Why California native tribes are cautious about ending shutdown. ‘We can’t lose a single elder’
Sherry Scott joined the rebellion in some parts of the state against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s stay-at-home order at a protest with dozens of others in Crescent City on Friday.
The next day, buoyed by the experience, Scott and her business partner invited customers to eat at her Log Cabin Diner in Klamath, an outpost along Highway 101 at the mouth of the river that gives the town its name.
“In those three days, we’ve had people coming in and taking a stand with us,” Scott said Monday. “We’ve actually done quite well.”
Then the tribal police stepped in and told them to stop feeding customers inside.
The state’s largest Native American tribe, the Yurok, on whose reservation Scott’s diner sits, has banned all visitors to its lands, in an effort to keep the new coronavirus out of one of the state’s most vulnerable communities.
For the tribe, it was tremendously painful to close its casino, river jet boat tours and other tourist attractions.
“We absolutely, 100 percent understand the position they’re in,” said the tribe’s vice chairman, Frankie Myers. “Our economy is based around tourism, and we’re suffering right along with everyone else. We get the gravity of this. We see the red in our books just like everyone else does.”
Nevertheless, Myers said, “there no amount of economic loss will ever deter the tribe (from protecting) the health and safety of our elders and our most vulnerable who are at risk.”
The Yurok might be the state’s largest tribe, but the issues it faces — lack of revenue from a tourism collapse and disease risks in its isolated rural communities — are not unique.
To understand those risks, Myers said to look at what’s been happening on the tribal lands of the Navajo Nation reservation in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. As of Tuesday, the Navajo Nation had at least 2,530 confirmed coronavirus cases and at least 73 deaths. Per capita, that’s the third-highest regional infection rate in the United States.
Experts say the risks of COVID-19 infecting residents on Indian lands are disproportionately higher. Some reservations have dilapidated housing and lack of clean water, making disease-preventing hand washing a challenge in many households.
Native Americans also tend to have high rates of disabilities, diabetes, heart conditions and obesity that experts say puts them in extra danger from COVID-19.
While federal guidelines say Americans are considered at particular risk if they’re older than 55 and have underlying health conditions, for native peoples, the age is even younger.
“For the native community, the age has now been dropped to 40,” said Britta Guerrero, chief executive officer of the Sacramento Native American Health Center. Guerrero is a member of Arizona’s San Carlos Apache Nation.
So far, low numbers of infections
Disparities in Native American healthcare systems have long troubled experts.
“It is significant to note that American Indians/Alaska Natives frequently contend with issues that prevent them from receiving quality medical care,” the federal government’s Office of Minority Health Resource Center said in a 2017 report. “These issues include cultural barriers, geographic isolation, inadequate sewage disposal, and low income.”
The report noted that infectious diseases are a particular concern. For instance, tuberculosis rates among Native Americans were four times higher than the national average.
California has 109 federally recognized Indian tribes and 78 others petitioning for federal recognition. There are around 100 reservations and rancherias in the state. The tribes are sovereign governments, and the larger ones like the Yurok have their own police forces.
So far, no large outbreaks on tribal lands have been reported in California. However, 72 Native Americans have caught the disease statewide, and seven have died, according to COVID-19 data from the California Department of Public Health.
Those numbers may be a substantial undercount, Guerrero said. In Sacramento County alone, health officials aren’t identifying Native Americans specifically in a dashboard tallying ethnicities testing positive for COVID-19, Guerrero said. “Other” and “multi-race” make up about 8.5 percent of the cases where the patient’s ethnicity was known.
“We’re being lost in this data as well,” Guerrero said. “So even if our rates are higher, it may not be captured in that way.”
She’s heard of small clusters of COVID-19 cases beginning to pop up on some rancherias around the state. She’s hoping they don’t become large outbreaks in the coming weeks.
California tribes face funding crunch
Many of California’s tribes like the Yurok have turned to casinos over the decades to try to bring life into their struggling economies. The COVID-19 crisis has forced them to close an $8 billion a year business.
It’s created a unique challenge in communities wary of outsiders carrying the disease, but that desperately needs their business.
Tribal leaders are hoping to get the slot machines and gaming tables back up and running soon, said Susan Jensen, executive director of the California Nations Indian Gaming Association.
“It makes sense to get people back to work,” she said. “It’s important for them to get up and operating ... but not putting public health at risk.”
