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The Lapse in the U.S. Federal Government’s Response to the Indigenous Impact of COVID-19

Thomas De Pree

The previous annotation opened with Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez’s remarks about being forgotten by the U.S. federal government, and the failure of federal actors to recognize their responsibility and respond to the needs of Indigenous nations of the United States. What President Nez said authorizes a common discourse circulating among Indigenous nations around the world about “being forgotten,” and the general ignorance of the nations within which sovereign nations are nested (see IITC Webinar Series). The Indigenous impact of COVID-19 has made the experience of being forgotten painfully apparent. In the previous annotation, I described how recent reportage has displaced this noticeable discursive gap in the absence of the federal government. This annotation amplifies the irony that such structures and processes of forgetting are becoming increasingly visible.

In what follows, I will examine how ignorance and forgetting were enacted by the federal government through a new strategy of the politics of time, as witnessed in the untimely response to the crisis that is rapidly unfolding in the Navajo Nation (Dinétah). To be sure, the delay in federal emergency relief funds incapacitated public health responses across all levels of government—“tribal” and “non-tribal”—but in varying degrees; the impact was acute among tribal government. At a broad scale, what we have witnessed is an inversion of the “capacity building” that was once in vogue in international development discourse in the domains of government and business, and the effective reduction in the U.S. government’s capacity to respond to natural and anthropogenic disasters. I will not speculate on how such extensive incapacitation of government produced a neoliberal lapse that opened up a new space for privatizing ‘essential’ public health services and technologies. Instead I will focus on perceptions of “the lapse” itself, which marks a double meaning as both the passage of time and cognitive failure in memory.

President Nez underscored the urgency of the matter: “Navajo residents are panicking as these numbers rise... We need a lot of help fast from the federal government.” Nez continued by describing the partial access to limited emergency relief funds: “We’re barely getting bits and pieces. You have counties, municipalities, already taking advantage of these funds, and tribes are over here writing our applications and turning it in and waiting weeks to get what we need.” A New York Times report identifies the “delays in receiving federal emergency funds” and the compounding effect of “the requirement that tribal nations, unlike cities and counties, must apply for grants to receive money from federal stimulus legislation.” The report concludes, “the Navajo Nation—among other tribal nations — has faced crippling delays in receiving emergency funding” (NYT). An Arizona Congressman, Greg Stanton, echoed Nez’s concern using a similar vocabulary of timing: “Well, I’m very frustrated. I’m angry we’re waiting. We’re in the middle of a pandemic. The tragedy on the Navajo Nation is happening right now, in real-time. This is not the time for delay.”

This is not the time for delay. It bears repeating. The prevailing discourse of urgency and delay calls out the federal government’s strategic negotiation of the politics of time. The anthropologist Stuart Kirsch introduces the concept of the “politics of time” to understand how corporations strategically delay recognition of the environmental impacts of industry (2014:145-148, 155). I am advancing the concept here to account for how the Trump administration has scaled up the widespread corporate strategy of delaying recognition and deferring critique through a new form of government incapacity building—literally and actually building incapacity into every level of government. The lapse in the federal response is a new strategy of the politics of time that forces us to think critically about novel responses to incapacitating delays during the pandemic. Kirsch also accounts for the new politics of time leveraged by the critics of corporations: the novel strategy of critical intervention early in the production cycle made possible by accelerating the local learning curve and sharing information. In the new (covid) politics of time, both early intervention and information sharing were stifled by the once most trusted authority of information, the Executive Office of the President.

