This story about the Seattle Indian Health Board requesting medical supplies and getting body bags and toe tags instead is making the rounds.
I’m not surprised. My dad was a physician in what was at the time called Indian Health Service (IHS) in the late 50’s and early 60’s — I spent my first few months of life on the South Dakota reservation where he was stationed. He also practiced on the Navajo Nation and has some terrible, horrible, no good stories about that time in his life, and the many, many children who died in the pediatric service there. “We were so stupid then” is one of the common refrain of those stories, which include accounts of how he and his fellow doctors did blood chemistry on dehydrated children by judging the color of the flame in a bunsen burner. Today those tests are done in seconds with a machine. The children were often dehydrated because it was common for sick kids to spend some time at a Navajo ceremony called a sing prior to being brought a long way to the hospital. Today, the Navajo Nation is one of the worst COVID-19 hot spots.
Back in the 50s and 60s, there was a compulsory draft, and the IHS was considered military service, so most of the medical staff consisted of people who joined to avoid the draft, many of whom went on to distinguished careers — my guess is that the quality of care when judged by standards back then was probably decent, who knows. I do know that the services offered at the reservation hospitals were bare-bones, and Dad has a lot of stories about riding in an ambulance to a far-off hospital with a sick person. He also has many stories of the illnesses of poverty on the rez, mostly shared after a few martinis.
I don’t have a lot of reservation stories but I do have a story about voter suppression. Because of their clear-eyed, rational concern about fraud, the South Dakota state legislature took a minute off from their usual work of banning abortion to pass laws requiring that voter registration forms and absentee ballots be notarized. So, more than 30 years ago, I became a notary public, following the advice of the South Dakota Democratic Party (RIP). It costs money to become a notary (application fees, a bond, a stamp and a seal), and notaries can charge for services. Who knows what the laws are today — they probably require that notaries wet their stamps using ink obtained from Chilean octopuses on full moon high tides in months ending in “r”, a requirement that John Roberts would understand and endorse as an eminently reasonable safeguard of democracy. The point is that, back before voter id became a thing, Republicans were pioneering voter suppression in their laboratory of anti-democracy, the reservation.
Well, enough story time, but it’s obvious that voter suppression and being shipped body bags when you ask for medical supplies are two pieces of bread around the shit sandwich called “being poor” and “being brown” here in the greatest country God has ever wrought, the U.S.A.
By the way, Pine Ridge knows the score — over a month ago, they posted guards at the entrances to their reservation towns to keep the modern day equivalent of smallpox blankets away from their people.
germy
West of the Cascades
Go Fund Me sponsored by four nurses in Arizona for PPE, medical equipment, food, and water for the Navajo Nation: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-navajo-nation.
download my app in the app store mistermix
@West of the Cascades: That reminds me of this:
https://www.theonion.com/health-experts-worry-coronavirus-will-overwhelm-america-1842314132
(Good of people to send money to the Navajo Nation but they shouldn’t need a GoFundMe to buy PPE.)
laura
@West of the Cascades: Donated. If I’m not my brother’s keeper, who the hell am I?
West of the Cascades
@download my app in the app store mistermix: I could not agree with you more. But our government is doing nothing to help these people and the Irish can only do so much, so GoFundMe it is ….
The Moar You Know
And so is Gallup NM, right on the border. The mayor begged the governor to close off all access to the town, as the Navajo were coming in to buy booze and spreading the virus.
That has escalated to the point where the NM State Police and Highway Patrol (as per my ex-girlfriend’s son, who’s an officer who just got his orders to deploy there) are having to enforce that blockade in full body armor and automatic weapons.
Because there’s nothing that a Republican can’t make worse, the mayor of Grants, a little bit farther off, has told the governor to fuck off, his town is open for business and the Navajo can come and buy all the booze they want there. The NM Supreme Court told him to stand down and close the town two days ago. He ain’t closing. This one is going to escalate to a shooting situation very, very soon.
Amir Khalid
@download my app in the app store mistermix:
By the way, is your federal government still seizing PPE shipments?
