Native American tribal leaders are dying at an alarming rate due to the pandemic. Many elders of the native American tribes have been lost and they are now facing a cultural crisis because of it. The New York Times reports, “ he virus took Grandma Delores first, silencing an 86-year-old voice that rang with Lakota songs and stories. Then it came for Uncle Ralph, a stoic Vietnam veteran. And just after Christmas, two more elders of the Taken Alive family were buried on the frozen North Dakota prairie: Jesse and Cheryl, husband and wife, who died a month apart.”
“It takes your breath away,” said Ira Taken Alive, the couple’s oldest son. “The amount of knowledge they held, and connection to our past.”
“One by one, those connections are being severed as the coronavirus tears through ranks of Native American elders, inflicting an incalculable toll on bonds of language and tradition that flow from older generations to the young.”
“The loss of tribal elders has swelled into a cultural crisis as the pandemic has killed American Indians and Alaska Natives at nearly twice the rate of white people, deepening what critics call the deadly toll of a tattered health system and generations of harm and broken promises by the U.S. government.”
The virus has been especially hard on us all, now we see the reality of the seriousness of this virus, as Black and Native Americans continue to suffer, we must remember the words of Minister Farrakhan, he said that this virus is “A pestilence from heaven”. The only way that it can be lifted is by our repentance to God.
NNV Writer Hasan Ali
