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The decomposition of Beni, one of Bolivia’s nine political regions, is located in the northern part of the country, where the Andes encounter the jungle and the tributaries of the Amazon sneak into the warm, humid lowlands. It is one of the most biodified regions of biodring in the world. Blue-throated macaws fly in the sky and rise misty and pink over rivers full of fish.
For nearly two decades, Hillard Kaplan, a professor of economics and fitness anthropology at Chapman University in California, and Michael Gurven, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, visited Beni to examine Tsimane, an organization of people living in wheelchairs. in about a hundred villages in the region. Kaplan and Gurven’s assistance leads the Tsimane Health and Life History (THLHP) project, which analyses the physical condition and ageing of this population.
When COVID-19 closed its campuses in March, Kaplan and Gurven learned that although Beni was far from the urban centers where COVID-19 was spreading, the disease posed a serious threat, especially to indigenous communities such as the Tsimane. But Kaplan and Gurven never intended to break in as saviors.
Together with their team of doctors, anthropologists and Tsimane, Kaplan and Gurven began devising a plan, published in The Lancet in May, to help Tsimane succeed over the pandemic. While his plan apparently addresses the special wishes of the approximately 16,000 tsimanes living in Beni, it includes a broader lesson: efforts to help indigenous teams navigate the COVID-19 pandemic directly involve local stakeholders and respect the autonomy of indigenous peoples. It is not only the vulnerable lives of these communities that are at risk, but also the traditions and cultures they represent.
In Bolivia, where almost part of the population is of indigenous origin, COVID-19 cases have increased. Beni is consistent with the rate of infection in the country. In mid-July, Tsimane recorded his first case of the disease.
For tsimane and other indigenous peoples, a confluence of vulnerable elderly populations, networked lifestyles and limited resources means that their own lifestyles could possibly be at risk. Respiratory infections, gastrointestinal diseases and parasites are not unusual in these communities, which can also worsen the severity of any case of COVID-19, Gurven said.
Isolated villages like the Tsimane are within days of receiving medical care with limited access to safe drinking water, which, combined with a limited source of soap, can cause the spread of infectious diseases with devastating consequences. Centuries ago, smallpox marked the beginning of the decline of aztec, Mayan and Inca civilizations. The 1918 flu epidemic wiped out 90% of an Aboriginal village in North America in five days. In 2009, H1N1 mortality rates were three to six times higher among indigenous populations in the Americas and the Pacific than among non-Aboriginal populations.
The risk of COVID-19 to indigenous communities in South America became tangible in April, when a 15-year-old Aboriginal child in Brazil died of the disease. The boy, Alvaney Xirixana, was part of a Yanomami network in the Amazon, where COVID-19 experts arrived with illegal gold miners. Xirixana’s death was noted as a harbinger of the devastation that could fall, and he did, upon the Amazon.
To this fate in Beni, Kaplan, Gurven and their collaborators at Tsimane began their efforts to teach the Tsimane about COVID-19.
The first phase of your plan to inform communities before the disease arrived. Tsimane’s team members translated data posters created through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Team members in Bolivia, without symptoms for two weeks, traveled by motorcycle to 60 villages to talk about the prevention, symptoms and transmission of COVID-19.
Some Tsimane communities, already semi-isolated from foreigners, have made the decision to isolate themselves more absolutely until a vaccine or remedy is available. Through conversations with local communities, the team learned the need for quarantine huts, a concept familiar to the Tsimane, which isolates postpartum moms and their children to protect them after birth. Communities also asked for salt and soap reserves so they wouldn’t have to travel to San Borja to stock up.
But Kaplan stated that even the best-crafted plans are and that many remote communities would eventually have to deal with the virus. In June, he predicted that traders would enter Tsimane’s land to buy and sell items. “The official scenario is that other people shouldn’t do this, but the genuine scenario is that it’s a leak,” he said.
At least 17 villages in Tsimane have shown cases of COVID-19, however, surveys reveal typical symptoms in many others. Taxis make stopovers in the villages available across the road, Gurven says, and suspects that the virus is present in most, if not all, villages near the cities. “We hope you now have the possibility to explode across the country,” he wrote in an email. On August 11, the team recorded the death of a 78-year-old woman, the first showing Tsimane’s coVID-19-related death.
While the first phase of the team aimed to delay the arrival of COVID-19 in Tsimane’s populations, the team has now entered a phase for the time being, focusing on repair and mitigation.
Gurven says his strategy is a review that his team, in collaboration with Tsimane tribal leaders and government medical staff, will review as the pandemic expands. He and Kaplan sought to publish their technique so that other Aboriginal populations could use it as an advisor to expand methods to lessen the effect of COVID-19 on their populations.
While not all Aboriginal teams have established dating and decades of acceptance as true with a clinical team, Kaplan insists on the universality of the approach. “The concept that other stakeholders deserve to combine and jointly develop plans with wonderful respect for the autonomy of tribal peoples,” he said, “is something that I think is very widespread.”
Carolina Batista, a physician and member of the International Council of Doctors Without Borders, praised the collaboration for the use of existing network structures. Batista led the COVID-19 evaluation team at the Navajo Nation for Doctors Without Borders in April and May, where he promoted strategies.
She says communities like Navajo are resilient because they have resisted epidemics. For foreigners, he says, the key is to help communities take advantage of their history by directly engaging them, perhaps with teams already in place, such as social media or physical structures that can only be used for isolation sites. And above all, he says, members of the network deserve to be the protagonists of their own plan, not outdoor experts.
In many Aboriginal communities, older people are concerned. Especially in communities with strong oral traditions, the elderly may have an irreplaceable wisdom of rituals, songs, myths and language. “When an old man from those communities dies,” Batista said, “he took much of [the community’s] history to the cemetery.”
Indigenous peoples around the world face a multitude of formidable threats, joining industrialization, deforestation and climate change. Although many non-Aboriginal populations are grappling with immediate social upheaval through a first-time human-remembered pandemic, Aboriginal peoples are very familiar with the vulnerabilities exposed by these diseases.
Over time, we will be able to measure those suffering from COVID-19 not only in lost lives, but also in erased traditions. With our wisdom of the devastation that beyond the pandemics have inflicted on Aboriginal communities, and through reaction plans created in collaboration with the communities they seek to help, rather than for them, this time we can minimize both types of losses.
Allessandra DiCorato is an independent and scientific scientist in biomaterials founded in Chicago, Illinois. He was a member of the AAAS 2019 media at KQED. This article was originally published on Undark.
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