Tribal nations feel the crush
Tribal nations around the United States are facing their most severe crisis in decades as they grapple simultaneously with some of the deadliest coronavirus outbreaks in rural America and the economic devastation caused by the protracted shutdown of nearly 500 tribally owned casinos.
The Navajo Nation, the country’s largest Indian reservation, now has a higher death rate than any U.S. state except New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Across Indian Country, more than 5,200 COVID-19 cases have been confirmed in communities from Arizona to Minnesota. That’s a number that might seem small compared with those in major urban centres in New York and Los Angeles, but which in many cases represents significant local clusters that are challenging the limited resources of tribal clinics and rural hospitals.
On reservations in the Dakotas and Montana where good housing is scarce, extended families have been forced to shelter together in tiny homes with no clean water and no internet. On the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, the Northern Arapaho Tribe opened its casino as a quarantine site.
The collective perils — fragile health-care systems, large numbers of people with pre-existing conditions and the collapse of tribal economies — have prompted Native American leaders to warn that serious havoc may be ahead, especially if shut down casinos prevent tribes from battling to recover their economies on their own.
“Life and death,” explained Bryan Newland, tribal chairman of the Bay Mills Indian Community in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, who estimated that about two-thirds of tribal employees were now out of work.
“We’re just going to write off 2020. There’s no sense in trying to work under the delusion that we’ll be able to claw back to normal life this year.”
The closure of the tribal casinos, which have emerged as one of the largest new sources of employment of any economic sector in the U.S. in recent decades, is eviscerating the revenues many tribal nations use to provide basic services. In one of the most important shifts toward increasing self-determination since the start of the century, more than 40 per cent of the 574 federally recognized tribes in the U.S. now operate casinos.
Now these operations are hemorrhaging jobs. After the entire industry shut down in the early days of social distancing measures, more than 700,000 people were left out of work, according to Meister Economic Consulting, which specializes in the tribal gaming industry.