Some casinos will likely open with temperature kiosks, restrictions on attendance and with many of the slot machines mothballed or separated by Plexiglas shields. Similar measures were taken when casinos opened in the Asian gambling mecca Macau.
She said she expects casinos in rural counties that have largely escaped the pandemic would be the ones to open first.
Because of their sovereign-nation legal status, she said the tribes have the “ultimate authority” to reopen their casinos regardless of state or county regulations.
But she said tribal officials “are working hand in hand” with the governor’s office and with county and federal officials on the timing.
With casino revenues on hold, tribes are seeing their attempts at economic diversification falter.
The Whitney Oaks Golf Club in Rocklin — owned by the owners of Thunder Valley Casino, the United Auburn Indian Community — is open now but closed twice over the past month.
The collapse of the travel industry has hurt businesses like the Residence Inn Hotel in downtown Sacramento, which is owned by the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians in San Bernardino County. The tribe also owns a hotel in Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile, tribes also have yet to receive stimulus money from the federal government. The $8 billion in the fund set to go to tribes has been tied up in a legal dispute with the Trump administration.
Tribal governments in the lower 48 states argue Alaska Native corporations, for-profit businesses that serve tribal villages in Alaska, shouldn’t receive the funds. The Trump administration disagrees.
The Yurok is one of several tribes who’ve sued the Treasury Department to release the money, citing “a sustained lack of funding for tribal healthcare systems and the scarcity of medical resources on and in proximity to reservations.”
“This disease is especially devastating in Indian Country, where there are substantial vulnerable populations and very few healthcare services,” Joseph James, the Yurok Tribe’s chairman, said in a written statement announcing the lawsuit. “The Treasury needs to quickly release these funds to protect the health and welfare of millions of indigenous people.”
On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin and Secretary of the Interior David L. Bernhardt released a joint statement saying that $4.8 billion of it would start being distributed to tribal governments in all states.
In the meantime, the Yurok Tribe’s 6,500 members are doing what they can to keep the coronavirus off their lands beyond just banning visitors.
They’ve embarked on a public awareness campaign on the reservation, and to help minimize the risk to infirm members, the tribe is delivering emergency food and supply boxes every week to nearly 500 tribal citizens in Del Norte, Humboldt and Trinity counties.
“We can’t risk the life of even one single elder,” said Myers, the vice chairman. “The amount of knowledge they have and what they mean to our community is invaluable. … Most folks when they want to know the history of their pasts, they go to a library. Well, for us, as Yurok people, as indigenous people, our elders are our history books. They are our libraries.”
‘The right to choose’
Scott, the diner owner, and her partner, Ed Salsedo, are not members of the tribe.
The tribe says the Log Cabin Diner is inside the reservation boundary and it has the authority to enforce the local closure notice. Scott says she and Salsedo own the restaurant property, though, and they dispute it is under the tribe’s jurisdiction.
On Tuesday, the tribe’s police chief was poised to cite them, but Scott told The Bee she went back to serving take-out only, and the chief backed off.
The tribe’s legal threat also followed Del Norte County’s health department sending a letter warning of fines of up to $1,000 a day and six months in jail if the couple didn’t stop serving customers in their diner.
While she may have backed off a day later, Scott seemed ready for a fight on Monday.
She said she doesn’t think her business puts the tribe at any more risk than when its members make trips to places like Crescent City or Eureka to go shop at the large retail stores.
“These people go into town and shop and then they go back on the reservation, OK,” Scott said. “That’s OK?”
But she believes the overall risks in Del Norte County are minimal for everyone. After all, her county has only had three people test positive for COVID-19 and all of them recovered.
Scott said residents deserve the right to choose.
“If I have dine-in in a restaurant, and you’re afraid you’re going to get sick, then don’t come to the restaurant,” Scott said on Monday. “Come and get takeout. Or don’t give us any of your business. Shelter in place.”
But Guerrero, the CEO of the Sacramento Native American health clinic, said tribal leaders have every right to decide who opens on their lands; they also have a deep obligation to protect their most vulnerable citizens from a dangerous contagious disease.
“Our elders are our most precious members of our communities, and so taking any chances that would risk their health or safety is not a decision we would be willing to make,” Guerrero said. “If a tribe says, ‘No, you’re not allowed to open up a non-tribal business on our land because you’re putting our elders at risk,’ then that’s the answer.”