VOR
IIRC, the Bush administration replaced the US Attorney in Minneapolis because the old one wasn’t prioritizing the prosecutions of voter fraud on reservations.
Raoul
The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe is facing a May 7 court hearing determining the fate of their land. This country’s history of abuse of First Peoples is just disgraceful, and Trump and his Admin are our current barometer of extreme whiteness.
Mousebumples
We’ve been watching Longmire, on Netflix, which covers some of the Native American legal and Healthcare issues (now and in the past) since it’s set in Wyoming. I agree that it’s a travesty, and a lot of these points seem similar to what African Americans have gone through (and continue to go through). ?
catclub
Is this an open thread?
can I complain that EVEN IF China covered up cv19’s severity, the extremely competent US intelligence agencies should have learned of, and dealt with, that problem.
Suppose China commits some act of war. The Quality of the US response to that is dependent on the US federal government, not whether China was particularly malicious in its act.
MisterForkbeard
@The Moar You Know: I’m… sort of two minds about this? I get it, but the “blockading the Navajo in their hot spots and letting them suffer” isn’t great either.
This would be REALLY offset if we were able to actually support them with supplies, medicine, etc. But the current policy appears to be “let them sit over there and get sick, don’t help them and don’t let them infect the white folks”.
MisterForkbeard
@catclub: This is true, though also you’d expect a Chinese coverup to delay the realization of the threat by Intelligence. Even so – the intelligence agencies WERE warning about this and it was ignored.
The whole thing is a shitshow.
Brachiator
I hope he was a kind and capable physician.
What a fucked up system. Did this also mean that people had to pay a fee to get their ballots notarized? Were there efforts to try to get out to people to make sure they were registered and voted?
Indigenous people should not be reduced into “being brown.” And indigenous people are poor as a result of a deliberate policy by the federal government to keep them locked down and oppressed. They are also US citizens, but they have never been allowed to have functioning independent nations within the United States.
ETA: Always thought it was weird that notary income is not subject to self-employment tax.
satby
@MisterForkbeard: There are 13 grocery stores on the reservation, which sounds like a lot but not for the vast area covered. I think the point of closing the nearby towns is to limit sales of alcohol.
way2blue
I thought all aspects of voting need to be free. i.e., no poll tax or its equivalent. If correct, requiring voting documents to be notarized should fail a court challenge. And mail-in ballots should have pre-paid postage on the envelope. As is done in California…
Baud
I’m surprised they didn’t require the form to be notarized by a fetus.
Omnes Omnibus
@way2blue: The current SD voter registration form does not require notarization. The current SD absentee ballot request form asks for either a copy of a valid ID to be attached or notarization.
Kent
The whole abortion thing really defies logic. If you were an amoral GOP politician in a state with lots of brown people, the logical thing would be to allow and promote all the legal measure available to keep the brown population check. Especially since they not only cost you votes, they cost you money in terms of schools, social services, etc. Don’t tell me it is deep-seated religious beliefs. They conveniently and happily adjust their so-called religious beliefs to accommodate a thousand other customs and habits that are not remotely Christian.
I lived in the south for over a decade and I still fail to completely understand the diseased right wing white evangelical mind.
The Moar You Know
@MisterForkbeard: That, fortunately, is not what’s happening. Both the Feds and the state are in there with field hospitals and medical personnel.
There’s trying to enforce stay in place, the Navajo don’t want to stay in place, and it’s going really fucking badly and going to get a lot of people killed.
@satby: The point of closing the nearby towns is not to limit sales of alcohol (which you cannot buy on the reservation) but to limit the deaths of the people working the stores, their families, and everyone in the whole damn town.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I suppose when you tell your own voting base to go out and die while they party on in safety and comfort you have to have a Other the sheep can feel better than.
Or rather going by dumb ass Donny example; refuse any personal safety precautions based on some idiot mixture of genetic superiority because granddad was a self made man in the Sex Worker industry and quack medicine. So how long before Trump gets the virus?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Put it this way; what happened with Iran? Trump will have some missiles shot, get bored and wander off which is exactly what Trump is trying to do with the Pandemic.
