The deadly loss of Navajo women
On the Navajo Nation, the coronavirus is leaving children motherless, families lost and traditions in peril. But Diné women fight on.
Photography by Don J. Usner
SHIPROCK, N.M. — Sitting in the passenger seat of her husband’s pickup truck just before dusk, Eugenia Charles-Newton watched a young Navajo girl, her niece, during a traditional kinaaldá ceremony in Shiprock.
The coming-of-age ceremony was unlike any other kinaaldá she’d ever seen. Scores of family members were missing and there was only a small cake, just enough to feed the immediate family. That morning, the girl’s female relatives hadn’t gathered to sing and tell stories as they mixed the cake batter. When the girl ran toward the east before the sun rose, she didn’t have throngs of relatives running behind her to fill the dawn air with happy screams and shouts, celebrating her transition into womanhood. Only the young woman’s brothers ran after her.
It’s hard “for a girl to have a ceremony like that and not have all the family there,” Charles-Newton said. She tried to comfort her niece, a relation by clan. “Your mom could have just said, ‘No, we’re not going to have it,’” she pointed out. “But instead, she made it happen.”
Women have long been front and center when it comes to making things happen on the Navajo Nation. But never has that role been so apparent — or so perilous — as during the pandemic. Ever since the coronavirus arrived on the 27,000-square-mile reservation, women in this matriarchal society have been putting themselves at risk, taking on ever more responsibilities, culturally and in everyday life.
“The sacred side of women has changed with COVID,” said Charles-Newton, 43, one of three female delegates on the Navajo Nation Council. Girls used to learn traditions through celebrations, face-to-face talks with elders and communal gatherings. But the pandemic has squelched those opportunities. “It’s taking away a part of the culture.”
By every measure — from economics and education to health — COVID-19 disproportionately harms women and girls “simply by virtue of their sex,” the United Nations has concluded. Women are more exposed to the virus because they’re more likely to be frontline workers, such as nurses and health care staff. They hold more than 77 percent of jobs in U.S. hospitals, health care facilities and nursing homes, U.S. labor statistics show. They hold essential jobs, albeit low-paying ones, in groceries and retail stores.
On the Navajo Nation, women are even more vulnerable to the virus, as a result of poor health care, poverty, trauma and high rates of illnesses like diabetes.
Navajo women not only hold high-exposure jobs but also are keepers of the cultural flame — and caretakers of the many people around them who’ve tested positive for the virus. When they become sick or die, the whole culture suffers.
“Women are the home — they’re matriarchs, they’re mothers,” said Navajo archaeologist Rena Martin, 67. “When people say, ‘I’m going home,’ it’s to where Mom is. If you lose a matriarch, you have no home to go to.”
The founder of Dinétahdóó Cultural Resources Management, a Navajo company dedicated to preserving tribal history, culture and lands, Martin has seen families living in some of the most remote landscapes in the Southwest. She particularly worries about the women elders — crucial to the culture — who are highly vulnerable to COVID-19.
The virus is typically more lethal for Navajo men — but that changes in the golden years, statistics show. After 70, the coronavirus death rate for Navajo women begins to accelerate. By age 80, Diné women suffer a substantially higher death rate than men.
Martin knows firsthand what the loss of an elder can do. Her maternal grandmother, matriarch to the core, boiled herbs, made medicinal drinks and carried them to families stricken with whooping cough, delivering them near and far on horseback. She succumbed to the disease when Martin’s mother was 4.
The loss left the next two generations without knowledge of their family history and teachings, Martin said. It was the need to reclaim those losses that prompted her to become an archaeologist.
“There was a loss of centeredness in the family. There was a loss of oral history.” The pandemic, she said, could leave generations of women feeling similarly at sea.
Some might feel like they’re drowning. Diné women today are juggling employment while also cooking, cleaning, babysitting, shopping, parenting, teaching, caring for relatives and tending to the elderly.
Since March, when the reservation became one of the country’s worst hot spots, women have commonly been seen making supply runs at local stores, buying not just for the immediate family but for extended family members, to meet kinship obligations.
