Aunties of Resilience: Decolonization During COVID-19

The author speaks about the toll COVID-19 has taken on Native Americans by reflecting on life before the pandemic in her Choctaw community. She recalls experiencing the warmth of kinship as a child, including the foods people lovingly prepared and the assurance of knowing a whole community was looking after its youth. The legacies of colonization nevertheless left people physically vulnerable to disease and tore at families, physically distancing people from each other before disaster struck. Facing this crisis, Frazee asserts that Indigenous peoples have responded with renewed “commitments to fighting for the survival and success of their people in an echo of the ways of their ancestors.”