If there’s any group that might have a legitimate reason to lag behind on vaccine uptake, it’s Native Americans. Community members often live far from healthcare facilities and a history of mistreatment by the government could have led to mistrust about the vaccines.
But according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Native Americans have a higher vaccination rate than any other major racial or ethnic group. Native Americans are 24% more likely than whites to be fully vaccinated, 31% more likely than Latinos, 64% more likely than African Americans and 11% more likely than Asian Americans.
Part of that success is attributable to strong leadership. Native American tribes were empowered by the CDC to adopt their own rollout plan. Many prioritized the elderly and people who speak Native languages in an attempt to preserve their culture. The Los Angeles Times reports:
… tribal leaders understood that vaccines were the clearest way out of the pandemic. They took to the radio and social media to promote them, warning that elders faced the greatest danger in communities vulnerable due to high rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity.
They reminded people of the damage COVID-19 had already wrought — killing Native Americans at 2½ times the rate of white Americans — as well as of the smallpox epidemics of the 18th and 19th centuries that decimated many tribes.
The “language you hear throughout Indian country is ‘be a good relative,’” Kerry Hawk Lessard, the executive director of Native American LifeLines told PBS. “Do this for the grandmas, do this for the ceremony, do this for the language, because our people are precious….We already lost a lot. We can’t afford to lose more.”
The message seemed to work. A poll by the Urban Indian Health Institute revealed that the primary motivation among Native Americans to get inoculated was “a strong sense of responsibility to protect the Native community and preserve cultural ways.”
In addition, many Native American tribes have strong connections to local healthcare workers, who made a point of communicating about the vaccines in Native languages. Several nurses were recently honored as the grand marshals at an annual parade in Montana.
“We put on our ribbon skirts,” Samantha Allen, one of the nurses, told the L.A. Times. “Otherwise we’re always in our scrubs.”
The Washington Post adds that tribal leaders made an extra effort to make vaccines as accessible as possible:
Tribes tried to reach people by offering private appointments, drive-up appointments and mass-vaccination events. In April, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and [Indian Health Service] teamed up with the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe to offer a mobile vaccination site, no registration required, in the parking lot of the Royal River Casino, according to Keloland TV.
“I know that the media comes in and paints us as this poor, poor Navajo society that got hit hard. But there’s a flip side to this,” Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez told The Post. “There’s a story of resilience and overcoming in the midst of a pandemic.”
