Gallup, N.M., Apr 15, 2020 / 03:01 am (CNA).- Native Americans have not fared well in pandemics and epidemics.
The smallpox virus, which killed the parents and brother of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, is estimated to have wiped out 90-95% percent of the indigenous peoples of the Americas in the span of about two centuries.
The H1N1 flu epidemic of 2009 had a death rate that was four times higher for Native Americans than for any other ethnicity combined, according to the National Library of Medicine.
And now, Native Americans are being similarly hard-hit by coronavirus, and reservation conditions mean the disease spreads quickly, and already-limited resources could soon run out.
“Unfortunately, on top of everything else that people are dealing with, adding this whole (coronavirus) situation is just going to make life that much more difficult for many families on the reservation,” Jeremy Boucher, co-director of the non-profit Southwest Indian Foundation, told CNA.
Since the Navajo Nation announced a shelter in place order March 20, Boucher and the foundation have been making food deliveries to a food pantry on the reservation to ensure that those in quarantine or far away from grocery stores had access to food.
But the Navajo Nation extends into three states – New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah – with several other reservations in the area as well. And local food pantry rules limited Boucher to delivering food within McKinley County, New Mexico.
“The (Navajo) reservation itself is about the size of West Virginia, and there is maybe a total of five grocery stores on the reservation, and most of those grocery stores are close to border towns,” Boucher said.
“And so Gallup (county seat of McKinley County) is really the central town for most people living on the reservation. So people sometimes drive two, two and a half, three hours to come into town to get supplies. And right now, they’re facing a situation where, if they’re home-bound under quarantine for 14 days, it’s really difficult to have someone come into town for you and get a bunch of stuff with all of the limitations that are happening at the grocery stores,” he said.
“So if you’re not able to make it, you’ve got to send someone for you, but then there’s no guarantee that, when you come into town, you’re going to be able to find what you need, because the stores are wiped out,” he added.
To expand the relief efforts, Boucher teamed up with Patrick Mason, a member of the Osage Tribe and the Knights of Columbus board of directors, to bring food to more people.
“We knew just from living out here – I was born and raised here – the need is out there,” Mason told CNA. “Whenever something like this hits, whenever an epidemic or pandemic hit, a lot of times it’s just devastating.”
Besides direct deaths from illnesses, Mason said, ancillary suffering and deaths typically occur in such crises. Many elderly people on the reservation live in simple, traditional hogans and lack running water and electricity and the ability to get themselves supplies.
They rely on family and friends to look out for them, but they’re often the first people forgotten in a crisis, Mason noted. “Not intentionally, it’s just, people are concerned, and they forget to go check on so-and-so. A lot of times they end up suffering in a myriad of ways,” he said.
When Mason heard Boucher needed help, he worked with the Knights of Columbus as well as Life is Sacred, a Native American pro-life organization, to organize and deliver food baskets to the Acoma people, a Pueblo tribe 90 miles away that includes Sky City village, the oldest continuously inhabited place in the United States.
They also consulted Lance Tanner, one of the owners of T and R Market (a family-run grocery store that primarily serves Navajo clientele), for the food baskets.
Tanner, also a member of the Knights of Columbus, knew what staples his customers would like in a food basket, including flour, lard, potatoes, coffee, and spam, as well as toiletries and water; and treats like Crackerjacks and Kool-Aid for the kids.
Once assembled, Mason said the baskets – which were actually three large boxes – contained enough food to feed a family for about two weeks.
“I had a trailer (from the Knights of Columbus) and we called it the COVID-19 Relief Canteen,” Mason said. They made their first delivery during Holy Week.
“Our first delivery went to the Acoma people, which is one of the old Pueblo tribes. Those are Catholic tribes. They’ve been Catholic for hundreds of years,” he said.
“They have some churches there that are hundreds of years old, and they’re very faithful Catholic people. They were suffering, and they said that they had about 140 people that were in desperate need of food, so we did our first delivery there,” Mason said.
When they arrived, they were told by the local volunteers that 60 more people had called in that day looking for food.
Wearing facemasks and gloves, Mason and the Knights and local volunteers unloaded the boxes at a centralized distribution center. Mason said they worked with local organizations who were able to deliver the boxes to the families most in need.
As word spread through the region that the Knights of Columbus were organizing food baskets, “then names kept coming in” of more people in need of help, Mason said.
Mason added that he also learned that another member of Life is Sacred, Dallas Carter in Hawaii, had been organizing similar relief efforts with his local Knights of Columbus for the native and vulnerable people there, and was in need of some additional help.
“Independently from what we were doing, he was doing something similar down in Hawaii. I talked to him and I said, ‘Well hey, we need to support you too.’”
Mason said the New Mexico Knights were able to provide a grant to the Hawaii Knights to keep their efforts going for two more weeks.
“Caring for our kūpuna (elders) has always been an essential value to the people of Hawaii,” the Knights from the Diocese of Honolulu said in a statement provided to CNA.
“With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent mandatory state quarantine many of our kūpuna were required to stay home without regular access to their normal means of acquiring food and other essential items. In fact even many of the regular food pantries, which many kūpuna depend on, were completely shut down for the safety of their volunteers,” they said.
“Several Knights of Columbus in the diocese of Honolulu, with the announcement of the quarantine and its inevitable effects on the vulnerable, stepped into the breach and began their own personal initiatives to help the kūpuna and other vulnerable people in their community,” the statement added.
