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Pandemic Reveals Navajos’ Tenacity
Coronavirus is the most recent in a historical list of political and social challenges to the Navajo Nation.
I took the photo above on a late-afternoon in winter 2003 at a small Navajo cemetery near Window Rock, Arizona, the capital of the Navajo Nation.
The flag is one of many that was flying in the cemetery. Navajos are quite patriotic, even when it seems they have little reason to be. Many Navajo men volunteer for the United States military. When Navajos plant a U.S. flag in the cemetery to honor a veteran — it stays there. Wind-ripped, tattered, and frayed, the flags remain until they are just some scraps of material on a pole.
Those flags represent Navajo resilience. Torn, but still holding strong.
Coronavirus — COVID-19 — is the most recent in a historical list of political and social challenges to the Navajo Nation.
The Navajo Nation encompasses 27,000 square miles in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. At the end of April 2020, it had the third highest pandemic infection rate in the United States, behind New York and New Jersey.
At this writing, the Navajo Nation had recorded 3,632 cases of COVID-19, and 127 related deaths. That’s of some 250,000 citizens.
