The Coronavirus Makes Trump's Cruelty Toward Indian Country Even More Deadly

The Trump administration is slow-walking $8 billion in desperately needed pandemic aid to Native American tribes, many of whose lands have become coronavirus hot spots while enduring their worst economic crisis in decades. This was foreseeable; the president has spent decades telegraphing his enmity toward Native people and disregard for their concerns, even before he took office. It was a matter of time before a disaster of this magnitude brought it all to bear.

The latest funding delay stems from a mix of administrative ineptitude and legal wrangling. A month after Congress passed the CARES Act on March 27, which allocated relief money, tribal governments still hadn’t received a cent. (As of this writing, they still haven’t.) Several sued the federal government for the holdup, but a separate lawsuit was filed to resolve a related problem: the administration’s choice to include Alaska Native corporations among the entities that could receive funds. ANCs are not tribal governments, though some serve tribes by managing land and sharing governing responsibilities; the simplified backstory is that they were devised in the early 1970s to solidify tribal-land control in Alaska, in large part to make those lands easier for oil tycoons to plunder. (Several ANCs have gone on to profit from these arrangements.) But many Alaska Native tribes have their own governments, too, even if they weren’t federally recognized until the mid-1990s — much later than those in the lower 48. In some cases, this means that making ANCs eligible for pandemic dollars lets some tribes get money twice while others get less than they would otherwise, an outcome widely regarded as unfair.

The impact of fewer available funds for non-ANC tribal entities isn’t theoretical; the coronavirus and its economic impact have decimated tribal coffers that were already close to bone-dry from decades of underfunding. Tribal businesses have shuttered en masse, costing thousands of people their jobs and incomes. Overstretching aid would make matters worse. Allegations of federal profiteering complicate things further. Tara Sweeney, assistant secretary of Indian Affairs in the Interior Department, was vice-president of an ANC before joining the Trump administration, raising suspicion around her motives for insisting on their eligibility; several tribes have since called on her to resign. This discord was avoidable, as was the delay in disbursement. But the Trump administration’s proclivity for conflicts of interest and general incompetence, paired with the typical Republican disdain for public investment, may have rendered inevitable what happened instead — too little money, too late, and with the stench of a deal-sweetening payout for Trump officials hovering over it.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/trump-native-american-pandemic.html