They are carrying caskets at burial sites, typically a man’s job. They are revising the “baby’s first laugh” celebrations, dropping off salt and goodies to family and friends instead of hosting a gathering at home.
Grandmothers are helping children attend virtual classes, though most have no experience with computers. Some have set up makeshift desks in crowded houses without electricity, running water or indoor plumbing — a problem for roughly a third of households. Others sit with their grandchildren outside of schools and chapter houses so the kids will have internet access and can complete their homework.
Zoom won’t suffice
The Navajo are a matrilineal society: When they introduce themselves, they do so by clan, leading with their mother’s clan, which children take as their own. Naabeehó sáanii (Navajo women) are the center of the family, the keepers of wisdom and conservators of ancestral teachings. Navajo emergence stories tell of how women learned to be matriarchs from Changing Woman, a single mother of twin sons who became Diné heroes.
By tradition, the teachings are passed down in person, in the Navajo language. Zoom meetings are hardly a suitable replacement.
In the four-day kinaaldá, for example, the mother, grandmother and other female relatives have hands-on roles in the ceremony, held when a girl reaches puberty. The women help the girl wash and they tie and wrap her hair. They knead her limbs to symbolically “mold” her into a strong woman. They make the alkaan (Navajo cake) and bury it in the ground to cook.
It is a level of communion that’s nearly impossible during recurring waves of contagion and the accompanying public health restrictions. The Navajo Nation, a vast landscape (pop. 172,875) that spans New Mexico, Arizona and Utah, has one of the highest COVID-19 infection rates in America. As of Nov. 10, at least 12,641 cases have been confirmed there; 594 people have died.
The tribal government has tried to curb transmission by issuing strict curfews, stay-at-home orders, business and travel restrictions, and limits on gatherings. Officials have also canceled events like the Miss Navajo Nation pageant, in which contestants must butcher a sheep and cook over an open fire.
Shaandiin Parrish, the current Miss Navajo Nation, is one of the scores of women who’ve seen their roles morph in ways they never imagined. Parrish, 26, was living alone in Window Rock, Arizona, the Navajo Nation’s capital, when the virus struck. She wanted to rush home to the Kayenta area to be with her family, but the reservation was on lockdown.
So she used her time to spread health safety messages on her social media platform. When travel was allowed, she drove hundreds of miles to dispense food, water and supplies to families, along with Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez. Dressed in full traditional attire — velvet shirt and skirt, moccasins, jewelry, a sash, crown, plus a mask and gloves — she continues to give out care packages in remote Navajo communities, from Oljato, Utah, and Chinle, Arizona, to chapters in northwest New Mexico.
Acts of love
Charles-Newton, the council delegate, is among the countless other women engaged in relief work. In addition to her elected duties, she volunteers with the Northern Diné COVID-19 Relief Effort, a grassroots organization that distributes essentials to local families.
The work can get intense. In late July, before driving two hours to an emergency council meeting in Window Rock, Charles-Newton threw on her safety-approved clothing (long-sleeved T-shirt, baseball cap, pants), put on her mask, jumped in her truck and picked up cases of water to deliver to a mother and daughter in Shiprock who had no running water or electricity.
Both women are diabetic and — with no refrigerator — had to buy bags of ice every day to keep their insulin cold in plastic coolers.
On other days, Charles-Newton dispenses advice. One man contacted her because he feared he’d broken tradition: His mother and sisters had tested positive and were too sick to enter the sweat lodge alone. In violation of protocols that require women and men to sweat separately, he entered the women’s sweat to look after them.
“He was very emotional,” Charles-Newton recalled. “He said, ‘This is my mother; these are my sisters. These are the matriarchs, the strong ones in my family.’” Was it wrong to help them?
“I told him, ‘Shiyáázh [my son], what you did for your mom and your sisters is not wrong — it’s an act of love.’”
