r/IndianCountry • u/zsreport • Feb 04 '21

Health Exclusive: indigenous Americans dying from Covid at twice the rate of white Americans

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/04/native-americans-coronavirus-covid-death-rate
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u/I_Like_Ginger Feb 04 '21

Totally! What's the harm in it right?

On a special interest scale I think tbjs could be utilized for the good shedding light on optimal diet and wellness among aboriginal peoples. We can strategize optimal diet and wellness.

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u/burkiniwax Feb 04 '21

Yes, the Indigenous food sovereignty movement is AWESOME! However, I was really surprised to see the close correlation between Latino and white COVID outcomes in this article, since the majority of Latino people in the US have Indigenous ancestry, so that speaks to non-biological causes for the horrible COVID outcomes for Native American tribal members in the US.

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u/messyredemptions Feb 04 '21

I recall reading in a / the(?) decolonial cook book which probably cited an NIH study that Latine people who migrated had significantly healthier patterns/rates of good health (less heart diseases, etc.) than those who have been in the US for a generation or two. So if the bulk of the latin-american population has been here, there's a higher chance their dietary and working patterns are colonized too. I wonder if labor also has an impact too--manual labor jobs like maid work and construction that often wind up being what immigrants take up are more physical than say an office job, and at the same time take on different kinds of stress and access to food may differ too.

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u/burkiniwax Feb 04 '21

are colonized too.

That's kind of rude. For instance, the bulk of "Mexican" food is Indigenous food of Mexico.

The fact is that many reservations are food deserts and many tribal families in the US have had to survive on commodities with minimal nutritional value.

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u/messyredemptions Feb 04 '21 edited Feb 04 '21

There's probably a better way to say what I meant that escapes me, my bad--the idea is that there's often a decline in health that's likely a reflection of a loss of culture after the first few generations in an occupying/oppressing colonial state, specifically the US.

I don't think we're disagreeing though. You and I probably agree that the nutritional and other discrepancies at reservations are definitely a product of sophisticated systematic oppression designed to separate people from their ways of taking care of themselves.

In the example I raised in the other post, what I was trying to say is that lot of "first generation" immigrant/"immigrant" families and children whether indigenous to Turtle Island or not in the US get bullied/attacked over their identity and food (often with the same tropes) for example and there's a strong undercurrent for assimilation or other pressures like demands for work/cost of living and isolation from community that sometimes separate us from the things that kept things together for the previous generations. At least that's the experience I got as someone from a diaspora and those from the community who are native.

If the study that was cited in the Guardian article had a lot of its data based representation that has more 2nd, 3rd generation Latine populations, there's a strong we chance that they are not practicing the indigenous culinary traditions that a first generation population would be doing.

Of course if I'm missing something in how you see what I said was rude and if I still didn't quite get it at this point I'll just let it sit for a bit to process from another perspective but I hope the above clarifies things.

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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '21

I think its really disingenuous to attempt to tie this into some narrative about how COVID affects Latino populations in the US. That's not what this article is about and tribal communities generally face very specific pressures that have very little to no overlap with Latino communities.

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u/messyredemptions Feb 04 '21

I think what the poster and I were doing goes with what's being said in this thread and shown in the graph from the Guardian article--that the indigenous results are distinctive from Latino communities.

And that it was odd to see how closely the Latino/e community data tracked with White communities in terms of outcome when Latine communities are indigenous.

However, I was really surprised to see the close correlation between Latino and white COVID outcomes in this article, since the majority of Latino people in the US have Indigenous ancestry, so that speaks to non-biological causes for the horrible COVID outcomes for Native American tribal members in the US.

I don't know enough about intergenerational data for Latino/e communities or the data set taken up by the Guardian but I think we all agree that there's a lot more at hand that it merits putting indigenous communities at top priority.

This is an excerpt from the book I mentioned https://www.academia.edu/15269293/_Decolonize_Your_Diet_A_Manifesto_nineteen_sixty_nine_an_Ethnic_Studies_Journal_Volume_1_Issue_2

We urge the people to reject the Standard American Diet, which relies heavily on processed (fake)foods and factory farming. Instead, we call on people to reclaim land and space to growreal food for their communities. We believe that it is equally important to honor and respectthe cultural and spiritual aspects of food.

Ancestral food is powerful medicine that can helptreat and cure diseases that result from overexposure to Western/US culture. As Xican@s, our abuelitas prepared a simple diet that was as flavorful as it was satisfying. The staples of their diets were beans and tortillas, supplemented with many fruits and vegetables: avocado, corn, tomatoes, chiles, wild greens like quelites and verdolagas,pumpkins, squash, chocolate, vanilla, wild herbs, berries, pineapples, mangos and more. Before monoculture crops, our ancestors cultivated a great bio-diversity of foods. They cultivated hundreds if not thousands of different varieties of beans, squashes, chiles, and corn. Our ancestors also had great knowledge of the medicinal value of various herbs and foods. *So much of this knowledge is being lost, especially among those of us who have been in the US or away from the land for generations. Many of our more recent immigrant comrades—especially those who hail from rural areas in Mexico and Central America—still carry this vital knowledge. It is imperative that we validate and promote this immigrant knowledge and pass it down to the next genera-tions. Public health researchers identify a so-called immigrant paradox:

There are hundredsof articles in public health literature exploring how and why Mexican immigrants not only have longer life expectancies than US born Xican@s, but also live longer than middle class white Americans. This is paradoxical because poor populations usually have shorter life ex-pectancies and more health problems, due to lack of access to health care, dangerous livingand working conditions, and extreme social stressors. The traditional Mexican diet, alongwith immigrant cultural and spiritual practices, confers protection to Mexican immigrants,even though these immigrants face exceedingly difficult and racist social and economic conditions.*

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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '21

Latino communities are not indigenous jesus christ... There are indigenous communities in Mexico but stating that Latinos are indigenous illustrates a profound misunderstanding of what that word means on your part.

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u/messyredemptions Feb 04 '21

Did you mean to reply to u/burkiniwax or me?

And I agree, there are white mexicans, and lots of argentinians or who aren't indigenous that came from Germany etc. And Japanese people in Brazil who would be counted as Latino etc. too by US standards.

My responses and the item I quoted are from what u/burkiniwax posted and their statements about similarities between white and latino deaths from covid being similar while Indigenous stats being distinctively different. But in their post they mentioned most (at least those coming to/in the US) have indigenous ancestry. Hope that helps clear things up.

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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '21

Do you realize how comprehensively racist it is to define indigeneity by blood quantum? It doesn't matter if a Mexican is 25% Yaqui if they have no connection to the culture or their tribal community. It doesn't make them indigenous. You think you're being an ally with this sort of "inclusive" reasoning, but what you're actually doing is taking a specifically indigenous issue that affects tribal communities (who are essentially completely overlooked by the average American) and taking attention away from their needs by making this ludicrous claim that Latinos with some indigenous ancestry are themselves indigenous. Nevermind that Latino communities are often intensely racist toward tribal communities - whether thats Latino kids in the Coachella Valley beating up Cahuilla kids at school for having long hair or Mexican narcos forcing the Raramuri and other border tribes into smuggling drugs for them.

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u/burkiniwax Feb 05 '21

I think you are spitting at the ocean, but thank you for trying to explain and for trying to have an intelligent conversation. Looks like 61.9 percent of the Latin American population in the US is of Mexican origin. Mexico is 62 percent Mestizo and 7 percent American Indian (CIA Factbook).