A year into the pandemic- Tales from the Diné Rez
Ni Hi Ke’ Baa’ (For Our Relatives) Mutual Aid
Photos courtesy of Nihi K’é Baa’ (For Our Relatives) Mutual Aid
A year into the pandemic- Tales from the Diné Rez
by Kim Smith
Reflecting on my work in 2019, pre-COVID, it now seems like a fantasy world that nothing could ever go wrong in. My work’s focus was primarily on 1) Healing the Land & 2) Holding the Public Utility of New Mexico accountable for the decades of land, water, body destruction and health disparities it has created in New Mexico. A good decade of doing the work on the ground. Gathering signatures & testimony from folks across the rez, DIY Graffiti murals to shine light on our Diné water crisis. Organizing art shows, live shows, immersion camps, and cooking and visiting resistance camps to walking 1400 miles to each of our sacred places across our homeland. 2010-2020 includes a decade of work and the reflection of that laid the foundation for 2020.
Photo courtesy of Kim Smith
In 2016 I learned about a prophecy that a huge paradigm shift would happen in 2020. Folks thought it would happen in 2000 but prophecy says that it is in line with 2020 vision. If you have 20/20 vision, you can see clearly at 20 feet what should normally be seen at that distance, 20/20 vision only indicates the sharpness or clarity of vision. So in the year 2020 we would see things as they really are and there would also be a shift in our societies. I remember in 2016 we were like, “ahh!! ok, we’re not ready..””what is the shift going to be?!”
Each winter for the past 3 years my time was spent uplifting the voices from the Northern Agency of the Diné nation at the New Mexico state legislature. These sessions varied from either a 30 day session to a 90 session. Day in day out in an institution that is colonial AF, talking and schmoozing and making every effort to transition New Mexico to a true Just (justice oriented) Transition away from fossil fuels.
Photo courtesy of Kim Smith
Spring of 2020 really sprung a new bud and was a turning point for the fight against climate change, equality, and a “Green New Deal/ Just Transition”. For me personally, I was also reflective on the past decade of work. Was it enough? And seeing all the rude awakenings and harsh realities of the so-called movement. Folks we worked with at the beginning were not there at the end of the decade. Meanwhile Trump and his fellow white supremacists came out guns blazing. Showing more and more of themselves year by year. Then the pandemic hit.
The urgency to serve and make sure our communities were taken care of before ourselves was worrying for our mothers. Especially with an unknown and very contagious virus. As everything shut down so did our Diné nation. The central chapter (town) houses and elder centers closed and quarantine began on our homeland. A large percentage of Diné households use wood as their primary source of heat. Folks use wood well into April, sometimes May. We definitely didn't have tons of food to give away. So we started with gathering as much wood as we could. We came up with protocol for a mutating virus, telling folks to stay inside when we came to deliver wood. Not use it for 24 hours. We drove miles and miles across the four corners. As we dropped wood we saw the dire need for food, water, PPE, livestock-feed, especially for positive households going into quarantine.
Photos courtesy of Nihi K’é Baa’ (For Our Relatives) Mutual Aid
How this virus crept into our homeland was like most colonial ways before. A church and a pastor. In Tsiiłchin Biiʼ Tó (Chilchinbito, AZ), a small village in western agency of our homeland in the four corners region of our homeland there is a small population of less than 1,000, with an elementary school, small churches and a project housing. In 2019, the median income for this community was around $15,000. Tsiiłchin Biiʼ Tó sits just below Dził Yiijiin' (Black Mesa), so this community is also within the 100 mile radius of 3 major coal mine and powerplant operations powering the ever growing Southwest. A pastor came from a basketball tournament in Phoenix to preach at a revival in this small village. Pre-COVID this worship and ceremony was happening every day across our homeland; whether it was ancestral ceremony, Native American Church or revivals, Diné faith and prayer is deeply embedded in our society.
Not long after, our Nation had the highest cases of the virus per capita. It was all around us. We wouldn't dare go into the local markets or border towns to get food or feed for households. We drove to small towns in New Mexico and Colorado that had little to no cases of the virus. We vigorously wiped down everything we bought before packaging and delivering to positive or elder households. We did this for a year, day in day out. In the same communities we visited over the past years to tell them about the closure of the San Juan Generating Station and ask them about the health impacts on the land and body. When we did that, we served free ancestral foods and had these conversations over a meal. This time we delivered food, wood, water storage tanks and other supplies with no contact or interaction.
One of our joys in life as Diné folk is to greet someone. You are always greeted through kinship. As you can imagine this was a major shift for our elders, aunties, uncles. The other huge shift for Diné society was not being able to carry out Ceremonies. The final winter offerings and prep for spring and all ceremonies came to a halt. A new protocol was created for protecting ourselves and faith keepers and knowledge keepers against COVID. Like our ancestors who dealt with the Spanish flu and smallpox epidemics or greatest defense was ceremony. This was a very heavy and heartbreaking time for our people in modern day history.
