Credit: Ash Adams |
Communities in this rural fishing region, site of the world’s largest sockeye salmon run that draws thousands of workers each year, are defined, in part, by their isolation. Everything is a plane ride or more away, including medical care, food, and supplies. The largest hospital in the region has little more than a dozen beds to serve a combined population of about 7,000.
So the threat of COVID-19 is worrisome in a place still haunted by the 1919 Spanish flu epidemic, which wiped out 30 to 40 percent of the population, historians estimate, leaving behind a generation of orphans. |
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Moreover, Alaska Natives and Indigenous people have been disproportionately affected by the current pandemic. Alaska Natives have died at four times the rate of whites due to complications from the coronavirus. Nationwide, a higher percentage of Alaska Natives and Indigenous peoples have died from COVID-19 than any other demographic.
Thomas Tilden, First Chief of Curyung Tribal Council in Dillingham and a commercial fisherman, remembers hearing elders when he was young talk about the devastating toll of the 1919 epidemic. “When they talked about it, and they very rarely did talk about it, they’d talk about it in hushed tones. You could tell that it really scared them.”
Tilden, now 68, says that there was a period of regrouping following the wide-scale loss, a time of trying to relearn crafts that were lost with the dead. “It wasn’t just a pandemic that hit them.”
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