Elders on the Navajo Reservation benefited from a fundraising effort Sequoyah Fellow Olivia Mathison organized through the Puget Sound AISES Professional Chapter, which partnered with Lower Columbia/Willamette River AISES Professional Chapter to provide and transport essential items to the Navajo Reservation. “We are a small group of professional urban Natives in the Pacific Northwest giving back to our community in these difficult times,” she says.
Dr. Mary Jo Ondrechen and her team are researching the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, at her laboratory at Northeastern University in Boston, where she is a professor of chemistry and chemical biology and principal investigator of the Computational Biology Research Group. Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, the group is working to predict compounds that could disrupt the viral life cycle — findings that could lead to new treatments. For more on Dr. Ondrechen and her work, click here.
Nikki Dupuy
Nikki Dupuy of GM launched her own grassroots effort to raise funds and supplies for the Navajo Nation and made repeated trips to and across the Navajo Nation from Phoenix to deliver the items, all while working within the parameters of the Navajo Nation curfew.
In the thick of the crisis the Enterprise Board of the Boeing Native American Network stepped up to raise funds and gather supplies for the Navajo Nation, at the time the hardest-hit tribe in the continental U.S. BNAN officers are Alex Tsosie, president; Winston Kelley, vice president; and Stephen West, secretary.
Laurence Brown and Sandia Employees
The American Indian Outreach Committee and many other employees of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., mounted an urgent response to the devastating spread of the virus on the Navajo Nation and in pueblo communities. They ran the grassroots Need Is Now fundraiser in late April. At the time, 55 percent of COVID-19 victims were Native Americans, who account for only 11 percent of the population. Under the leadership of Laurence Brown, tribal government relations program manager, the fundraiser collected more than $220,000 from nearly 2,000 donors in less than two weeks ($121,000 in the first two days). National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia LLC, which manages the lab, contributed another $25,000. The Native American Relief Fund, established by the New Mexico Foundation, distributed the funds.
ARSINO WARTZ (DR. KRISTINA GONZALES-WARTZ)
Dr. Kristina Gonzales-Wartz
One of the few Natives at the National Institutes of Health researching the coronavirus, Dr. Kristina Gonzales-Wartz is a biomedical scientist in the Antibody Biology Unit at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. She has been working in the Laboratory of Immunogenetics on developing monoclonal antibodies against COVID-19. “I would love to show the Native community that we are making a difference in all STEM fields,” she says. For more on Dr. Gonzales-Wartz, click here.
Categorized as corona (crown in Latin) because of their characteristic spiky projections, the coronavirus family has a large host range. A new type of coronavirus can develop when an animal infection is transmitted to humans, and coronaviruses that make the jump can cause serious illness in people who lack immunity. Coronaviruses include SARS-CoV, the virus that causes SARS, identified in 2003; MERS-CoV, the virus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), identified in 2012; and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, identified in 2019.
— Kimberly Durment Locke
As she finished her last months of residency in Seattle, Dr. Kelsey Motanic saw the virus threat grow from a vague worry about people who had traveled to China to a full-on effort to screen, triage, and treat rapidly increasing numbers of patients. In addition to her work at the Swedish Medical Center Cherry Hill Campus and the Seattle Indian Health Board, Dr. Motanic made time for the Chief Seattle Club, a social services center for urban Natives. “It’s a place where a lot of our relatives who have unstable housing come to,” she says. “Before Seattle set up free clinics, I would spend some of my half days there in a tent gowned up head to toe, getting our high-risk people screened.” The pandemic also meant that the ceremonies marking the end of Dr. Motanic’s years of medical residency were not what she had expected.
“I had my grand rounds presentation on March 19,” she says. “It’s something you plan for and work on, and to present to an empty auditorium or on Zoom was strange. But I’m grateful our residency class of 14 was able to have a beautiful virtual graduation.” Now a full-fledged family practitioner, Dr. Motanic says that her experience with COVID-19 has highlighted both the weaknesses of the health care system and the advantages of telemedicine for patients with chronic conditions and accessibility issues. “That makes me happy as a practitioner to be able to provide care for them,” she says. Dr. Motanic’s next step will be starting her practice with the Puyallup Tribe. For more on Dr. Motanic and her family, click here.