This Week in Native American News (9/11/2020): Memorials, Internet, and Pageant Queens
September 11, 2020 - Never Forget
Exhibit at 9/11 Museum features the Mohawk ironworkers who built One World Trade Center
Photographs by Melissa Cacciola, via The 9/11 Memorial and Museum
If you haven’t had a chance to see the 9/11 Memorial, put it on your bucket list! It’s powerful.
Don’t miss “Skywalkers: a Portrait of Mohawk Ironworkers at the World Trade Center,” at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. The exhibit features photographer Melissa Cacciola’s tintype portraits of Kahnawake Mohawk ironworkers who volunteered in rescue efforts after 9/11 and helped raise One World Trade Center, Towers 2, 3, and 4, and the Calatrava Transportation Hub.
Mohawks have been “walking iron” in New York since 1916 when ironworkers from the Kahnawake Reservation near Montreal made their way to New York to work on the Hell Gate Bridge. In a legacy that spans over 100 years, Mohawk ironworkers have helped build virtually all of the city’s most iconic buildings, including The Empire State Building, The Chrysler Building, the George Washington Bridge, and of course, the original World Trade Center.
Cacciola chose tintype photography to help document that legacy because the art form and its subjects have something in common: iron. Tintype photographs are produced using a lacquered iron plate. But that’s not the only way the medium is connected to the portraits’ subjects: Tintype emerged in the mid-19th century, and some of the earliest tintype photos were taken of Native Americans.
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In remote Alaska, broadband for all remains a dream. So a school district got creative
The Aleutians East Borough School District has big enough classrooms -- and a small enough number of students -- that it can socially distance. But it's also preparing for the possibility of the school getting shut down during the pandemic.
About as far west as you can go in the US before hitting Russia lies the string of Aleutian Islands. It's where the Discovery Channel's The Deadliest Catch is filmed and where most fish destined for restaurants in the continental US gets processed.
A tiny school system in the region, the Aleutians East Borough School District, educates 230 students across four schools. About 85% of the kids are Alaska Native. Traveling between the four schools requires flights on twin-engine planes or, in one case, a flight followed by a helicopter ride. The towns -- Sand Point, King Cove, False Pass and Akutan -- have stunning views and plenty of seafood, an industry that employs most of the residents.
What the Aleutians East Borough School District doesn't have is COVID-19. No one in the four towns or the large Trident Seafood fish-processing plant has contracted the novel coronavirus. Fewer than 5,000 people have been infected in all of Alaska. But that doesn't mean the district isn't preparing for quarantines. When the Spanish Flu swept through Alaska a century ago, it devastated the population of some villages. One out of every 20 Alaskans died between 1918 and 1919. The state can't let that happen again.
Reliable internet service would help the islands keep coronavirus at bay by allowing people to communicate and learn at safe, social distances. But the few home internet connections that exist in the area are accessed through satellite delivery, which leads to delays and stutters. Cell service, even in the more urban areas, can drop 10 times a day, estimates school district Superintendent Patrick Mayer. And service is pricey.
"There's very, very limited access to the internet out here," Mayer said. "Most families just don't have it here. It's tremendously expensive."
To get around that, the school district has gotten creative. It's building its own digital content delivery system that doesn't need internet access. The school district will be able to beam signals to students' homes, sort of like setting up a TV station and equipping homes to tune in over an antenna.
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Also in Alaska Native Villages… How remote Arctic communities can tap into river power
Coronavirus is threatening their people but it hasn't held back these indigenous pageant queens
Miss Navajo Nation Shaandiin Parrish helped distribute food and other supplies over the summer.
As her silver crown shimmered in the sunlight, Shaandiin Parrish loaded car after car in the Navajo Nation's Huerfano chapter area with food and toilet paper.
When the coronavirus pandemic halted the nursing home visits and speeches that kept her Miss Navajo Nation predecessors busy, Parrish knew she couldn't hang up her crown and sash.
"She becomes everybody's mother, everybody's sister, everybody's aunt," the 26-year-old said about holding her title.
The Navajo Nation, spanning more than 27,000 square miles across parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, had at one point some of the highest Covid-19 infection rates per capita in the United States. Regular weekend lockdowns and nightly curfews have since helped flattened its curve, but authorities are not easing restrictions yet.
The incidence of Covid-19 cases among American Indians and Alaska Natives has been 3.5 times higher than among White people, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The pandemic has led Indigenous pageant queens or tribal ambassadors like Parrish to redefine their duties. While the majority have been unable to travel, these young women have sewn hundreds of face masks, launched online campaigns to increase census participation after it was hampered by the pandemic and secured school supplies for thousands of children.
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Watch This: My Grandmother’s Sheep
It’s hard to fit all the news in a little space.
To read all of this week's news, visit the LIM Magazine.
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