interviews
The Federal Government and Native American Health
by Sarah Stern
July 7, 2020
This interview with Sarah Stern, a Health Educator at John Hopkins American Indian Health (JHCAIH), was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Native American populations have been disproportionately impacted by COVID. I am curious about what the current reality of tribal healthcare infrastructure looks like and the history that has played a role in shaping it?
Sarah Stern | The reality is that tribal healthcare infrastructure has been and remains underfunded and understaffed.
The Indian Health Services (IHS) has been vastly underfunded since it’s creation in 1955. The Snyder Act of 1921 was the first federal agreement to even allow Native people to receive medical care. We see facets of American history that are not even 100 years old. I stress this as a reminder that while Native people have always existed in the United States, there are far more years of physical and cultural genocide against Native people within American history than years of serving, protecting, and advocating for Native lives.
IHS remains the last in line to receive federal funding to aid the health and wellbeing of Native people. The National Indian Health Board (NIHB) released tribal budget recommendations showing that the IHS spends on average only $3,332 per capita on each patient, compared to a national average of $9,207. In comparison to the Veterans Administration (VA), which is also underfunded, the VA remains about 14 times as funded than the IHS. Highlighting these gaps creates dialogue for both Native people and allies to engage in political pressure to increase funding for healthcare and save lives.
From my understanding there was a "Self-determination Era," which came about in the 1960s, giving tribal governments greater control over local government operations, including healthcare and health clinics. Can you go into the history of that era?
The “Self-Determination Era” allowed Native people to use federal funds as they wanted, but the caveat was (and remains today) that Native people had to report how they wanted to use funds and keep records of the cash flows using systems developed by non-Native people. This created a newer opportunity to add in ‘western’, or non-Native educational programs. School-based teachings of Native cultural values or language were not allowed until 1975, which is less than 100 years ago. Public services, workforce creation, and health care facilities were more developed as Native people were granted the federal ability to allocate funds into these things, alongside education.
It is important to recognize Native people have always utilized the act of self-determination to keep community members, especially children and elders, safe from harm’s way, even before the “Self-Determination Era”. We have worked persistently to protect our land, people, and allies since time immemorial. As Native people proved in many ways to survive physical and cultural genocide, the United States eventually allowed Native people to use federal funding as they saw fit, which was not the case before the 1960s. Basically, the onslaught of Native people cost the United States so much time, money, and non-Native causalities that they eventually folded and decided to stop murdering on stolen land.
Native people also began to have more rights for self-governance, which allowed for leadership among the facets the people wanted funding applied to.
As we see in successful public health initiatives today, when communities have voices at the table representing what the needs and realities are, more positive opportunities take place.
Without Native leadership, the “Self-Determination Era” would not have been as successful nor propelled us to where Native communities are presently.
How can the federal government effectively help in this crisis while also ensuring levels of continued self-determination?”
The federal government can listen to Native leadership directly. Native community leaders have the means to communicate what their people need during this time. This is the most direct way for the federal government to help.
Another way that the federal government can help is to increase public health funding to health programs and educational opportunities. JHCAIH is committed to providing national leadership in training Indigenous scholars in health care and public health science. JHCAIH has awarded over 1,500 scholarships to people representing 45 tribal communities around the nation. Linked below is more information on the public health training programs and online application for scholarships.
Online Application for Scholarships
Is there a specific piece of that history and its effects that you are thinking about most right now?
Treaty rights, and the broken treaties this country participates in.
Broken treaties impact all aspects of Native American communities. Broken treaties account for the fact that some Native people are not federally or state recognized, which in turn impacts the ability to apply for education, housing, health, and infrastructure assistance. Broken treaties have taken away Native lands and water rights.
Broken treaties have created health disparities we see across Indian Country.
Broken treaties have fueled stereotypes against Native people and treaties continue to be broken to this day. For example, in February, the current administration demolished Tohono O'odham Nation’s sacred burial lands without consulting the tribe. Members of the Mashpee Wampanoag community are currently battling the federal administration for seizure of land granted by a federal trust. Land has life. Land connects to Native creation stories, it holds memories, it gives protection, and when land is seized, people hurt. I encourage you to find out what Native land you live on, who the Native people are in your area historically and presently, and how you can show allyship to Native people during this time. Allyship can help combat broken treaties.
How do the economic crisis and health care crisis particularly feed off of each other?
Both crises increase panic. Health care requires money. Lack of economic opportunities diminishes ability to pay for health care costs and decreases the ability to fund health care initiatives.
Collapse of economic ventures impacts everyone, regardless of whether the business is run by Native people or not. This will vary by community, but Native leadership works diligently to ensure that community members have the means to purchase essentials, like food and water, and as they are able, they create plans for how business can run with social distancing procedures at the foreground. Protecting the health and lives of people is the best practice to begin re-opening businesses during the pandemic.
interviews
The Life Work of Senator Rodriguez, Part Two
by Senator Rodriguez
July 12, 2018
This interview with Senator Rodriguez, who represents District 29 in El Paso, was conducted and condensed by frank news. It took place June 28, 2018. This is part one of an ongoing conversation between frank and Senator Rodriguez.
Tatti: We want to clarify the immigration conversation, because what we’re hearing is actually a conflation of lots of issues, and I think it’s detrimental to a real debate about policy.
Sen. Rodriguez: Exactly, you're question earlier was, do you think that there was confusion about the various policies? And the answer is, there is confusion in the American mind. People in any place out of the border, who don't have a sense of what the border is like, what life on the border is like, the reality of border communities, all their impressions of border and border people like myself and immigrants are negative because of the purposeful misinformation that is being put out by politicians and others who are anti-immigrant.
