COVID-19 represents a serious threat for Indigenous peoples around the world. The pandemic has hit the Amazon very hard, with particularly challenging conditions due to vulnerable health care systems and the long distances that communities need to travel to reach emergency services. Additionally, preexisting health inequities have combined with an exacerbated exploitation of Indigenous territories during the pandemic. Meanwhile, in India’s Meghalaya, many Indigenous Khasi communities are already confronting weakened public health due to the impacts of toxic development projects that have polluted drinking water and land and left them without adequate health infrastructure. Yet, Indigenous communities and organizations in both regions have generated distinct responses to the pandemic. Drawing lessons from the 1918 Global Flu Pandemic, in Northeast India, Khasi communities have been employing traditional medicines to boost their immune systems and prevent COVID-19 from spreading rapidly. In the Ecuadorian Amazon, Indigenous organizations are implementing self-determined practices, and communities are sharing knowledges about plants and treatments to address the symptoms of the disease. Around the world, practices of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge (IEK)[1] to sustain the land emphasize not only Indigenous autonomy and self-determination, but also epitomize the continuation and strengthening of Indigenous cultures.

     While scholars have increasingly begun to understand that Indigenous’ peoples ethic of care for the landscape fosters some of the most robust and biodiverse ecosystems on the planet (Rundle 2019), analysis has missed how this same IEK and the symbiotic relations it requires with the land depends entirely on a healthy ecosystem to ensure that traditional medicines, and in turn, Indigenous libraries of knowledge carried by living elders, may thrive. That is, already fragile landscapes subjected to ecosystem destruction through oil, coal, or mineral extraction, or monocrop production, enter a negative feedback loop wherein products extracted from them exacerbate greenhouse emissions and feed climate catastrophe, thus rendering the Indigenous communities who serve as their custodians more precarious, and at the same time unleashing new viruses and destroying the forest pharmacies that Indigenous peoples depend upon to heal their bodies. Communities who have the most intimate relationship with the landscape are likewise extremely vulnerable to the impacts of ecosystem destruction. When forest buffer zones tended by Indigenous communities are deforested or destroyed, mammals formerly inhabiting these regions become homeless, encroaching on more densely populated regions and triggering viral spillover events. In this way, zoonotic spillover events trigger the spread of new diseases (Daszak 2020). Pandemic emergence, then, does not simply pose the problem of habitat drift, rather, loss of landscapes can trigger cultural ecocide when entire cultures no longer have access to their resource base and are unable to meet their basic needs (Whyte 2020 and Gilio-Whitaker 2017). While the hollowing out of ecosystems has been foundational to settler colonial erasures, COVID-19 exacerbates all of this by an order of magnitude, channeling it into a series of feedback loops that feed the very crisis that fostered the initial loss of habitat.

[1] We define IEK as engaging in a reciprocal relationship with and management of the flora, fauna, landscapes, and waterways of one’s local ecosystem as an extended kin network the survival of which is entwined with one’s own.