Covid-19 leads to chronic water crisis

NAVAJO: Amanda Larson pulls up at a water station a few miles from her home in the Navajo Nation, and her three children get to work filling up large bottles lying on the bed of her pickup truck.

The 66 gallons will be used by her family for drinking, washing clothes and bathing — before the next trip out in two or three days to repeat the back-breaking task.

“It’s embarrassing. It’s degrading. It’s heartbreaking for my kids because they can’t jump into a shower like everybody else and just wash,” the 35-year-old preschool teacher tells Agence France Presse (AFP) after returning to her prefabricated home in Thoreau, which lies in the southeast corner of this sovereign territory, the United States’ largest Native American reservation.

“This is how we get ready for school, this is how my husband and I are getting ready for work, in these two totes,” she says, pointing to large plastic containers placed inside the bathtub.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Washing your hands is easy and it’s one of the most effective ways to prevent the spread of germs,” advice it has relentlessly emphasized over the course of the coronavirus pandemic.

That’s just not possible for an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the nation’s 178,000 residents, who do not have access to running water or sanitation.

This is seen as a major reason behind the surge in coronavirus cases within the territory, with nearly 5,000 confirmed infections and 160 deaths — one of the highest per capita fatality rates in the country. “Water is life,” say the Navajo, who prefer to call themselves “Dine” and their land “Dinetah.”

The global death toll from the virus mounted to more than 357,000. More than 5.7 million have been confirmed infected since the virus emerged in China late last year.

These three words are spray painted on walls throughout a geographically diverse territory that stretches 27,400 square miles (about the size of Scotland) across Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, a land of arid deserts with striking sandstone formations that give way

Members of the Larson family, who have no running water in their home, collect water from a distribution point in the Navajo Nation town of Thoreau. Nearly 2 million residents of the region, where native Americans are located, have no safe water access as workers in the distilling plants were forced to take long leaves caused by the pandemic.

to high plateaus and alpine forests.

It’s a sentiment also reflected in place names: Sweetwater, Many Farms Lake, Willow Spring. But these names often no longer reflect reality.

Rising temperatures and declining rainfall led to a decrease in the area’s surface water by an estimated 98 percent over the 20th

century, according to a report by water nonprofit DigDeep.

Chronic neglect by the government is another aspect to this story, says George McGraw, who founded DigDeep in 2012 to help communities in Sub-Saharan Africa, but who has since shifted his focus to America.

Starting in the mid-19th century, the US began heavily investing in water and sanitation systems — but an estimated 2 million of America’s 330 million people remain unconnected to this day.

“There are these gigantic swaths of the country, mostly black, brown, indigenous and rural, that were bypassed when it came to the major federal infrastructural investment that was made to service the rest of the country,” he told AFP.

Native Americans are the hardest hit group: 58 out of every 1,000 households lack complete plumbing, compared to three out of every 1,000 among whites.

The Navajo signed a treaty with the US government in 1868, four years after they were forced from their homeland in a mass deportation called the Long Walk of the Navajo.

In exchange for giving up their resistance to the colonizers, as well as vast tracts of land, they were promised basic necessities such as education and healthcare in perpetuity.

A 1908 Supreme Court judgement emphasized that the creation of reservations also included an implicit right to water sufficient to fulfill the territories’ purpose — but left open the thorny question of how much that was, an ambiguity that has prevented enforcement.

By contrast, southwestern states built hundreds of dams in the following decades, creating plentiful supply for their residents, often at the expense of Indian reservations.