Caring at a cost
Acts of love, of course, can be dangerous. In late April, the Navajo Nation mourned the loss of young mother Valentina Blackhorse, 28, a former Miss Western Navajo. Her boyfriend had contracted the virus, and she’d insisted on taking care of him, the Navajo Times reported. The death of someone so young became national news. Blackhorse was described as selfless, someone who risked her life to help another.
She would not be the last. Social media and headlines announced a growing list of health care workers who’d lost their lives to COVID-19. Other women who passed away were unsung heroes — caretakers on a land of vast needs.
They’d raised sheep and goats, weaved wool, grown food and survived on lands passed down for generations, by matriarchs who came before.
On a recent evening, just as the sun eased to meet the horizon, Natalie Tome-Beyale tended to the crops on Farm Road in Shiprock. With her cell phone in a back pocket and a water bottle nearby, she plucked weeds growing around her family farm. She placed the water bottle five plants ahead of her to make sure she stayed hydrated; every time she reached the bottle, she took a sip.
In previous years, Tome-Beyale and her husband planted the farmland together, but this year she had to do the work alone. About six months ago, she nearly lost her husband, Herbert Beyale Jr., to the virus.
Farming has become an act of healing, she said. With every weed she pulled, the memories sprouted.
Tome-Beyale, 63, lost her father when she was a teenager. The eldest of her siblings, she looked after her three younger brothers and at 19 became their legal guardian. She married Herb at a young age, had five children and worked as an educational assistant. “Being a Navajo woman, the big thing was that you need to care for the people around you — they come first.”
Today, she said, this presents women with an entirely new quandary: Children are defying public health orders.
“It’s really sad, because the mom — the women — will not close the door on them. And because of that, it [the virus] comes into the home,” she said. “The love that women have for their children is sometimes their downfall.”
In May, the coronavirus found Tome-Beyale’s family. She had recently become a grandmother and was staying with her daughter in Rio Rancho to help with the baby. Just as she was preparing to return home to Shiprock, Herb tested positive for the virus. He’d been exposed at work.
Tome-Beyale immediately switched gears from looking after her daughter and granddaughter to caring for her husband from a distance.
When Herb developed trouble breathing, he was admitted to a local ICU and then flown to a hospital in Santa Fe. She raced there to see him, but all she could do was watch him get wheeled in from afar.
For three tormented weeks, Herb remained hospitalized and she wasn’t allowed to visit. She rented a hotel room nearby just to be close to him.
The weave of history
History has often changed the role of Navajo women, who’ve had a role in shaping history, as well. After the Long Walk began in 1864 — and the U.S. Army brutally removed the Diné from their homelands — women were instrumental in pushing for a return home, which was secured under an 1868 treaty.
After the return, women’s roles shifted, this time because of an influx of Christian missionaries who stressed that men — not women — needed to run the home, rule the people and control the government.
It wasn’t until 1951, when legendary public health crusader Annie Dodge Wauneka was elected to the Navajo Tribal Council, that a woman became a prominent government leader, a position Wauneka used to battle tuberculosis and other scourges. To this day, women seldom win elected office.
And while Navajo women are considered sacred, they are disproportionately victimized by violence. More than four in five Native women in the United States have experienced violence in their lifetime, studies show. On some tribal lands, women are murdered at a rate up to 10 times the national average. Navajo Nation Council delegate Amber Kanazbah Crotty has spent years calling attention to the problem of missing and murdered women, pressing for solutions at home and before the U.S. Senate. Fellow Council delegate Charlaine Tso summed up the tragedy in a report to the U.S. Department of Justice.
“The Navajo Nation views women as sacred. Yet Navajo women cannot safely go for a short jog in their own communities,” she said.
Answers found
The sun had just set behind the famed Shiprock pinnacle when Gloria Hosteen, 63, took a minute for herself, sitting alone on the front porch of her double-wide trailer, facing ha’a’aah, the east — the direction that signifies birth and strength. She looked to the sky, where the Holy People are said to live, and turned to prayer.
