The Navajo Nation now has the highest per capita COVID-19 infection rate in the country, surpassing New York and New Jersey, with 5,250 cases and 241 coronavirus deaths as of May 31, according to the Navajo Department of Health. The tribe is in an official state of emergency.
Diné College – a Navajo tribal college serving more than 1,500 students across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah – has been busy weathering this crisis. Students and faculty alike were infected with the coronavirus during the spring semester. Now, summer enrollment is down roughly 25%.
“It’s scary,” said Diné College president Dr. Charles M. Roessel. “A lot of our students, their homes are intergenerational. They’re living at home with their parents who are living at home with their parents who may be living at home with their parents, all within a few feet of each other … And of course, they take care of each other.”
The pandemic has also “magnified” disparities in Native American lands, he added, like a lack of supermarkets and an underfunded healthcare system, making the day-to-day logistics of students’ lives harder. For example, Roessel said students now have to ask themselves questions like how to make it to the grocery store 35 miles away – while caring for sick family members and taking classes – before curfew at 8 p.m., a Navajo policy during the pandemic.
Simple tasks turn into “huge challenges,” he said. “It’s like being in a 110-meter hurdle, and while you’re in the middle of that, they add another 50 meters.”
Meanwhile, internet access on the reservation is “very, very shaky,” he said, which made it hard to shift to an online platform. Nearly 86% of Diné College students don’t have internet access at home, a pervasive problem for tribal colleges and universities.
Even before the pandemic, students would do their college work in the campus parking lot so they could use the internet, said Roessel. As the college moved online following the pandemic, students without laptops complained that using Zoom on their phones quickly ate up their data plans. Professors sometimes had to teach class in three different mediums – Zoom, phone calls and email – to deliver a lesson to all of their students.
