Leaders of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians say they are “losing parts of our culture” as the COVID-19 pandemic has ripped through their community.
More than 10% of tribal members have contracted the virus, The New York Times reports, and they’ve made up 64% of Neshoba County’s COVID-19 deaths despite only making up 18% of the county’s population.
“We aren’t just losing family members or an aunt or uncle, we are losing parts of our culture,” Mary Harrison, interim health director for the Choctaw Health Center, told the Times. “We’ve lost dressmakers, we’ve lost artists, elders who are very fluid in our language — so when you think about an individual we’ve lost, these are important people in our community.”
Click here to read the full story from The New York Times.
After a steady decline in total cases and average cases, COVID-19 cases are again on the rise in Mississippi. The seven-day average for new COVID-19 cases is now at 646, a 27% increase since the start of October and a 24% increase in the last week alone. The average is also the highest since Sept. 4.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.