Like the Knights in New Mexico, the Knights in Hawaii were delivering food supplies for two weeks and other necessities to the elderly and vulnerable populations – and so far have served about 5,000 people in their efforts.
Mason said his group of Knights have enough funding to keep their own relief efforts in New Mexico going for another two weeks, but he is hoping they are able to garner more support to keep it going even longer.
“We want to get the word out there, because really, everybody’s suffering right now,” he said. “But I think sometimes…those people on the peripheries are sometimes the most forgotten and the most suffering. A little old, 80-year-old grandma living by herself an hour from the closest person, is one of the first people forgotten,” he said.
In a statement, the Knights of Columbus in Gallup said that while this has felt like a long Lent for everyone, “by standing together, the light of Easter will be upon us, and together we will sing the Non Nobis and Te Deum as the mists of darkness clear.”
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I shall vote with my eyes. I will not watch the Olympics.
Surprised that the archbishop of Malta was outraged, I thought that he was these people’s apologist?
That Paris suffered a power surge that blew the lights in all buildings save the Basilica of the Sacred Heart and it’s bright light was beautiful to behold!
I am outraged at this heinous display and mockery of our most sacred Holy Eucharist. May God have mercy on the souls of all involved. I will not watch a single minute of these games. Paris and all concerned should be ashamed of themselves.
I hope that the Holy Father joins us, in a public pronouncement, his rebuke of this blasphemous display.
So many Catholics on these pages ask, “What can I do?” regarding the disgusting display at the Olympics. For starters, stop using the term “TRANS”. By so doing you are giving the appearance of a reality it does not merit. There’s no such thing as “trans.” Call it for what it is: homosexuality. That’s what what was on display. Stop being suckers for the woke nonsense this culture is handing you. I’m afraid my brothers and sisters in Christ are some of the most gullible people I’ve seen. This gullibility evidenced itself during the Great Covid Paranoia Psychosis of 2020. Even the Pope himself was forcing Vatican employees to take a vaccine against their will. I sometimes think that otherwise intelligent people are under a spell
Deacon Edward,
I am with you on the issue of “Great viral paranoia”. I will take it further though. The Church gave a sign to the world, of a blasphemous communion when it closed its doors to the unvaccinated and allowed in only the vaccinated. The vaccines were abortion-tainted i.e. they utilized the aborted human embryos’ cells either for the design of the vaccines or/and their production or/and their testing. PF cracked a letter which actively discouraged Catholics from demanding an ethical alternative (which already existed). Most gladly embraced it. As a result, those who partook the vaccine “made” on human sacrifice were allowed to the Holy Communion. Those who refused were not allowed. This is a very gross blasphemy done by the Church and not many noticed it.
The Church “sanctified” children’s sacrifice, for the first time in its history and tried to force its members to participate in it. It made a participation in the sin of a murder of children a condition for receiving the Body and Blood of Christ. It was done in an oblique form (as everything is being done in the postmodern world) but it was done nevertheless. In some places vaccination took place in churches, in some places with great solemnity. In Salisbury Cathedral the “holy injections” were accompanied by the live sacred music, some written for the Eucharistic hymns. (I wrote a paper about that “communion of abandonment” that is a hellish communion contrary to the true Communion of the Union with Christ and each other.)
And so, I see this parody of the Last Supper as a logical consequence of the Church’s blasphemy of the Holy Communion. The Church has never repented that. The world simply takes the Church’s sins on board now, being semi-conscious of it.
Yes, Anna. I agree. The world simply takes the Church’s sins on board now, being semi-conscious of it.
Re those church leaders who have not publicly spoken against the repugnant spectacle. Are they privately thrilled to see their ‘faith’ represented as their imagination would have it? Do they privately applaud the abhorrent spectacle? Why else would they not speak against it?
JMJ, have mercy.
Anna, I hadn’t thought about this dimension of the rot that is our current moral culture and how it has thoroughly infiltrated our Catholic Church.
Satan is our enemy. He has recruited much of the pagan world and actively seeks recruits in the Catholic Church as well. Satan hates Christ. Satan hates the Mass. Satan hates the Eucharist. Satan hates the fact that Christ’s death and resurrection has brought the possibility of redemption to a fallen world.
Not all men dressed as women are homosexual. Some are Drag Queens not transgendered like they like to be called and are doing it for entertainment purposes only and have wives that are genetic females. It’s awful what has happened and evil. let’s pray for them and someday like us all they will have to answer for what they did.
Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 1:18, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
At the Last Supper, of those who followed Jesus most closely, one betrayed Him, one denied Him, and all fled like sheep whose shepherd has been smitten.
Jesus loved them anyway and commissioned them to spread the word after His resurrection. We have the grace of God, and should we fail to follow in the Disciples footsteps, how different will we believers be than those who hate Christ, mock his cross, and persecute Christ’s followers,
Displays such as this in the LGBT+++ movement, are the devils work and prayer is the force that will spread God’s word and protect his people.
“Words cannot describe it.”
Gotta disagree with you on that – let me trot out just a few: Disgusting, pathetic, sad, outrageous, blasphemous, insulting, inexcusable – and that’s just the start.
Yet there are those who claim that the whole pathetic performance was not meant to insult anyone. I say to anyone who believes that for one instant – I have 6 acres of oceanfront property just north of Brattleboro Vermont that I can let you have for a song.
Your Holiness – We’re ALL waiting on you to say something – ANYTHING – about this.
Please
The current Vatican is unbothered by all of this garbarge from Paris. Nothing official has been said…yet.
And it is unlikely anything will be said. So be it, Francis. Sad.