L85NJGT
Welp, this happened.
Baud
@L85NJGT: Probably couldn’t find a mask where he was.
laura
@Kent: Kent, a gentle correction if I may, the rationale behind restricting/outlawing abortion has a long and storied past but the short version is that women should not have agency over any aspect of their lives. Sure, there’s the while replacement thing, and the keep out of the workplace and the voting booth. Don’t forget the objection to women having sex when where and with whom they choose. But, for me, at the end of the day it boils down to men HATE women. Not all, but way too many.
Men. Hate. Women.
BobS
You probably don’t need me to tell you, but your dad was/is a mensch.
evodevo
@Kent: Read a few blog posts over at Roll to Disbelieve…she’s an ex-fundie and does a lot of analysis of their incredible range of hypocrisy and misogyny…very informative
Kent
HIstorically abortion wasn’t even an issue in the evangelical south until the early 70s. You can find very little mention of it in say Baptist writings until the early 70s when right wing political leaders decided to mobilize the issue for partisan political gain and to keep poor evangelicals on the side of the right, rather than see them drift towards left wing policies that would actually benefit them.
I’m sure it is all tied together. But the weaponizing of abortion as a political issue is a fairly recent development in historical terms.
Ruckus
@Kent:
Think narcissism.
Having a view of the world that human beings are “different” because they don’t look exactly the same or speak differently or believe in different mythical beings and that you belong to the “special” group because, BS, BS is group narcissism.
It can’t be rationalized because it’s not rational, but that doesn’t mean people won’t try or form those opinions.
Emerald
@Kent: Frank Schaeffer, whose dad was the pioneer of using abortion to politically mobilize the evangelicals, did a 180 decades ago and has written several books about how it happened.
And yeah, it was completely political. As often noted, the Bible doesn’t even mention abortion.
MisterForkbeard
@The Moar You Know: Well, thank God we’re trying to actually help >_<
BobS
@Kent: It happened around the same time as the radicalization of gunowners/the NRA, for the same cynical, political reason.
Barbara
@Kent: To put it nicely, you are looking for logic in the wrong place. And yes, there is indeed a logic but it’s hardly straightforward. This is about maintaining hierarchy of specific social groups.
Kent
Yes. Evangelicals believe (or claim to believe) a lot of different things. You can find a bible verse to support just about anything you want. But abortion is the one issue that seems to have mobilized state legislatures in Red America more than practically anything else. Even in the middle of the pandemic they can’t stop their abortion-bothering.
I think it is largely cynical and political. What they are essentially saying is that no matter how much you might agree with the other party when it comes to social issues or education or health care or whatever. You absolutely HAVE to vote for us because ABORTION
How else do you get people to vote so consistently against their own interests? Yes, there is racism, and that is a powerful tool. But that will only get you so far. Abortion is the one thing you just can’t argue with.
Barbara
@Emerald: I read two of Schaeffer’s very entertaining memoirs. The level of hypocrisy among all of the players in the anti-abortion movement, including his own parents, is just astounding. To give an example, his mother wrote books on parenting that emphasized strict discipline, but in real life, she barely paid attention to her kids and let them roam free, (at least for Frankie, who was the youngest) and never hit any of them.
laura
@Kent: I agree that it became a wedge issue in the 70’s along with all manner of god bothering and private religious schools. That wasn’t the point I was trying to make. The point is there is zero rationale other than gaining and retaining power over the lives of others.
Soprano2
@Kent: If you think about their opposition to abortion not as a way to “save lives” but instead as a way to control the sex lives of young women and make sure they are “punished” for having the “wrong” kind of sex by being forced to have a baby, their positions make a lot more sense. They don’t seem to realize that married women also have abortions, either.
Nora
@Kent: I remember having a discussion — almost an argument — with my very Catholic, very social justice oriented, mother right before the 2012 election. She was saying she was reluctant to vote for Obama and Biden because of Abortion, and Paul Ryan was anti-abortion and that was a big deal. I remember reminding her that Paul Ryan had done everything in his power to hurt poor people, people of color, the people she cared about, that in terms of following the message of Jesus, Paul Ryan was a much worse Christian than Biden. I don’t think I got through to her, which broke my heart. This was a woman who marched for civil rights in the 60’s, marched against Reagan’s Central America policies in the 80’s, and had always been what I consider a real Christian. In the end I didn’t blame her; I blamed the Catholic Church for turning all the teachings of Jesus into “Abortion is murder.”
