by VINAY LAL
Every nation has its, to use the word commonly invoked for such purposes, “myths”. Just how myths, lies, and fictions differ from each other is an interesting question in itself, but in his classic essay of the late 19th century, “What is a Nation?”, Ernest Renan put forward the arresting idea that a nation cannot be forged without some shared notion of “forgetfulness”. Americans, especially white Americans, have for generations been brought up on the idea that the annual celebration known as Thanksgiving, held on the fourth Thursday of November for many decades, marks the occasion when the Pilgrims first sat together with Native Americans and they broke bread together in celebration of the first successful harvest. This recounting of that idyllic past disguises the forgetfulness which would become critical to the making of America. The other name for that forgetfulness is “genocide”. It is for this reason that, in common with many other Native Americans, the United American Indians of New England mark Thanksgiving Day as the “National Day of Mourning”. As this collective of Native American organizations states, “Since 1970, Native Americans and our supporters have gathered at noon on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the US thanksgiving holiday. Many Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers. Thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture.”
Though the onslaught on Native Americans was carried out over generations, this year, as the coronavirus continues its rampage through the US, has been especially brutal for them. There has been considerable discussion in the American and international press, as indeed there should be, on how the pandemic has disproportionately affected certain constituencies, among them the elderly, those with certain underlying conditions, and certain racial minorities. In my recently published book, The Fury of Covid-19: The Politics, Histories, and Unrequited Love of the Coronavirus (Pan Macmillan India 2020), from where what follows has been excerpted with some revisions, I discuss how racial minorities and the poor have been impacted in countries such as the US, UK, Brazil, and India. In the US, most of such discussion has been around Blacks and Latinx communities, but American Indians (and Alaskan Native People) are also, as an increasing number of studies have indubitably established by now, disproportionately vulnerable to the coronavirus; indeed, among those who are infected, American Indians are far more likely to suffer from a serious illness.
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