part of their—often hidden—past. 

 

Much that has been hidden is coming to light.

 

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