A memory suddenly came to her. She recalled sitting next to her paternal great-grandmother in her hogan years ago. Her great-grandmother and mother had taught her all she knew about ceremonies, herding sheep, weaving, preparing traditional foods and picking herbs.
“These things will come in handy someday,” her great-grandmother told her.
That day had come, Hosteen realized. Her elder had been teaching her survival tools — tools to preserve the culture and protect her family.
For nearly 15 years, Hosteen had been the full-time caretaker for her four grandchildren, ages 10 to 15. She’d felt unsure of herself, uncertain about the future of her children, her grandchildren and the Diné. Now she knew what to do.
She began teaching her granddaughters the old ways. She taught them how to tie their moccasins, tie their sash belts and wrap their traditional hair buns. She taught them about sweat lodges and ceremonies. She also began preparing for the kinaaldá for a young granddaughter, who she expects will have her coming-of-age ceremony before a COVID-19 vaccine arrives.
She felt as if she’d become a matriarch in the truest sense, tested by the pandemic the way matriarchs in the past were tested by ravages and despair. “I have to be strong to challenge these barriers, so I take it one day at a time,” she said. “I’m sure a lot of Navajo women are saying the same thing.”
And on that day on the porch, she offered a prayer to the sky. “I looked up and said, ‘Thank you, Nalí. Thank you, Mom: I will do what you advised me to do.’ All these memories came back, and I just had tears in my eyes. I just prayed with that, and carried on.”
Planting hope amid a plague
Older generations on the Navajo Nation have passed down stories of scourges, resilience — and survival. New generations are bringing the tales to life.
Photography by Don J. Usner
Hear the story in Diné
Hear the story in English
SHIPROCK, N.M. — Four miles down Farm Road, just off U.S. Route 491 in northern Navajo, a group of young Diné used what was left of daylight in early May to plant onions and potatoes on Yellow Wash Farm.
As the novel coronavirus stretched its way through Navajoland, leaving a trail of heartbreak and uncertainty, the four Navajo men, a mixture of family and friends from Shiprock, picked up their seeds and broke the earth with their shovels.
By month’s end, the Navajo Nation would have the highest per-capita infection rate in the country, surpassing even New York state. The outbreak cut a swath across the vast reservation, from outposts in Arizona to the mesas and high desert in northwest New Mexico, where Shiprock, or Naatʼáanii Nééz — the largest Navajo community — became a hotspot seemingly overnight.
Zefren Anderson, one of the farmers, was among hundreds of Shiprock residents who’d been tested for COVID-19; today he was awaiting the results.
But amid all the anxieties, the men felt a sense of purpose. They had the land to tend to. They were planting, because that’s what their family stories told them to do.
“If the stores close tomorrow, we have a backup plan. We have enough to survive till winter for whatever we’re creating on the farm,” Anderson said, taking care to stand six feet away from the other farmers. “We’re hedging our bets.”
There is no safe haven today on the Navajo Nation, where generations of families have lacked running water, food, electricity, indoor plumbing, safe housing and access to health care — the basic necessities for fighting disease. As of June 1, the Navajo Nation reported 5,250 positive COVID-19 cases, 1,745 recoveries and 241 deaths. In the Shiprock area last month, three siblings who buried their mother, father, and brother were forced to watch the burial services remotely because they, too, were infected with the disease.
Guidance from the past
While the staggering numbers have left many feeling hopeless, some in Shiprock have found solace by looking to history, traditions and family stories to push back against the pandemic. They are returning to a way of life depicted in tales passed down by elders, generation after generation.
Anderson, 38, a weaver and self-proclaimed family historian, found the blue corn and cantaloupe seeds his late grandmother left behind and started planting to prepare for a potential food shortage. He changed his weaving style from large, time-consuming museum works to simpler, utilitarian items: blankets, winter clothing and small pieces that he can trade for food or supplies.
