NATIONAL DEFENSE
MANUEL HEART SAT IN HIS PICKUP TRUCK OUTSIDE THE UTE MOUNTAIN UTE TRIBAL OFFICE IN TOWAOC ONE DAY THIS PAST SUMMER, THE CHEVY’S ENGINE IDLING IN THE PARKING LOT AS THE SUN SLOWLY ARCED OVERHEAD. THE SOUTHERN COLORADO HEAT WAS MERCILESS THAT AFTERNOON.
Small, silver hoops dangled from the tribal chairman’s ears. A beaded bolo tie was pulled tight against his neck. Chimney Rock, a 100-million-year-old, 730-foot sandstone pillar that plays a role in Ute Mountain Ute warrior mythology, stood visible in the distance. Heart’s hands gripped the steering wheel, but he wasn’t going anywhere.
Heart said these had been the most difficult 17 months in his more than two decades of tribal politics. It was not uncommon for the 60-year-old to pull 12-hour days guiding the reservation’s business amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Sometimes he took a call from a sick tribal member. Sometimes he fought with the county government over its laissez-faire masking policies. Sometimes his days were broken up by a funeral. Sometimes he just cried in his office.
As the novel coronavirus spread across the United States over the past two years, it ravaged Indigenous communities. Since the pandemic began, American Indians and Alaska Natives have been infected at a rate three-and-a-half times greater than that of white Americans; hospitalization rates are four times higher; and rates of death are twice as high. For the more than one million Native Americans who live on reservations across the country, COVID-19 has threatened every part of their existence.
Beyond the Ute Mountain Ute’s southern border, the 173,000 residents of the Navajo Nation reservation have suffered more than 30,000 infections since March 2020. Nearly 1,500 tribal members had died by mid-September of this year, including a former Navajo president. In Montana, the Blackfeet Nation reported 50 deaths and more than 1,400 infections among 10,000 members. The Cherokee Nation, in Oklahoma, lost several dozen fluent speakers in less than a year, undermining a tribal program designed to stop the Native language from dying out.
The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe is one of 574 recognized by the federal government and has been subsisting on its reservation for more than a century. Pushed from traditional hunting grounds that once included most of what’s now Colorado, the tribe inhabits an 898-square-mile stretch of land that encompasses a small corner of the state plus portions of Utah and New Mexico. Estimated at 10,000 members in the late 19th century, the tribe now has just
