They were the original Code Talkers, Native American soldiers sent to fight in France a century ago who transmitted orders from the trenches at Cherokee to confuse the enemy and help the Allies secure victory during the First World War.
So, the Germans were the enemy. Now, it’s Covid-19.
Although the launch of the coronavirus vaccination was chaotic and resisted by the public, the Cherokees silently mobilized their members to put as many needles in as many arms as possible, starting with some of the most threatened members of the tribe – those who still speak Cherokee.
“We put speakers who are fluent in Cherokee, most of whom are elders, at the front of the line,” said Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr., leader of the 385,000-person Cherokee Nation, on a call from the reserve Zoom in Oklahoma. “The reason is that our language is at risk.”
Tribal leaders and activists across the country have used the reverence for Native American culture and tradition to vaccinate a people who have deep-seated fears and suspicions from the United States government and the medical institution.
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“We are more at risk because we have had to deal with 500 years of oppression,” said Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Seattle-based Indigenous Urban Health Institute, who said that some of the Native American women who were forcibly sterilized in the 1960s and 1970 are still alive.
But a survey of 1,435 Native Americans across the country led by Echo-Hawk in November also revealed that 75 percent would be willing to be vaccinated, not because they suddenly trusted Uncle Sam, but because they put the “we” ahead of ” me . “
“The main motivation for participants who indicated a willingness to be vaccinated was a strong sense of responsibility to protect the native community and preserve cultural environments,” said a summary of the report. “Despite the hesitation regarding the vaccine due to the historical and current abuse of health and government institutions, they finally felt that the high cost of COVID-19 in their community outweighed the potential risks of the vaccine.”
So Native American leaders are selling vaccines to their people, emphasizing the good they can do for the tribe, as opposed to the individual, said Echo-Hawk. And it seems to be working.
The Seattle Indian Health Board receives about 7,000 calls a month, said Echo-Hawk. On Monday, he received 4,900 calls from Native Americans seeking information about vaccines. “It crashed our system,” she said.
The Cherokee nation, until Wednesday, was able to vaccinate 12,000 people.
Hoskin said: “When fluent speakers received the vaccine, I think it helped to reduce people’s anxiety. And I think people felt a kind of renewed obligation to try to protect the culture by being vaccinated.”
Not all of the Cherokee speakers that received the first photos are over 65, said Hoskin. But the tribe was able to prioritize who was vaccinated first because it responds to the Indigenous Health Service, a federal agency, rather than the state of Oklahoma, which put most people under 65 in Phase 4 of their deployment.
“I like to think that a lot of Cherokee leaders feel that way,” said Hoskin. “You have your ancestors on your back.”
Only about 22,000 people speak Cherokee, a language that began to decline after the tribe was forced to leave North Carolina and marched to Oklahoma in the 1830s on the Trail of Tears. But along with other native languages, like Navajo and Choctaw, it was deployed by the USA to deceive the enemy in both world wars.
The pandemic has hit indigenous people like the Cherokee, the largest Native American tribe in the United States, particularly harshly, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Native Americans are 3.5 times more likely to contract Covid-19 and 1.8 times more likely to die from coronavirus than whites, the CDC found.
Why? Poverty and a lack of health care, along with higher rates of asthma and diabetes, are the main culprits, said Echo-Hawk. In addition, many Native Americans live in multigenerational and often crowded families.
When vaccines made their debut in December and the government began encouraging Americans to be vaccinated, tribal leaders eager to protect their members offered to roll up their sleeves to receive their first doses.
“We wanted to reassure our people that it was safe,” said Donny Stevenson, vice president of the Muckleshoot tribe.
The tribe, most of whom live on a reservation about 30 miles south of Seattle, also emailed a digital newsletter to computer-savvy members and held Zoom meetings that included trusted healthcare professionals.
Meanwhile, the elders received paper copies of the newsletter with free lunches that were regularly delivered to their doors.
Stevenson said that because of the strategy, which promoted the use of masks and social distance, there was very little diffusion of the community in the reserve. And on Sunday, she saw proof that her campaign to vaccinate tribe members was working when hundreds of cars arrived at the reserve’s health post for a tribe-sponsored vaccination drive-in.
About a quarter of the 3,300 registered members of the tribe have been vaccinated, Stevenson said.
Echo-Hawk said the rest of the country could learn something from its original inhabitants.
“Our community is behaving differently,” said Echo-Hawk. “Whenever there are discussions about Native Americans, it seems like they always talk about problems, but they need to come to us, because we have the answers.
“We are using our cultural strength not only to survive, but also to thrive amid horrible obstacles,” she said.