He grew up hearing the old stories from his paternal grandparents. He revisited the tales his late grandmother told him about the early 1900s, when his great-aunt survived the 1918 flu pandemic. Thousands of Navajo were lost to the flu and other scourges. The Diné learned to fend off the plagues by practicing social distancing, washing their hands and whispering with their heads down to keep outbreaks from spreading. They learned to leave supplies for families and neighbors at the gates of their homes.
“Shiprock was always the epicenter for big disease outbreaks in the last 100 years — the Spanish flu, different types of lung diseases, meningitis,” Anderson said.
During the 1918 flu, some in Shiprock were so afraid of spreading the virus that, if they knew they were dying, they boarded up their families in their hogans, the traditional Navajo homes made of mud. A boarded up hogan — or hook’ee ghan — alerted other Navajo to stay away.
Tooh (water)
The people of Shiprock, or Tooh, meaning water, were mostly farmers and sheepherders, connected to the land, to the San Juan River that runs through it, and to Tsé Bitʼaʼí (winged rock), the famed Shiprock pinnacle whose existence is explained in Navajo creation stories.
Because early homes had no plumbing or running water — a problem that continues today — children typically got a bath only once a week. Anderson heard stories about crude washing machines that arrived by wagon in the early 1900s and a linen service that appeared in Shiprock, making it easier to clean bedding and clothes.
Handwashing, he recalled, was strictly enforced. “When I lived with my grandma, anytime I came in from outside the first thing she told me to do was to wash my hands.”
Grandmothers had learned about handwashing during their own childhood, when they heard chilling stories from elders about the 1918 flu. “We’re here because they did that” — they washed hands, he said. “And the people who didn’t, aren’t. It’s the same thing that’s happening right now.”
Anderson’s own prevention efforts have been fierce. He shaved his head after learning from a medical journal that the coronavirus can live on a strand of hair. He wears a full-length homemade lab coat when he leaves the house, an added precaution he takes because he lives with and cares for his father, a stroke victim.
To make sure he was healthy, Anderson also got two COVID-19 tests. The results of the first test came back negative.
To make doubly sure, he got tested again in May. The results arrived shortly after the day of planting with the trio of farmers. This time, he tested positive.
“I’m surviving,” he wrote in a recent Facebook post. He has been able to stay home, surrounded by his yarn, fighting off fever and a COVID brain fog. “I was ready to go if it was going to be my time,” he wrote. “But apparently there are more weavings to be woven and more fields to be planted.”
Fighting to save lives
Right now, as Navajo Nation Attorney General Doreen McPaul describes it, “the Navajo Nation has been devastated by COVID-19.” Communities lack resources at every level. “We are literally fighting for dollars to save lives,” McPaul said in May.
National and international media have descended to tell the story. Actor Sean Penn spent days on the Navajo Nation to offer help from his nonprofit Community Organized Relief Effort. Mark Ruffalo collaborated with Navajo entertainers to launch a grassroots response. A Game of Thrones star sent more than 1,000 cases of water to the reservation, where 30 percent or more households lack running water for drinking or washing hands.
But the needs in Navajo Country run too deep to be solved with celebrity fundraising. The reservation’s roughly 175,000 residents lack health clinics, hospitals, schools, roads, broadband access and housing — things that the federal government is sworn to provide but has flagrantly refused to address. The U.S. is obligated by treaty to protect the nation’s health and welfare. It has ignored the responsibilities for more than a century.
Shiprock, in many ways, is more fortunate than other chapters, as the communities are known. With an estimated 8,300 residents, it is the reservation’s largest chapter, home to the Northern Navajo Medical Center, an Indian Health Service hospital with an emergency room and a handful of ICU beds. (Elsewhere, the nearest 24-hour hospital might require a four-hour drive across terrain too rough for an ambulance.)
Shiprock is also home to a branch of Diné College, a commuter campus that’s now mostly empty, aside from the parking lot. Students drive there to use the wifi, which many don’t have at home; others have had to drop their classes because they don’t have laptops.
Thirty to 40 percent of homes on the Navajo Nation don’t have basics like electricity, indoor toilets, cell phone service or computers, studies show. Most people get their information from local radio stations, including an all-Navajo channel that broadcasts in Diné.
