Though it seems like the entire country now lives under some form of lockdown, the governor of Nebraska has yet to issue stay-at-home orders — a decision that is jeopardizing lives, according to Margery Coffey.

The 78-year-old Democratic voter is a fourth-generation Nebraskan who has dedicated her life to studying the Omaha, a federally recognized Native American tribe in the Midwest. While Governor Pete Ricketts fails to implement a lockdown, Coffey says the Omaha reservation where she lives in Rosalie is already taking steps to mitigate the crisis.

The governor “will not protect Nebraskans from the virus by making us housebound. We are doing it on our own because we know how pandemics work. I mean, this is not the first pandemic to sweep an Indian reservation,” Coffey tells The Independent in a recent interview.

Native American communities have been devastated by disease outbreaks throughout US history, as epidemic Eurasian diseases tore through the land after the arrival of the pilgrims. “They had smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, all of it,” Coffey notes. At one point in the early 1800s, she says members of the Omaha “literally just ran out into the prairie as far as they could go, until they fell from exhaustion. Those who didn’t die slowly came back and rebuilt the village.”

(Photo courtesy Margery Coffey (Photo courtesy Margery Coffey)

To prevent another catastrophe, the reservation has locked down all of its local Native towns, establishing a curfew, feeding the elders and more. Predominantly white communities living within the bounds of the reservation “can choose to join us or not,” Coffey says.

Coffey notes she’s “technically in the retirement age,” though that doesn’t stop her from keeping a busy schedule as the graphic artist and assistant director for the Omaha Tribal Historical Research Project (OTHRP), which has been dedicated to documenting and educating communities across Nebraska and Iowa about the Omaha.

The Democrat moved onto the reservation in 1990, and helped the tribe become one of the only Native American reservations in the US whose boundaries are codified by both law and treaty, by contributing her research in numerous court battles — all of which, Coffey notes, the tribe won unanimously.

“I became radicalized in my twenties and realized I had been lied to by my school, the government, the newspapers, because they were all trying to push the dominant rich folks’ line,” she says. “I wanted to know the truth, and I figured the Indians knew the truth.”

She adds: “As I came back to Nebraska, the logical thing was to study the Omaha … It has been a learning experience that has really changed me.”

Coffey, who voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2016, remains closely tuned into the 2020 presidential elections, though she says she has no plans to vote for either Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

In her opinion, both are “terrible for the Indian country”.

Trump “has been attacking the Indian country,” Coffey notes, saying his administration is “after the land, and they want to turn all the Indians into immigrants — which is hard, because they’re native to this country.”

Coffey also fears the Trump administration is “trying very much to ruin the upcoming election” by “attacking the post office” as Democrats call for expanded mail-in ballots amid the pandemic.

She also describes the president as “bloody ignorant,” calling his actions against the environment “pitiful.”

Meanwhile, she says Biden is “just as bad.”