Introduction

In March 2020, as COVID-19 ravaged Indigenous communities in one of the first major hotspots of the pandemic, the Seattle Indian Health Board and Abigail Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee Nation citizen and public health researcher, pleaded for support and supplies. The State of Washington and federal contacts responded by sending body bags. Echo-Hawk's photos of the body bags and Indigenous communities' outrage and dismay went viral along with the ongoing disease, while Echo-Hawk asserted: "I'll never accept their body bags for our [Indigenous] people... all I will accept is a world where we are thriving, ever continuing." The delivery of body bags revealed a common but perverse assumption in American society that Native Americans were destined to die. Cherokee scholar Thomas King delineated this notion by defining the "Dead Indian" as one of the stereotypes that have shaped American mentalities and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. The "Dead Indian" stems from the myths, often accepted as factual narratives, that "Live Indians living today cannot be genuine Indians," relegating the only "Live Indians" to the past. Thus, in 2020, state and federal government officials' assumption that the Seattle Indian Health Board needed body bags for "Dead Indians" perpetuated a twisted sense that Native Americans were inevitably set to die out.