Just as the colonial COVID-19 virus is wreaking devastation on the oppressed and exploited African community inside this country, the Indigenous people are also catching hell.
The United States was built on the theft of the land from the Indigenous people, who are today confined to concentration camps euphemistically characterized as “reservations,” where the average life expectancy is 42 years old.
The European mass murder of Indigenous people involved all means of colonial violence, including biological warfare, such as the infamous use of smallpox-infested blankets given by European settlers to Indigenous people.
Today, Indigenous people are struggling to protect their communities from the ravages of the colonial COVID-19 virus.
In the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, 11 people have tested positive for the virus as of Friday, April 3 and one has died.
In the Navajo Nation, 321 people were infected as of Saturday April 4, an increase of 51 cases in a single day with 13 fatalities.
There are five million Indigenous people remaining today on their occupied land.
“When you look at the health disparities in Indian Country—high rates of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, asthma and then you combine that with the overcrowded housing situation where you have a lot of people in homes with an elder population who may be exposed or carriers—this could be like a wildfire on a reservation and get out of control in a heartbeat,” said Kevin Allis, chief executive of the National Congress of American Indians, in an article published by The Washington Post.
“We could get wiped out,” he stressed.
Indigenous people are forced to live in concentration camps on their own land mainly in the West, Midwest and South, according to the National Congress of American Indians.
Houses often lack electricity and running water.
Indigenous people face brutal health disparities as a consequence of centuries of genocidal violence, domination and land dispossession.
Conditions such as hypertension, asthma, cancer, heart and cardiovascular disease—conditions that put them at a higher risk of dying from the Coronavirus—are common.
Indigenous people are 600 times more likely to die of tuberculosis and nearly 200 times more likely to die of diabetes than other groups. More than a quarter under age 65 lack health insurance.
As infections more than tripled from 71 to about 270 in just over a week, the nation could not get federal funding quickly and protective gear for health workers was inaccessible.
A third stimulus package passed by congress on March 27 included a small sum of $10 billion toward the Indigenous reservations but allocating the funds could take weeks.
Meanwhile $4 trillion is going to the Wall Street banks.
The idea of Congress putting a measly $10 billion towards the Indigenous people whose land was stolen at gunpoint is appalling. That money is not theirs to give.
The entire “American” continent belongs to Indigenous people. The real estate value of the land occupied by the United States is estimated at $23 trillion.
As summed up by the Uhuru Movement, for the white population the COVID-19 crisis is a disturbance at worst, and a vacation at best.
For colonized African and Indigenous people, it is another weaponized tool of colonial genocide.
The People’s War strategy of the African People’s Socialist Party stands in unconditional solidarity with the struggle of the Indigenous people to seize control of their land and to win national liberation and self-determination.
Victory to the Indigenous people!
Uhuru!