Fast forward to the vaccine development. Again, like our ancestors before us, we were faced with foreign viruses then treated like lab rats for vaccine development. Almost 200 years ago the federal government launched the largest effort in US history to vaccinate Natives against smallpox. One of the darkest times in Native America. As smallpox ravaged through Indian country, settlers and colonizers seized the opportunity to force thousands of Native people off their homelands in the east and push them west and reservations were created. In 1832, the Indian Vaccination Act was passed in Congress. This legislation funded the federal government to hire doctors to vaccinate Natives. The act was intended to vaccinate Indians against smallpox but really it was passed to protect settlers and colonizers who were set on invading indigenous land, like many other legislations.
The feds took that pandemic as an opportunity to remove us from our lands but also to use us as guinea pigs for vaccine development. It also set the framework for how the feds would create Indian Health Service (IHS). With that came all the trauma and mistrust of the feds and their IHS, settlers and their “medicine”. During this COVID-19 pandemic all eyes were on Dine’ to see how and if the virus could mutate, how it’s transmittable and how IHS’ infrastructure and system failed us once again. Underfunded, outdated IHS hospitals could not meet the demand or have the necessities needed to combat the virus. Nonetheless support and love poured in from around the globe.
Photos courtesy of Nihi K’é Baa’ (For Our Relatives) Mutual Aid
By summer, talks of vaccine development by the feds and our leadership came. Dr. Anthony Fauci, Johns Hopkins and the pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer came to our leadership to discuss accelerated clinical trials on Diné people. Usually when clinical trials are proposed on our people there is a long process through the Institutional Review Board and the executive and legislative branches. With so many unknowns about the virus our community was targeted and policies were waived so a for profit pharmaceutical could once again use our bodies for clinical trials. Through the recruiting of Fauci and NN President Jonathan Nez trials began, Diné folks participating in the trial were offered $700.
Because of the trauma of Indian Health Services and past studies and vaccine development on Indigenous people many of us on the ground were very concerned with the lack of information and propaganda about the disease and vaccine development. It was pushed on our community with the rhetoric that, “it’s just like any other flu shot”. But really, it wasn’t, those vaccines had gone through all of the policies and procedures necessary across the board. On Dr. Andrew Curley’s podcast “The Diné Situation” he and Diné College professor Christine Ami talk at great length about those trials.
Meanwhile everyone else was left to really fend for themselves and organize and get resources to our people. CERT volunteers (Community Emergency Response Teams), Community Health Representatives (CHR’S) and folks like us were navigating how to safely and efficiently get resources to our communities. With no non-governmental infrastructure to open to help. Leadership used those spaces to their advantage to gate keep resources. They actively sought to shut down our work and the work of other grassroots support. In reality we were doing most of the frontline work. Soon enough we saw our pictures on their media propaganda.
During this time we were also rocked by the death and murder of Black relatives by police across the nation. We were devastated and watched the injustices in horror. We were also targeted by police and white supremacists in border towns who told us, “Go back to the rez with your diseases”. It was a very dark and uncertain time.
Our mutual aid collective was created in 2014. Although we may have not acknowledged our work as mutual aid then it was most definitely a time that as young Diné organizers we wanted to counter the hierarchical oppressive systems of capitalism in our community. We gathered resources and tried to equally distribute resources. Through this system we were able to walk 1400 miles across our territory to our sacred places to make offerings for our earth mom and holy people. From there we took the resource share to other resistance camps and kitchens in Oak Flat to the forest of Unist'ot'en, to the jungles of Chiapas to Lelu Island in the boundary waters of Canada and Alaska then back down across the midwest to the Line 3 resistance, and to Standing Rock. Our collective is composed of comrades and allies that we met on those journeys of redistributing resources.
Photos courtesy of Nihi K’é Baa’ (For Our Relatives) Mutual Aid
We are a collective of Indigenous people not only from Diné Bikéyah but we also have the support, commitment and solidarity in our efforts and membership of Indigenous relatives from other parts of Turtle Island, members from the Kanienkehaka Nation (Haudenosaunne confederation), relatives from south of the colonial border. from Anahuac (Mexico), all the way south to Abya Yala (South America) members from the Yagua Nation of the Amazon region of so-called Peru. Relatives who have been with us not only since the beginning of this pandemic, but long before.