Soprano2
@laura: Some men hate women when they cannot control them. I wouldn’t say all men hate women; I know my husband doesn’t hate women.
zhena gogolia
Deleted. It’s out of place here.
Brachiator
@Soprano2:
The Supreme Court decision in Griswold v Connecticut came about because of laws denying access to birth control to married women.
The Comstock law prohibited any person from using “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception.”
The idea was that the state had an interest in making sure that women had children. A corollary was that men and women should be encouraged to get married.
Soprano2
I think the radicalization of the abortion issue tracks pretty well with women feeling more and more freedom to have sex with whoever they pleased, whenever they pleased, and the availability of birth control to help them not get pregnant. It’s hard to believe, but it was only in 1965 that the court ruled that birth control couldn’t be restricted to only certain people. I had a friend who lived in one of the Dakotas in the 1970’s; she said even though birth control was legal, the only doctor for 100 miles was a Catholic who refused to prescribe it for anyone. So to me it’s all about the idea that their control of women’s behavior sexually was slipping away; preventing abortion was one way they tried to re-assert it.
Kent
I don’t disagree with you generally. But if you look at the pasty white men in these various state legislatures who are obsessively voting in abortion restrictions. I think they are mostly motivated to retain power so they can continue to vote for never-ending tax cuts and regulatory roll-backs. As most of them are small businessmen of some sort and want unfettered ability to pay less wages, taxes, and follow less health, safety, and environmental regulations that might cost them money.
The endless abortion-bothering is mostly a way to cement their fundie base and make sure that every fundie preacher across their district demands that their flocks vote GOP above all else, because ABORTION. As Nora’s example above shows. It works.
If giving women more freedom was a political tool that they could use to lower taxes, regulations, and wages then they’d do a 180 in a nanosecond and be all over that like white on rice.
rikyrah
Revealed, the reason why obese people may be more at risk of coronavirus: Fat cells make large amounts of a protein used by the deadly infection to infiltrate human cells
The coronavirus latches onto ACE-2 receptors, known as the ‘gateway’ into cells Scientists said fat cells express high levels of ACE-2 which make them a target ACE-2 is also widely expressed in the fat cells of people with type 2 diabetes The UK Government are looking into the links between obesity and COVID-19 Here’s how to help people impacted by Covid-19
By VANESSA CHALMERS HEALTH REPORTER FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 05:48 EDT, 6 May 2020 | UPDATED: 09:15 EDT, 6 May 2020
The reason why obese people may be more at risk of dying from coronavirus could be because their fat cells make large amounts of a protein used by the infection to infiltrate human cells. The coronavirus – scientifically called SARS-CoV-2 – latches onto ACE-2 receptors, known as the ‘gateway’ into cells inside body. Fat cells express ACE-2 receptors, which experts say may explain why obese people have higher odds of suffering a severe bout of COVID-19. ACE-2 is also expressed in the fat cells of people with type 2 diabetes – another high-risk health condition driven by obesity. Some researchers now believe diabetes drugs could be used to fight the infection – and admitted that losing weight may also have a benefit. The scientists who posed the theory, from Germany and the US, also outlined how fat cells are linked to a lung-scarring condition called pulmonary fibrosis. With COVID-19 added on top, the lungs would struggle to get enough oxygen to the rest of the body.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8291869/Obese-people-risk-coronavirus-fat-cells-infection-targets.html?ito=push-notification&ci=14534&si=733427
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Brachiator: Only the “right” women though. The state also had an interest in sterilizing women without their knowledge or consent up until relatively recently…
Roger Moore
@catclub:
They did. Unfortunately, the intelligence community can send warnings about this stuff, but it can’t make the President read and believe their reports.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
A little more information about the effects some of the restrictions have had on the Navajo Nation near Gallup, N.M. “Gallup is a hub for basic household supplies, liquor sales and water-container refills for people living in remote stretches of the Navajo Nation — often without full indoor plumbing — and indigenous Zuni Pueblo. The Navajo Nation has imposed evening and weekend curfews on the reservation spanning parts of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah.” New Mexico takes more drastic steps
New Mexico pueblo fights high corona virus numbers
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
And let’s not forget that Trump has been holding up 8 Billion dollars in Corona virus relief funds
“President Donald Trump is preparing to take credit for releasing the $8 billion coronavirus relief fund that his own administration has held up for more than a month, helping a vulnerable Republican along the way.” And they are only releasing half the funds…
Trump holds back relief funds amid pandemic
Bill Arnold
@Kent:
The American right has largely lost any claim to a moral standing with their advocacy for mass human sacrifice to attempt to gain improvements in general prosperity, especially for the wealthy. It’s clarifying, and it will be (properly) used to reduce evangelical support for Republicans/Trump.
