More than 180 years ago, the federal government launched the largest effort of its kind in the United States to vaccinate Native Americans against the deadly disease of smallpox.
With it ravaging Native American communities in the 1830s, the disease became a widespread public health crisis and threatened to curtail the government’s massive effort to force thousands of Native Americans from their lands in the East and push them West to reservations.
In 1832, Congress passed legislation — the Indian Vaccination Act — that allowed the federal government to use about $17,000 to hire doctors to vaccinate Native Americans who were living near White frontier settlements. Many White settlers feared that Indians would spread the disease to them.
The act was intended to vaccinate Indians against smallpox but for entirely mercenary reasons, according to Regis Pecos, a member of the Pueblo de Cochiti tribe in New Mexico.
“It wasn’t in the interest of Indian people,” said Pecos, who is also co-director of the Leadership Institute at the Santa Fe Indian School. “It was a way of vaccinating them to move them so White Americans could move them into Western lands.”
Fast forward to the 21st century, when the coronavirus pandemic has swept through the more than 500 federally recognized tribes in the United States and devastated some tribal communities. Native Americans have among the worst infection rates in the country — nearly three times higher than the overall U.S. population.
Tribes across the country are racing to get vaccine doses to their members and launching messaging campaigns to try to persuade Native Americans who may be reluctant to take them. The level of reluctance to take a vaccine stems from decades of mistrust between sovereign nations and the federal government, according to Native American medical experts, including over medical and scientific studies that were conducted in unethical ways.
“Historical trauma over these past wrongs is embedded in the DNA for some of our people,” said Dakotah Lane, a doctor and member of the Lummi Nation, recently told Indian Country Today.
“We need to remember that our communities have survived TB and smallpox, and a long history of lies and wrongdoing by the federal government,” said Lane, who is also the Lummi’s health director.
Donald Warne, an Oglala Lakota doctor from the Pine Ridge Reservation, said the Indian Removal Act, the massacre at Wounded Knee and other atrocities have contributed to vaccine hesitancy. And so has the memory of the distribution of blankets infected with smallpox, which he calls “the first documented case of bioterrorism with the purpose of killing American Indians.”