For the Cherokee Nation, an American Indian group living in northern Oklahoma, the coronavirus also poses a serious risk to their native language.
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There are only 2,000 people who still speak the Cherokee language in the world.
Since the start of the pandemic, this community of 141,000 people
has already lost 30 native speakers
of the language, according to CNN.
If the number continues to decrease, the language runs the risk of disappearing.
“When you lose a speaker and you are a tribe with only 2,000 fluent speakers left, you have not only lost something that is irreplaceable, as all life is, but also something that is truly a national treasure,” he told CNN. his main boss, Chuck Hoskin Jr.
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To ensure language survival, the community has decided that native speakers, along with healthcare workers, are among
the first to receive the
COVID-19
vaccine
from Pfizer and BioNTech.
As of January 12, the Cherokee Nation had reported 12,300 cases of contagion and 69 deaths related to this disease.
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It has already managed to vaccinate
600
native speakers, who were part of a registry of people whose mother tongue is Cherokee.
By the end of this week, half of all speakers are expected to receive the vaccine.
"As a Cherokee speaker, there are probably fewer than 2,000 speakers like me left alive on the face of this earth," John Ross, 65, told CNN.
"They want to protect us for as long as possible because we try to help preserve our language for the little ones or for those who want to learn," he added.
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The pandemic has been devastating to the
cultural legacy of native communities.
Their COVID-19-related death rate is double that of white people.
The virus especially affects older people, who are the knowledgeable leaders of native languages, traditional medicine and the cultural heritage of their ancestors.
"It's like we're having a book burn,"
said Jason Salsman, a spokesman for the Muscogee Nation in eastern Oklahoma.
“We are losing a historical record, the encyclopedias.
One day soon, there will be no one to pass on this knowledge, "he added.
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Like the Cherokee Nation, other tribes have taken emergency measures, such as vaccinating speakers of their languages first.
Volunteers have also organized to bring food for older people from tribes that have been cut off by quarantines.
However, some communities are too far from clinics where vaccines are administered, an important reminder of the
inequality
tribes face in accessing health care.
"We don't know what happens to them until we see the funeral announcement," said Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute.
With information from CNN and The New York Times.