‘It’s the end of the nightmare’: Native Americans of Yakama Nation celebrate vaccination roll-out...

Ken Leadercharge reckoned he knew as many as 10 or 15 people who had died from the virus. And those were close friends and neighbours, not distant acquaintances. One had been buried just days earlier.

So when the opportunity came for him to get the vaccine, he was not going to hang around.

“I've been keeping to myself, staying away. Trying to be healthy. Keep wearing masks,” he says. “But I got it, as soon as was possible.”

Leadercharge, 51, was sitting in in the front of his SUV at a drive-thru vaccination clinic held for members of the Yakama Nation, one of hundreds of indigenous communities in the US that have suffered grievously during the pandemic. Data show that along with African Americans and Latinos, indigenous communities were most at risk of contracting the disease, and least equipped to combat it once it struck.