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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.

Baltimore City - Inner Harbor Watershed

AKPdL

Zoning – Percent of Watershed Area
Commercial – 12.7%
Educational - 0.0%
Hospital – 1.3%
Industrial – 45.8%
Office – 1.3%
Open Space – 7.4%
Residential Detached 1.6%
Residential High Density Row House - 20.1%
Residential Mixed Use -1.7%
Residential Multifamily – 0.2%
Residential Low Density Row House – 3.7%
Residential Traditional – 1.1%
No Data – 3%

Land Use Type - % Watershed Area 

Barren Land - 2.4% 
Commercial -7.0% 
Forest - 1.9% 
High Density Residential - 25.9% 
Medium Density Residential - 1.4% 
Low Density Residential - 0% 
Industrial - 42.0% 
Institutional - 7.4% 
Other Developed Land -7.8% 
Transportation - 3.0% 
Wetland - 0% 
Water -1.3% 

Property Ownership – Percent of Watershed Area

City Owned – 12.8%
Private – 37.3%
Right of Way – 23.1%
Rail Roads – 25.4%
State Owned – 2.2%
Federal Owned – 0.5%

West Lake Landfill

AllanaRoss

Most of the citizen-produced data is discounted by officials. There is little authorized data, though data has been collected and can be found with some effort. Dissemination of information is on a grassroots level. PRPs have been engaged in misinformation campaigns as well, creating organizations with misleading names who advertise on the radio and distribute flyers. 

West Lake Landfill

AllanaRoss

Cancer cluster. Not racialized in this particular area so much as class-based. Bridgeton is a working-class, mostly white suburb. The neighborhood closest to the landfill is a mobile home park. 

West Lake Landfill

AllanaRoss

Dualistic attitude of humanity as separate from nature led us to believe that we can dump nuclear waste in a floodplain and it will not affect us. Refusal to trust in ecological processes, hubris of engineering, and faith that we are not subject to natural laws because we are above nature led us to use the land in this way. Ecosystems compromised are innumberable because of the nature of the site--its proximity to water and the porous nature of the karst beneath it. This is still not recognized as a fundamental issue as evidenced by the fact that our solutions to these problems are always based on engineering, attempting to outsmart geography, geology, and physics...never a long-term solution or re-thinking land use practices. 

West Lake Landfill

AllanaRoss

I think the public imagination hasn't arrived at this juncture yet. Priority=removal of hazardous waste. Some academics are imagining futures (the landscape architecture students and professors at Washington University for example). Discursive histories in use= culture of nature. Wildlife preserves on land unfit for habitation. 

West Lake Landfill

AllanaRoss

Capitalism. All of the practices on this land since settlers arrived have been driven by capital and extraction, perhaps a sense of pioneering and conquering...but what are the underlying motivations of Westward expansion? -accumulation of territory for capital, extraction, and political power. Also important to think about motivation of the government figures encouraging expansion as opposed to those who are actually engaged in it. Maybe settlers are analogous to foot soldiers. settler:expansion::foot soldier:war.