There is no question that there's conflation of refugee versus regular economic immigrants coming in from Mexico or any place else, versus border security with regard to the cartels, human smugglers, the criminal elements, and the category of terrorists.
We never had terrorists come through the Southern border. With regard to the Central American refugees, those are people who the public needs to generally understand are either seeking asylum or are refugees running away from violence or persecution in their countries.
Under our federal laws, long standing policy, international law, anybody who is seeking asylum or refugee status, can legally come up to our ports of entry and legally enter and make an application. They’re supposed to be allowed to be in the country during the period of time that their application winds its way until a final decision. In the meantime when they're here, they're placed with relatives, they’re placed with organizations that care for refugees and people seeking asylum. That's been the long standing policy and process until now. Now we are criminalizing people seeking asylum, everyday I see the headlines, including this morning, of the border patrol stopping people at the middle of the ports of entry, but they have a right to come over and petition, and they’re keeping them from coming over and coming in to petition. Then with the zero tolerance policy under Trump, now separating the children from the mothers, filing criminal charges against the mothers who are seeking asylum status.
With regard to Mexican immigrants, economic immigrants, the long standing migration of Mexicans into this country because of what I said earlier, the demand for labor, what the immigration experts call the push pull factors of economic reality. We need labor? We welcome them in. We don't need them anymore, we push them out.
With respect to whether or not we need comprehensive immigration reform, what do we do with people who have been here without documents for all these years? The estimates have been from 11 to 12 million.
I did some of that work. Pro-bono legalization appeals for some of those who were eligible. A lot of my farm worker clients for example, who have been here without documentation, working for years, paying taxes, contributing to the economy, we got them green cards, permanent legal, permanent resident status.
We have moved from that attitude towards legalization, to a time when amnesty is a bad word for republicans and where we are treating everybody under Trump as a criminal, as a rapist, as a person that should not be tolerated in this country.
All of the rhetoric about immigrants being criminals and harming people and taking jobs away, has caused us to lose sight of doing a humane comprehensive immigration reform that we tried to do several times in the past. The latest one being back in 2006. We did it under Reagan, the Simpson–Mazzoli Act. It was the 1986 immigration reform, what was referred to the Simpson–Mazzoli Act because of the legislators in the senate that passed it.
We've always said that we were going to provide several prongs to comprehensive immigration reform. Legalize the people that are here already, that have paid taxes, that haven't committed crimes, that are contributing to society and of course I always throw in have learned English. Fine. There was the legalization part of it, there was the guest worker part of it to provide permits for workers that were needed by the farmers, by the industry. That was another aspect to it.
The third aspect was to look at our visa system and see what reforms we could make with it. If you are a legal permanent resident, you want to have your parents or your brothers or relatives because our policy on immigration has always been based on family reunification, family ties get priority, now we've gone away from that. The immigration system got so bogged down that they took 10, 20 years for people to bring a relative into the country.
We have gotten away from those because now any discussion about comprehensive immigration reform, even with respect to the dreamers, the republicans don't want to allow them to have citizenship status down the line. That's new. That's something that a lot of people don't pick up on. You guys should emphasize. It used to be that when we talked about comprehensive immigration reform, including republicans on a bipartisan basis, if we were going to do a path to a legalization program we were going to have a path to citizenship. It may take a while, but you were going to be given the opportunity.
All of these things are now combined, confused, nobody distinguishes between an asylum seeker or refugee and an economic migrant and a dreamer. Or dare I say, the criminal elements. There's all these people coming over to do us harm, take away our jobs. That is an incredible shift in State policy toward immigrants in this country. We're starting to look no different than Europe that is trying to find ways to keep those economic migrants and refugees from coming into their countries.
The day before yesterday I was over there with the American Federation of Teachers and a lot of different faith organization, Rabbis, Baptists, Catholics, Muslim clerics. We were there for that last Sunday. We're going to go tomorrow. We're coordinating it for New Mexico State Legislators. New Mexico wants to do it's part and they’re bringing doctors and state legislators and Native Americans. A friend of mine who's a state legislator out of Albuquerque, filed a complaint with the United Nations and she wants to come with all of these folks and read it there at the port of entry and then come and do a visit with our Annunciation House over here in El Paso.
What gives me hope is that at these events, we have run into people from Canada, elderly people, people from Florida, from New York, from Alaska. That is what’s heartening.
Once the new justice gets appointed, of the stripe of Roberts, I'm sorry here young people, but you are going to see some hard times in terms of national policies.
A veering to the right like we have never seen in this country and the way the white nationalist movement is going, and the racists in this country, starting with the President, are going, we may be be looking at past years in Italy, Germany, France and other places where people rose against the different people in this country. Whether your difference is color, whether your difference is your sexual orientation, whether your difference is your religion. I'm painting I know a very black dire scenario, but I'm a student of history, I like politics.
I'm a policy wonk and I know what people have gone through in world history and in this country and what we can expect, if we as people do not rise and assert ourselves.
Finally, your question about Beto and Cruz debating, I don't expect that Cruz is going to want to debate him on the immigration issue. If he does, he's just gonna stay to a very canned message. He files a bill himself to try to keep families from being separated so he can then in the campaign say, I don't support families being separated. Yes, but he supports the President block step and the President is separating families. So he should be held accountable regardless of what he says or what he does. That's my view on Mr. Cruz.