President Joe Biden is expected to sign the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief billinto law on Friday. It includes the largest ever one-time federal investment in Indian Country, with $20 billion in direct aid to tribal governments, and another $11 billion set aside for federal Indian programs. The aid comes as many tribal nations in the Mountain West are struggling to stay afloat. “It’s badly needed,” said President Gabe Aguilar of the Mescalero Apache Tribe in Southern New Mexico.
The small community has seen nearly 900 positive COVID-19 cases and 25 deaths due to the disease. Aguilar says those numbers would be much higher if not for last year’s federal aid through the CARES Act, which allowed the tribe to build a COVID-19 emergency response building and purchase isolation trailers for tribal citizens. “So any time anybody was positive, we took them outside of their household, we provided them with food, we took care of them, and they stayed in isolation until the [Indian Health Service] cleared them to go home,” Aguilar said. “So we were stopping the spread.”
With COVID-19 vaccines now widely available to Mescalero Apache citizens, Aguilar said there are currently only four active cases on the reservation and one tribal citizen is hospitalized with the disease. Still, he said the economic situation is dire, with the tribe’s hotels and casinos operating at only partial capacity, and hundreds of tribal citizens still laid off. To view the full article visit KUMN.