Many of the 110 chapters are so remote, they’re little more than a scattering of mobile homes along treacherous dirt roads. Shiprock, by comparison, has a grocery store with fresh produce (a rarity) and a few fast-food restaurants. A series of potholed streets pass as a downtown, marked by a fairground, vacant lots, boarded-up buildings, a small shopping center, and a few local businesses that have survived for generations. One hamburger shack opened in the days when customers arrived on horseback.
Today, most residents live in government housing and in the hills beyond town, in overcrowded homes and singlewides; many generations of a family live together, sometimes along with friends. Doubling up is a way of life in a place where there is too little housing. An open-door policy is part of tradition.
Anderson’s home was also open to extended family. He believes he might have been infected by a relative who had contact with a healthcare worker, a viral daisy chain he never could have predicted. He is relying on family and friends to drop off supplies and food. As in the old days, they are leaving them by the gate.
Seeds of the past
Just south of Yellow Wash Farm, Gloria Emerson, 82, shuffles toward a pile of red bricks tainted with graffiti, at what was once known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs compound. The bricks are all that is left of the apartment she once shared with her parents on the top floor.
Adjusting her ill-fitted cloth mask, the artist, writer and advocate points to the rubble and talks about her memories of the Shiprock that once was.
After graduating from high school, Emerson left Shiprock to get a college degree. She returned home and worked in social services on the Navajo Nation, launching an expansive career devoted to education, art and Navajo communities. She attended Harvard University, where she received a master’s degree in educational administration. She returned to Shiprock again in 2000, to help her aging parents.
Emerson eventually took over their farm in east Shiprock at mile marker 31, the last farm before leaving the reservation. She planted corn, melons and alfalfa when she could. This season, she had to hold off due to the pandemic.
“There’s a lot of beautiful memories here,” she said. “I always thought Shiprock represented the love and passion for the river and planting.”
The BIA compound where she grew up once looked like a mini college campus, with administrative offices around a quadrangle of lawn and trees. She spent her childhood along the San Juan River, admiring trees and flowers that created a safe haven. The BIA assigned garden plots to residents, encouraging Navajo people to plant.
But as the old Shiprock decayed, so did its relationship with the federal government. Washington historically has refused to address the reservation’s crumbling infrastructure and health disparities. At least one in five Navajo has diabetes. Heart disease and cancers are widespread, due to entrenched poverty, subpar health care, a scarcity of healthy food and contamination from uranium mines, among many ills. Government foot-dragging is endemic.
“They’re incredibly slow, and it’s not just the BIA, I think it’s the Navajo tribe, the chapters — there’s something very wrong with the way we’re governing ourselves,” Emerson said.
The pandemic laid bare the problems. The Navajo Nation waited six weeks before receiving the federal aid promised in the CARES Act, signed by President Trump in late March.
The tribal government finally got word in early May that it would receive a portion of its rightful $600 million. The Navajo and more than a dozen other tribes had to sue the federal government to get the proper funding in the first place.
“It’s shameful that the first citizens of this country are having to fight over and over for what is rightfully ours,” Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said.
The delayed aid left people scrambling for already scarce supplies of water, soap, food, propane, personal protective equipment and other essentials. During the weeks of waiting, the number of positive cases on the reservation skyrocketed.
Emerson despairs at the destruction the virus has caused, and the lives lost. One of the few remaining members of her family, she spends most of her time alone, isolated on the farm.
Once long ago, she recalls stopping in her car to pick up an elderly woman along the road. The woman spoke very little except to say in Diné that where she was going was not that far. Emerson ended up driving the woman for more than an hour into the Arizona side of the reservation, where she lived.
“I just felt so bad when I saw how isolated she lived and no one there to help her … and then I remembered that’s the case with so many of our people,” Emerson said.
