A pandemic profile
This week Science published my profile of Abigail Echo-Hawk, a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma and a public health researcher committed to making sure data serves the needs of Indigenous people and communities. Which is an uphill battle always, but especially now. In the U.S. (and many other settler colonial countries) the COVID-19 pandemic is disproportionately affecting Native people, just as so many other diseases have in the past. It was important to my sources, and to me, to draw a clear causal line from long-standing U.S. policies to erase Indigenous people from the country and from the country’s data (the census, which began in 1790, didn’t count any American Indians until 1860 whaaaaaat), to the health disparities experienced by Native communities today, to what’s going on with the pandemic right now. Colonialism is not something bad that happened in the past, and thank goodness that now we know better. It’s still happening—or rather, settler colonial governments and the citizens they are designed to prioritize are still enacting it, are still making it happen—and it’s still killing people.
This story is a part of a series of short profiles of people doing important work related to the pandemic. You can read the others here, and there will be more!