Abigail Echo-Hawk

The Covid-19 pandemic hit American Indian and Alaska Native people especially hard. But because of poor data collection on race and ethnicity, public health officials failed to fully capture disparities in infection, hospitalization, and mortality rates. This problem is part of what Echo-Hawk has called a “data genocide” that extends beyond Covid. A citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma and fierce advocate for health equity and social justice for Indigenous people, Echo-Hawk last year stepped up her long-standing campaign for better collection and dissemination of health data on Native American and Alaska Native people. The current situation means that Native communities don’t get the funding and resources they need. As she told The Guardian in the early months of the pandemic: “If you eliminate us in the data, we don’t exist.”