“I can’t stand being here isolated — I can’t stand it,” she added, suddenly overwhelmed. “It’s so hard to see and to have our relatives go on.” She misses the old days, the bustle of Shiprock, the company of other people. How could this have happened so quickly? she wonders. “A lot of it is, I think, that our people just don’t understand the dangers, and a lot of us just ignored the early signs. But it’s hard for me.”
Sidelined warriors
Early May mornings were still too crisp for Duane “Chili” Yazzie to tuck in the first seeds of planting season in his farm near Ditch Number Eight. Yazzie, 70, who is in his third term as Shiprock Chapter president, has spent every day at home since March 30, when the Navajo Nation stay-at-home order was put in place and tribal government offices closed their doors.
He can’t remember the last time he was sidelined or the community shut down. “Never,” Yazzie said, sitting in his family’s hogan, used for ceremonial purposes. “It never happened.”
The only disaster that comes close, he said, was the Gold King Mine spill in 2015, which contaminated the river with such huge amounts of toxic waste that the water turned yellow. Even then, Yazzie was able to walk into his office and come up with solutions.
Today, with government offices closed, he’s had to learn to work from home, trying to protect a community from a mostly unpredictable virus. A recent hard-fought battle with pneumonia also prevents him from going to his office; it permanently affected his lungs and puts him at high risk.
Planting gives him time to think.
“For the first time in a long time I’m a farmer again. It’s always been my therapy,” he said, gazing out the window toward his fields. “As a community leader it’s overwhelming to know that there’s very little that you can do proactively to prevent or mitigate the impact of the virus. We’ve just been scrambling around doing what we can, trying to keep people from not going hungry and making sure they’re OK.”
The virus has left people feeling paralyzed. They are supposed to stay home, but they’re at risk when they’re inside, crowded next to generations of family members who might have the virus and don’t know it. They’re afraid to leave home but have to: They need to get water, food and medicine, and take care of sick relatives.
There are grimmer problems, as well: Those whose loved ones die are forced to speed up the mourning process or scratch it altogether. Funeral services are in disarray.
At one recent service, only five family members were allowed to attend, including women who had to carry the heavy casket, typically a job for male relatives of the deceased. The funeral home sent no one to the gravesite to help.
Funerals are expensive, furthermore, and funeral homes are known to take advantage of the grieving, who can end up agreeing to services and expensive caskets they can’t afford. People can ask the tribe for financial help. But the funeral dispensations are often too small to cover all the needed services.
Some family members end up doing things like dressing the body and driving the casket to the grave themselves. Worse, those who go to funerals aren’t allowed to hug each other for comfort: They’re expected to grieve at six-foot distances.
Chapters are like large families; almost everyone is connected by friendship or kinship. That means almost everyone in Shiprock knows someone who has struggled with COVID-19 or died from it. Each day can bring a new round of worry, grief and fear.
An equilibrium upset
Yazzie refuses to give in. And he keeps searching for solutions. He knows, for example, that the most vulnerable people — the elderly — don’t speak English and don’t have the internet or social media to turn to for the latest news and instructions. So for them, he prepares a recording that explains safety precautions and relief efforts in Diné, the Navajo language. He sends it to the local radio station to play throughout the week.
To address local worries about dwindling food supplies, he encourages people to return to farming, canning and traditional ways of storing food. Yazzie also helped initiate the Northern Diné COVID 19 Relief Effort, which distributes food and supplies in Shiprock and the surrounding region, the Northern Navajo Agency.
The Northern Agency is often forgotten by the tribal government, he said, so the group took it upon themselves to respond. “Shiprock has always had that kind of resilient spirit that calls for independence,” he explained. “Our people have always been warrior people, all through the years.”
It’s been a time of great reflection, of trying to understand why this is happening, Yazzie said. He’s come to one conclusion that he’s heard traditional Navajo concur with: The world is in a great disorder; the equilibrium of the Earth is greatly upset.
“Perhaps the pandemic is the great discipline whip of the Earth, from having irretrievably damaged the Earth,” he said, and paused to search for the right words. “This virus is a force to be reckoned with,” he offered. “It is alive with death.”