This Week in Native American News (8/21/2020): Mental Health, Housing Projects, and Women's Suffrage
August 21, 2020
The pandemic is creating a mental health crisis
Mental health in Indian Country during COVID-19. (Illustration by Taylor Bennett-Begaye)
As the U.S. struggles with wave after wave of health and economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, a silent epidemic of mental illness is looming. Native Americans, already in crisis mode due to limited access to health care and disparities in both physical and mental health, are especially vulnerable.
Health care professionals and grassroots leaders in Indian Country, however, are reporting surprising bright spots in ways that Native people are responding to mental health challenges generated by COVID-19 .
No strangers to making do with chronically underfunded infrastructures and limited resources, Native people are creating innovative ways to battle the loneliness and isolation of life during a pandemic. In 2017, for instance, the Indian Health Service spent $4,078 per person versus the national health care expenditure of $9,726 per person.
“In many ways, we’re used to taking care of ourselves; we can’t afford to wait around for someone else to help us,” says Theresa Henry, cultural keeper for South Dakota Urban Indian Health in Sioux Falls. Henry is a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians Tribe.
Henry and others interviewed by Indian Country Today describe a spectrum of formal and informal virtual gatherings, phone trees and other socially distanced activities in their communities as a way to survive and remain connected during the pandemic.
Read the Full Story Here
In similar news… Fighting Isolation & the loss of culture
In Indian country, isolation is often a way of life. Traveling through the remote reservations of Montana, the Dakotas, New Mexico, or Arizona, you can drive hundreds of miles, and several hours, before you see a gas station, never mind a motel or a place to eat. Native peoples who chose to live more traditional lives, on land belonging to their ancestors, don’t mind the isolation. They prefer it as their way of life.
However, the recent pandemic has transformed this freedom of isolation into loneliness.
Tlingit and Haida works to bring transitional housing projects to life
A proposed design for a Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska-run transitional living facility on the corner of Alaway Avenue and Glacier Highway. Tlingit and Haida will seek permitting on Aug. 11. (Courtesy Art / Tlingit and Haida)
The Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska is working to finalize its plans for two transitional housing centers.
“The fact is that those that have sober-supportive housing are going to do better,” said Talia Eames, Tlingit and Haida’s reentry and recovery manager, in a phone interview. “When they’re doing better, they’re not reoffending. And when they don’t re-offend, there aren’t new victims.”
The two projects will host residents who recently exited the Department of Corrections.
Read the Full Story Here
And See How Minneapolis, Seattle, and Mesa are doing the same.
Today’s History Lesson:
What Women’s Suffrage Owes to Indigenous Culture
It’s an under-known fact that the “revolutionary” concept of a democratic union of discrete states did not spring fully formed from the Enlightenment pens of the Founding Fathers, like sage Athena from the head of Zeus. No, the idea of “united states” sprang from the Haudenosaunee, collective name for six tribes that comprise the so-called (mostly by non-Natives) Iroquois Confederacy: the Seneca, Oneida, Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Tuscarora nations. Should you doubt this, check out Congressional Resolution 331, adopted in 1988 by the 100th Congress of the United States, which says as much. It’s worth noting that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy still thrives today, likely the world’s oldest participatory democracy.
It’s hard to fit all the news in a little space.
To read all of this week's news, visit the LIM Magazine.
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