In 1868, four years after the Navajo Nation was forcibly removed from its homelands in what is known as the Long Walk, the nation signed a treaty with the United States. In exchange for Diné citizens agreeing to “make the reservation herein described their permanent home” and allow their children to be assimilated through an “English education,” Congress and President Andrew Johnson agreed to make annual payments to the tribe and, through the federal government’s trust responsibilities, provide essential services—health care chief among them. In the 152 years since, the government has yet to meet its obligations. Where health care and infrastructure costs should have been met, the Diné have instead been forced to largely fend for themselves while America gladly put their ceded land to use.
This is not unique to the Navajo Nation. There is in fact no way to understand any tribal nation in its contemporary context without engaging with this history of displacement and treaty rights—there’s nothing that isn’t touched by it. Still, it has been largely absent from mainstream media coverage of the pandemic’s devastating toll across Indian Country, and the Navajo Nation in particular.
Reporters and TV trucks drove through Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico to explain to their audience what was happening in this corner of their nation. Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez briefly became a fixture in mainstream media. The op-ed section of The New York Times featured multiple Diné voices. Celebrities like Mark Ruffalo and Ellen Degeneres used their platforms for public service announcements. There was even a brief sidebar storyline in which people heaped praise upon Irish donors, who sent nearly $1 million to the Navajo Nation as a form of goodwill for a similar effort undertaken by the Choctaw Nation during the infamous Irish potato famine.
These narratives all focused on the material conditions that many Diné people were facing, often zooming in on the painful stories of lost human lives and heartbroken families as a way to jar readers awake. An emphasis was placed on those who lacked running water, lived in multigenerational homes, and had been denied access to necessary health care. The subtext was clear: How could this be happening in our country?
What almost every piece failed to do was provide an answer that went beyond vague allusions to congressional “underfunding.” Any talk of treaty rights—and a clear explanation of what breaking these rights meant—remained absent as ever. These publications reported that some communities in Navajo Nation and elsewhere lack access to broadband and running water. They covered the statistics about wealth disparities. But these conditions are often treated as predetermined and permanent, as if they came from nowhere, when they are the active legacy of a colonizing nation forgoing the legal agreements it signed with a tribal government.