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Hope and resilience in action: Navajo Nation continues battle against COVID

['Chad Bradley Cronkite News', 'More From Author', '- December']

Date: 2021-12-21 00:00:00

Reflecting on the pandemic

Residents of Tuba City, nearly 80 miles north of Flagstaff and one of the largest towns on the Navajo Nation, reflected on the past 21 months of dealing with the pandemic and experiencing loss and hardship while gaining a greater understanding of what “community” means.

“It was a big scare at that time,” Valentina Nez of Tonalea said as she waited in her car to receive a booster shot at the Tuba City Regional Health Care mobile medical unit. “You don’t know who has COVID, and you want to protect yourself, so you think about your family as well as your co-workers.”

Nez, who has received two doses of the Moderna vaccine, was afraid of coming into contact with people who may have been infected, some of whom seemed to have little concern for their safety.

“It was definitely heartbreaking, knowing that there were a lot of people losing their lives to this virus, something we don’t know anything about,” she said, describing the effects it had to her social life and noting that she had removed herself from social media because it was damaging her mental health.

Shaydreanna Jackson said her brother died in July, although not from COVID-19. But the pandemic still affected her family.

“Not being able to have everyone – his close family friends and relatives – there was hard,” she said. “Not being able to see everyone and for them to not be there for my sisters and I was hard.”

Jackson was waiting to receive a booster shot and was accompanied by her son, Koah, who received the Pfizer vaccine for ages 5 to 11. He said it wasn’t so bad, even though he’s normally afraid of needles.

Although Jackson lives in Tuba City, she is Hualapai, who, along with the Havasupai people, live in and near the Grand Canyon, about 50 miles northeast of Kingman.

“We’re already small as is, and we’ve had a lot of cases out there and it’s taken quite a bit of our elders,” Jackson said. “That’s scary because our language already isn’t spoken.”

The Hualapai Tribe has had 206 positive cases overall, with a population of 1,621, according to data from the tribe’s COVID-19 tracker.

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