Babaamaajimowinan (Telling of news in different places)

'It Takes Your Breath Away,' the High Rate of Deaths of American Indians

Jan 19, 20211
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Earth is shoveled onto the coffins of Jesse "Jay" Taken Alive and his wife Cheryl Taken Alive, during their burial at a family cemetery near Ft. Yates, N.D., on Dec. 26, 2020.Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

STANDING ROCK RESERVATION, N.D. - The virus took Grandma Delores first, silencing an 86-year-old voice that rang with Lakota songs and stories. Then it came for Uncle Ralph, a stoic Vietnam veteran. And just after Christmas, two more elders of the Taken Alive family were buried on the frozen North Dakota prairie: Jesse and Cheryl, husband and wife, who died a month apart.

"It takes your breath away," said Ira Taken Alive, the couple's oldest son. "The amount of knowledge they held, and connection to our past."

One by one, those connections are being severed as the coronavirus tears through ranks of Native American elders, inflicting an incalculable toll on bonds of language and tradition that flow from older generations to the young.

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Pommaqussit writes:

So sorry to here of the loses know that there lives will be remember in our heart the positive impact of there lives will go on as good energy earth mother needs from us two legged aho

01/19/2021, 5:52 am