The incapacitating effects of the new politics of time are exacerbated by attempts to control information and, in this case, produce a dazzling array of misinformation at the discursive level of national public health. During an interview on Democracy Now!, Dean Seneca, former senior health scientist in the Partnership Support Unit of the Office for State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Support at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, offers a diagnosis for why the Indigenous impact of COVID-19 has been so severe: “Well, as you can tell, you know, right from the very beginning, I mean, [Trump] didn’t make this pandemic a priority. He did a lot of mixed messaging in the very, very beginning when he started to talk about this. And you see that he’s trying to now — in his recent reports, trying to justify that, ‘No, we were on top of this right from the beginning.’ And that’s far from the case. You know, his mixed messaging is what was really critical. At times, he would say, ‘Well, hey, this virus is just going to go away. And we’ll wake up one day, and it won’t be here.’ You know, people listen to this information, and that is the wrong thing to send. He made a major mistake in eliminating his council on international health and global pandemics. That was huge right from the beginning. He should never have done that.” These early interventions of the current administration had broad incapacitating impacts.

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maryclare.crochiere

"The purpose of this essay is to discuss a truly formidable task, the creation of an international nuclear emergency response team"

This quote sets up the rest of the article by showing the reader, regardless of their background or knowledge, that the creation of such a team is going to be difficult.  Beyond the standard challenge of creating a unified emergency response team, it is an international one - therefore with language barriers, geographical differences, and large distances to travel in the case of an emergency. And futhermore, it is a team created to deal with the incertainty of nuclear materials in an emergency situation - even more of a challenge.

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maryclare.crochiere

"In the interest of sustainable and socially legitimate solutions, arguably decisions to even the technical responses to disasters should not be left to scientists and engineers alone"

This statement is very thought-provoking and is not exactly expected in a research article - that a scientist's or engineer's decision should be influenced or editied by those without such specific education or expertise.

-balancing point between safety and profitability

-disaster did not happen as a chain of events that made it bound to occur at some point, it happened on a system that was in good shape

-over regulation of the industry and workers results in a lack of flexibility and therefore an inability to be creative in emergency situations

-need emergency response team to be skilled professionally and socially, but on a low budget - and very importantly - cooperation from nuclear corporations

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maryclare.crochiere

The author compares existing and previous nuclear regulation/safety/etc committees, analyzing differences between them and various shortcomings. This information is used to develop the author's idea of a more effective and safe oganization to enforce regulations and train an emergency response team.

The author also looked at how previous emergencies were handled and what new regulations stemmed from each, as well as how those have worked since their implementation, and what more can be done.

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maryclare.crochiere

Emergency response is the main idea in this article, but specifically that related to nuclear emergencies. An interesting point was made about the confidentiality of the plants and their "trade secrets" of sorts. While being transparent is helpful for safety reasons, it also reduced the profitability of the company, since other companies would be able to use their ideas. EMS knows a lot about respecting privacy through HIPPA, however it is also important to know the layout of important or potentially hazardous buildings within a response district. This would be a necessary compromise to make between the nuclear emergency response team and the nuclear leaders.

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wolmad

The author of the article is Sonja D. Schmid. She is an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech. She holds a Ph D in STS from Cornell University. Dr. Schmid speaks fluent Russian and primarily investigates the history and organization of Soviet and Eastern European nuclear affairs, as well as the the challenges of global nuclear emergency response.

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wolmad

This article argues that the creation of an international nuclear emergency response group would be an important undertaking due to the global increases in the nuclear industries. The article also establishes some of the chalenges that would be faced in forming, staffing, training, and operating the group.

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wolmad

1. The article analyzes the existing international nuclear regulatory groups and determines their capabilities and possible shortcomings in organizing such a group.

2. The article analyzed how nuclear emergency response has been handeled in the past and how goverments have prepared for future disasters.

3. The article outlined some requirements a nuclear emergency response agency would need to meet and some chalenges it would face.

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wolmad

"The real challenge of a disaster involving nuclear facilities, however, lies in how to handle the unexpected, unpredictable, utterly novel, and barely intelligible chain of events unfolding in real time."

"...existing organizations with subject expertise have negligible international autority and often ave problematic rapport with general public, and confirm the need for a well-coordinated and integrated sociotechnical approach."

"Ellis clearly realized that a nuclear disaster response team would face tremendous challenges on the international level. He emphasized it would be necessary 'to find the sweet spot between national sovereignty and international accountability.'"