Since 2018 we have distributed hot meals to unsheltered relatives in bordertowns near our homeland. Some of our comrades and allies have deep relationships and connections to our homeland by supporting sheep herders, elders and families in the Dził Yiijiin' (Black Mesa/Big Mountain) region. Others came to help us fight Fracking, uranium and coal mining in Diné Bihkeyah. Shoot, some homies we fought with against the first Tar Sands Mine in the US in Ute territory so-called Utah and other forms of extreme extraction. Most of the time we were together on the frontlines of land/water desecration, government repression, resource colonization, police brutality, white supremacy. Bringing together our unique skills, efforts, understanding, and ways to approach this struggle against colonization/capitalism as Diné People but also as Indigenous people from other regions. In that way is how we relate to each other in the true spirit of solidarity, collective care, Indigenous Mutual Aid, accountability for our presence and living on occupied Indigenous land and territories (for our relatives from the south) and kinship in between ourselves and our different communities, tribes and nations. We are a collective made up of Indigenous people, undocumented migrant relatives, womxn, femmes, LGBTQ2Spirit relatives, volunteers, community organizers, frontline workers, land defenders/water protectors who are stepping in to support the ones who need it most in many ways.
Photos courtesy of Nihi K’é Baa’ (For Our Relatives) Mutual Aid
With the support of allies and comrades from across the world we have supported thousands of households across our Diné homeland. We also understand that we have to move toward a long term approach because the current systems continuously fail us. It is imperative for us to focus on long term solutions to heal our land of all the damage caused by the fossil fuel industry. These industries and projects made our communities more vulnerable to diseases, shit, they comprise our immune systems on the daily for decades. After many years of extreme resource extraction, we have worked to build self sustainable projects for our people. We focus on seed and food justice/sovereignty. We strive to reestablish our trade and solidarity systems. Indigenous mutual aid, food and water radical redistribution for the most vulnerable. With the outpouring of solidarity, we are recreating, we are reclaiming and bringing back our old ways of life and traditions. This means rebuilding our ancestral food hubs & apothecaries, (sustainable farming/gardening projects), food storage/redistribution, reestablishing traditional trading/economies...etc, to feed and nourish our communities. We are autonomously organizing our mutual aid relief efforts to reestablish our ancestral ways of taking care of each other and the land.
Another huge pillar in our organizing is calling out the fact that our homelands, our resources and people have powered and fed the economy of this country, metropolitan towns and cities at the expense of our health and wellbeing. As our homelands and people are hit with the COVID-19 pandemic and colonialism, our call to action and support was in the name of solidarity, NOT CHARITY. I have immense love and gratitude to these homies that have taught, shared and created this vision with us over the years. The folks who are still by our sides. Folks who supported our work with even a dollar donation, a load of wood, herbs and medicines, masks mailed in daily. For a year into this pandemic we have done much great work together.
Ahe'hee nitsaa'gó!
Photos courtesy of Nihi K’é Baa’ (For Our Relatives) Mutual Aid
We want to continue to increase and sharpen our skills within our communities to stand up and support each other without the interference or coaptation of alien entities and organizations. The next phase of our work is to establish what we are deeming “A hogan building society”. One thing is for sure, there is a major lack of infrastructure for us to effectively do this kind of work autonomously. There is no local housing for our communities and our organizers on the ground. Part of the reason why the virus spread so fast is because of the lack of housing. If you live on the rez, chances are that you live with your parents, sometimes with siblings and their children too. 3-6 families under one roof. Through this building society we want to build tiny homes, by relearning and teaching each other how to build ancestral hogans. A sustainable way of life that our people have sustained for time immemorial. This summer we plan to build 2-3 hogans and a kitchen/ food bank.
Stay tuned for the next installment of “Healing the land is healing my body”, where I will share our next chapter of living post-COVID and our emerging builds throughout our homeland. If you would like to donate, our paypal and venmo information is below.
Or if you’d like to get involved with our earth builds feel free to contact us at nihikebaa@gmail.com.
I also want to give a HUGE shout out to our supporters of this work. The work never stops but your support is what pushing us through time and time again.
“We are nothing if we walk alone; we are everything when we walk together in step with other dignified feet”
Photos courtesy of Nihi K’é Baa’ (For Our Relatives) Mutual Aid
What It Means To Be A Human Being
by: John Trudell
In the reality
Of many realities
How we see what we see
Affects the quality
Of our reality
We are children of Earth and Sky
DNA descendant now ancestor
Human being physical spirit
Bone flesh blood as spirit
Metal mineral water as spirit
We are in time and space
But we’re from beyond time and space
The past is part of the present
The future is part of the present
Life and being are interwoven
We are the DNA of Earth, Moon, Planets, Stars
We are related to the universal
Creator created creation
Spirit and intelligence with clarity
Being and human as power
We are a part of the memories of evolution
These memories carry knowledge
These memories carry our identity
Beneath race, gender, class, age
Beneath citizen, business, state, religion
We are human beings
And these memories
Are trying to remind us
Human beings, human beings
It’s time to rise up
Remember who we are
Sanostee, NM- Photos courtesy of Nihi K’é Baa’ (For Our Relatives) Mutual Aid