'We're born Indian and we die white:' Indigenous leaders in California fear COVID deaths are going undercounted

Native American leaders in California fear COVID-19 cases and deaths in their communities have gone unrecorded in county and state records.

Native American leaders across California said COVID-19 deaths have shrouded their communities, yet state figures show few American Indian people have died here compared with other states with significant Indigenouspopulations.

Leaders and experts fear deaths in their communities have been undercounted because of a long history of Native Americans being racially misclassified.

This damaging practice can bar native people from getting the help and resources they actually need, they said.

Nearly 9,000 American Indians in California have been sickened by COVID-19 and 163 have died, according to the state public health authority. .

Native American leaders said those figures do not reflect the death and sickness they’ve seen invade their communities, both on and off reservation land.

However, many states do not separate out American Indians into their own category, which public health experts suggest has lowered the overall tally of native deaths in the United States.

In California, native people comprise .3% of all deaths and diagnoses of COVID-19, and account for about .5% of the total population, at about 330,000. .

The California Department of Public Health said it has worked to decrease instances of racial misclassification in recent years, but conceded that officials may have misclassified American Indians in an attempt to prevent double-counting cases.

“The problem is in the data itself,” said Virginia Hedrick, executive director of the Consortium for Urban Indian Health, a California nonprofit alliance of service providers dedicated to improving American Indian healthcare.

For many Native Americans in California, it seems like every few weeks there’s another death.

Nate Phillips, a member of the Omaha Nation Native American Indian Tribe, bows his head in prayer during the closing ceremony on Nov.

Guerrero, the executive director of the Sacramento Native American Health Center, has seen nine Native American people die in her immediate circle over the past year.

“There’s misclassification there,” she said, pointing to the health department’s decision to count people with multiple racial heritages as multiracial or Hispanic/Latino instead of American Indian. .

If she didn’t, she worried her grandmother, who was of American Indian and Filipino descent, and her aunt, who had American Indian, Filipino and Mexican heritage, wouldn’t be classified as Native American by hospital staff. .

Gavin Newsom, fourth from left, at the future site of the California Indian Heritage Center in West Sacramento, Calif., Tuesday, June 18, 2019. (Photo: Rich Pedroncelli, AP).

A 1997 American Journal of Public Health study that compared birth certificates of American Indians in California from 1979 to 1993 with death certificates during the same time span found that at the time of death, about 75% of native children were racially misclassified. .

In one instance, racial misclassification resulted in undercounting the transmission of STDs through Arizona’s Native American population by up to 60%, according to a 2010 Public Health Report article.

“We’re born Indian and we die white,” said Hedrick, of the Consortium for Urban Indian Health.

Tribal members said each American Indian death needs to be counted as an American Indian death

Ramos said state and county governmentofficialsendangered native people by denying them information

Ramos, the first American Indian elected to state government in California,hopes to see more native people elected at all levels of government to help improve data collection and communication between Native leaders and governments. 

Adam Christman, chairperson of the Tule River Indian Health Center and Tule River Tribe Public Health Authority, said California did not grant the reservation health center access to the California Reportable Disease Information Exchange, the state system all testing entities report results to

Ricardo Torres, the secretary of the board for the Sacramento Native American Health Center, has helped to mask or vaccinate thousands of Native Americans in the Sacramento area. (Photo: Photo provided by Ricardo Torres)

Advocates and healthcare professionals at the Sacramento Native American Health Center have inoculated 72% of all American Indians 65 and older in the region eligible for the vaccine right now, far more than the state or national vaccination rate. 

“People can be vaccine-hesitant,” said Guerrero, of the Sacramento Native American Health Center

Until more Native Americans are vaccinated, tribal leaders said community members will continue to voluntarily social distance, wear masks and pray for good health

“As the Indian people as a whole, as first peoples of this nation, we’ve dealt with pandemic, sickness, illness, historically since the beginning of time,” said the Yurok Tribe’s James