Transcript

“I think there's always sort of like Indian humor with everything and so there were a lot of people making jokes about Trump putting a travel ban in place to stop the spread of disease from Europe. A lot of native people on Twitter and Facebook were commenting that it was, you know, a few centuries too late." -Rebecca Nagle

In this episode, our host Dr. Celine Gounder speaks to Rebecca Nagle, Dr. Melissa Begay, and Jamescita Peshlakai about why the Navajo Nation has been so hard hit by COVID, and what their communities are doing to protect everyone—young and old—during this pandemic. The Navajo Nation is the nation’s largest indigenous tribe and has the highest per capita infection rate of COVID in the United States.

Dr. Melissa Begay is a member of the Navajo Nation, and a physician at the University of New Mexico in the Department of Pulmonary, Sleep and Critical Care. Jamescita Peshlakai is an Arizona State Representative and represents eight tribes in her district, including the Navajo. Rebecca Nagle is an Indigenous rights activist, writer and speaker, and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She also hosts the Crooked Media podcast, “This Land,” about a Supreme Court case on the land rights of indigenous peoples in Oklahoma.

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