My husband and I recently gave four Navajo Churro sheep to the Navajo Nation. The tribe has a saying: Dibé éí Diné be’iiná at’é, sheep is life. They developed the Churro to thrive in the desert, beginning in the 16th century from Spanish stock. Twice, the US government tried to annihilate the breed. Only recently have they been brought back from the edge of extinction. My husband, Hal Cannon, and I acquired a few after Hal reported on the breed’s revival for National Public Radio. They became beloved pets and my favorite life models.

The Navajo Nation is experiencing Covid-19 infection rates among the highest in the world. In the midst of wide-spread sickness and loss, many children who rely on school breakfasts and lunches are going hungry. Hal and I felt it was time for these sheep to return to their people.

I miss them every day. But that is not the biggest hole I feel in my heart. I ache for the terrible inequities of the virus, and the toll it is taking on Native people and other people of color.

Two days ago, in this heartbreaking article in Scientific American–“Corona Virus is Attacking the Navajo ‘because We Have Built the Perfect Human for It to Invade‘” –traditional Diné storyteller Sunny Dooley relates the crisis in the Navajo Nation and the spiritual, physical and economic travesties that underly it.

A few excerpts:

When a family member dies, we the Diné, whom Spanish conquistadors named the Navajo, send a notice to our local radio station so that everyone in the community can know. Usually the reading of the death notices—the names of those who have passed on, their ages, where they lived and the names of their matrilineal and patrilineal clans—takes no more than five minutes. It used to be very rare to hear about young people dying. But this past week, I listened to 45 minutes of death notices on KGAK Radio AM 1330. The ages ranged from 26 to 89, with most of the dead having been in their 30s, 40s or 50s….

When your spiritual practice is based on the land you’re living on, and you’re being herded away from what somebody else would call her temple, or mosque, or church, or cathedral—that’s the first place your spirituality is attacked….

COVID is revealing what happens when you displace a people from their roots. Take a Diné teenager. She can dress Navajo, but she has no language or culture or belief system that tells her what it means to be Diné. Her grandmother was taken away at the age of five to a BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) boarding school and kept there until she was 18. At school, they taught her that her culture and her spiritual practice were of the devil and that she needed to completely deny them. Her language was not valid: “You have a Navajo accent; you must speak English more perfectly.” Same happened to her mother. Our languages were lost, the culture and traditional practices were gone. That was also when spankings and beatings entered Diné culture. Those kids endured those horrible ways of being disciplined in the BIA schools, and that became how they disciplined their own children…..

We had the Spanish flu in the 1920s, one of many viruses to invade our community. Then in the 1930s there was the Great Depression. We didn’t know that was happening: we did not have money, but we had wealth in the form of sheep. And the government came in and killed our sheep in the Stock Reduction Program. They said the sheep were eroding the land, but I think they did it because the sheep made us self-sufficient, and they couldn’t allow that. We had spiritual practices around our sheep. Every time we developed self-sufficiency and a viable spiritual practice, they destroyed it. My mother said they dug deep trenches, herded the sheep and massacred them….

It seems to me that COVID has revealed a lot of truths, everywhere in the world. If we were ignorant of the truth, it is now revealed; if we were ignoring the truth, it is now revealed. This truth is the disparity: of health, wellbeing and human value. And now that the truth has been revealed, what are we going to do about it?

Many organizations are working to get food, hygiene supplies and PPE to Indian Country, including Angel Flight West, which has conducted over 150 relief flights to the Navajo, Hopi and Hulapai Nations; and the John Hopkins Center for Native American Health, which has outposts in Chinle, Fort Defiance, Gallup, Shiprock and Tuba City. Hal and I have been working directly with a remote Navajo chapter that is not close to these distribution centers and not receiving help through these channels. If you would like to know more, contact me.

Painting: Sheep on Hot Ground • Oil on Canvas Board • Teresa Jordan