There may be anti-abortion groups who have been outspoken against premature relaxing of restrictions to reduce R0 of SARS-CoV-2; good for them if so. (But silence is complicity.)
Brachiator
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
I know that Connecticut proposed a survey in 1938 to identify people who would be deported or sterilized. Not sure that action was taken.
But yeah, there was also the 1927 Buck v Bell case, which upheld the practice of forced sterilization. Back then, it was eugenics; today you have fools hoping that the pandemic will do a similar job for them.
The shit never stops.
Brachiator
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
Meanwhile, he wants to spend hundreds of millions to paint his border wall black.
He thinks that painting it black will make it too hot for people to try to climb over it. I’ve seen some reports suggesting that it could cost as much as $3 billion to complete the job.
Ruckus
@Kent:
What makes it unarguable?
The only way it is unarguable is if you accept every spurious argument that has ever been made.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
It must be difficult to argue with a narcissistic moron who “thinks,” and worse yet thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, when he obviously is not.
sdhays
@Ruckus: I think that he means that there’s just no arguing with people over it, not that it doesn’t deserve to be argued over. Religious conservatives have successfully established it as the most fundamental moral principle, which is convenient because it doesn’t ask anything more of the members of the flock to be judgmental and control women. Win win! //
Jesus’ actual teachings are a lot more difficult to follow and take a lot of effort and sacrifice because our supposedly Christian society doesn’t really consider any of that important enough to organize around in a fundamental way (not saying there aren’t organizations and individuals who do, but a society which took the “rich person through the eye of a needle” parable remotely seriously, for example, would look extremely different from our society today).
Kent
Oh, I’m happy to argue with anyone about abortion. I’m just talking about in a general societal sense. Americans give a lot of deference to religious beliefs. Which makes abortion a hard topic to argue with because you are challenging someone’s professed religious belief. You quickly get into topics like when does life begin and the nature of the soul. Which are religious, not rational.
It doesn’t matter whether they are arguing in good faith or not. The religion part tends to shut down the argument in many cases. It is what it is.
Another Scott
@Kent: It’s politics, not some sort of moral position. It’s a cynical ploy to divide the Democratic coalition. Sound familiar?
Repost: Jill Lepore at the NewYorker – Birthright:
Don’t accept the GOP framing on anything. It’s (almost) always disingenuous.
HTH!!
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Brachiator: Javanka got a few tankers of black paint on consignment and have to get rid of it to rake in the bucks.
Maybe??
Cheers,
Scott.
Kent
Of course it is politics for the cynical politicians and religious leaders who push this shit. But try telling that to my 80 year old aunt who is convinced that we are killing babies and that this county is going to hell as a result.
Another Scott
@Kent: Most people don’t pay attention to politics that much – just keeping up with life is time consuming enough – they pay attention to leaders of their political tribe. The GOP political tribe bought into the nonsense that the “Moral Majority” was pushing because it worked. They won elections, and much of the media, with it. So that message took over.
Your aunt is a follower of the opinion of her chosen tribe, not a shaper of it.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.