By Heather Tirado Gilligan, California Health Care Foundation, March 22, 2021
Last summer, Heather Yazzie spent a night as an inpatient at a hospital in Temecula, a desert town 30 miles north of Escondido. Down the hall in two other rooms were her father, a member of the Navajo nation, and her mother, part of the Pala Band of Mission Indians. All three were being treated for COVID-19. Heather was released the next day, but her parents had to stay. “Dad, I love you,” she told her father before she left. “You’re gonna be okay.” Shortly after they spoke, he died. Since then, Heather has lost five other relatives to the pandemic, reports Amanda Ulrich of The Desert Sun.
When Leticia Aguilar’s grandmother and aunt died within four days of each other, she lit a fire for each of them, a tradition for members of the Pinoleville Pomo Nation in Mendocino County. Aguilar, who lives in the Sacramento area, filled out their death certificates and marked their ethnicity as Native American. Aguilar told USA Today reporter Kate Cimini that she was greatly relieved that they would at least be counted. “It meant a lot for us as natives,” Aguilar told Cimini.
Like so many communities of color, Native Americans in California have been devastated by the virus — but the data may not reflect the full extent of the toll that COVID-19 has taken on them. As communities of Native Americans watch their relatives die, they also worry that their loss is not being fully recognized by a state data system that is misclassifying Native Americans as Latinx or multiracial.
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