Disease Has Never Been Just Disease for Native Americans
By Jeffrey Ostler,
The Atlantic
| 04. 29. 2020
Native communities’ vulnerability to epidemics is not a historical accident, but a direct result of oppressive policies and ongoing colonialism.
As the death toll from COVID-19 mounts, people of color are clearly at greater risk than others. Among the most vulnerable are Native Americans. To understand how dire the COVID-19 situation is becoming for these communities, consider the situation unfolding for the Navajo Nation, a people with homelands in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. As of April 23, 1,360 infections and 52 deaths had been reported among the Navajo Reservation’s 170,000 people, a mortality rate of 30 per 100,000. Only six states have a higher per capita toll.
The spread of COVID-19 is reminiscent of previous disease outbreaks that have ravaged Native American communities. Many of those outbreaks resulted in catastrophic loss of life, far greater than even the worst-case scenarios for COVID-19. Even the 1918–19 flu pandemic, in which an estimated 650,000 Americans died (0.6 percent of the 1920 population of 106 million), pales in comparison to the losses Native Americans have suffered from disease.
Read: How the pandemic will end
Until recently, histories of disease and Native Americans have emphasized “virgin-soil epidemics.” According to this theory...
Related Articles
By Charles Schmidt, Undark | 09.25.2026
In 2010, scientists at the University of Tokyo and other institutions reported a startling achievement: They had successfully grown a pancreas made almost entirely of rat cells within the bodies of mice. The research was directed by Hiromitsu Nakauchi, a...
By Rob Stein, NPR [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.29.2026
Cathy Tie slips on a white lab coat bearing her name and the logo of her startup: Origin Genomics. "Welcome!" she says as she leads an NPR reporter, photographer and videographer on an exclusive tour of Origin's labs located...
By Erik Adams, Sundance | 09.08.2026
The scariest movie playing at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival isn’t about cursed audio recordings or a killer demon disguised as your true love; rather it’s a 110-minute essay film about how a handful of guys obsessed with numbers and...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a major focus of news recently, as it should have been, under the appropriately ridiculous name of Hugging Face, “a leading collaboration platform and community hub for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science.” In July, Hugging Face was hacked. The platform itself responded:
Earlier this week, we detected and responded to an intrusion into part of our production infrastructure. This one was different from anything we had handled before in one important way...
