Fourteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Through the lens provided by Sara Cobb’s framework of rival narratives, this study contrasts Navajo (Diné) stories of COVID-19 with the federal government’s story of its service to the Navajo Nation during the pandemic. From a Diné perspective, COVID-19 is not a novel phenomenon, but another chapter in a 500-year history wherein smallpox, the 1918 influenza, and H1N1 have decimated Indigenous peoples, the latter two cases proving four to six times deadlier to the Diné than to the U.S population, respectively. Since the Navajo Nation’s COVID-19 infection rate exceeded that of New York in May, 2020, their story has taken on characteristics of a ruptured narrative. Broken by expressions of anguish and tears, individual stories shared via local and national media exemplify the impact of collective violence and trauma so deep as to rupture narrative structure and reflect the lack of agency experienced by the storytellers. In contrast, the federal government’s story of the pandemic recognizes only tacitly the that continuum liking settler-colonialism to globalization has made the Diné vulnerable to disease and, instead, centers on its own agency. The White House celebrates the CARE Act’s allocations for Native peoples and the coordinated response of federal departments, forecasting an epic victory in Navajoland. To what extent will the two narratives merge? In the course of the pandemic, will the federal government adopt a bridging narrative born of genuine reckoning? Or will marginalization and a failure in pluralism prevail in the form of two incompatible narratives?