90 FORTUNE FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021
public and canceled the annual powwow and other cultur-
ally important ceremonial gatherings.
But there were limitations to the effort. Many of the set-
tlement’s residents work in nearby towns like Tama, Toledo,
and Marshalltown, and everyone has to leave the settlement
to get groceries and other supplies. The Meskwaki’s efforts
to stop the spread of the virus could only be as good as the
efforts in those surrounding communities.
“The state of Iowa was one of those states that didn’t
take the virus too seriously,” says SpottedBird, who moved
from Seattle to take his job in May (he’s not a tribal mem-
ber). “So safeguards were kind of lackadaisical, loose, and
people were generally not wearing masks for a long time.”
Like many health professionals in the state, Papakee
has been frustrated greatly by Gov. Reynolds’s response to
the pandemic. He would tune into her press conferences
on the virus only to be dismayed each time by her continu-
ing insistence that she trusted Iowans to make the right
decisions. “Obviously you could not, because our numbers
continued to soar,” he says.
He admits some of the same challenges exist on the settle-
ment; there are those in the community who bristle at being
required to wear masks or being told how to conduct their
social lives. At one Christmas gathering on the settlement, a
single person exposed 25 others. The casino, which provides
the tribe with important revenue, reopened in July with a
new nonsmoking policy, temperature checks, and masking
and social distance requirements—a combination of mea-
sures that Papakee says have been effective but not perfect.
Vaccinations have started on the settlement, but Papa-
kee had no idea when the next shipment was showing up,
making things hard to plan. The community’s elders were
anxiously awaiting their turn.
Reflecting trends seen across the country with Native
American populations, the Meskwaki have been more
impacted by the virus than other groups. When I spoke
with Papakee, roughly a quarter of the settlement’s tribal
population—301 people—had so far tested positive for
COVID; five had succumbed to the virus.Outside the settlement, Shannon Zoffka,
CEO of Tama County Public Health and Home Care,
leads the area’s pandemic response. She has lived in the
small, rural county of 17,000 all her life, but the past year
has been eye-opening. “There’s definitely a large percent
of the population in the county that don’t believe in
masks. They think that the vaccine is unsafe; they think
that COVID is a hoax,” Zoffka tells me one afternoon in
early January.
That resistance to reality persists despite the county’s
nursing home and meatpacking plant outbreaks, and the
fact that Tama ranks in the top 4% of counties nationally
in deaths per capita due to COVID. There was also a spikethe city over time, including most recently Burmese and
Congolese refugees.
In navigating the recovery process, language barriers are
one issue; the other is time. The city’s immigrant popula-
tion makes up a large part of Marshalltown’s essential
workforce, employed in jobs that often don’t offer flexibility
to deal with things like lining up an insurance adjuster.
For some on the Meskwaki Settlement, the
8,000 acres of Tama County that is home to the Sac & Fox
Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa—east of Marshalltown—
displacement because of the derecho came with another
brutal cost: COVID.
Iowa’s only federally recognized tribe, the Meskwaki
purchased the land in 1857 after resisting banishment by
the federal government to a reservation in Kansas. Over the
years the tribe expanded its holdings, and the settlement,
where 1,200 or so tribal members currently reside, has its
own health clinic, court, and school. In 1992 the Meskwaki
opened a hotel and casino on the property—advertised as
having “the loosest slots in Iowa”—which today provides
about 70% of funding for tribal operations.
The derecho damaged 271 of the settlement’s 350
homes, and in the storm’s aftermath, the generator-
powered hotel was the obvious place for those affected
to go. Seven hundred tribal members “jam-packed”
into the hotel, some five or six to a room, says Lawrence
SpottedBird, the settlement’s executive director. People
found themselves in proximity to people from whom
they’d been socially distanced for months.
“We were interacting more closely and working more
closely,” says SpottedBird. “We had to drop our guard to do
that. The result was our cases spiked.”
The settlement, in some ways, had taken an opposite
approach to the state’s in handling the pandemic. Rudy
Papakee, health director at Meskwaki Tribal Health Clinic,
learned of the community’s first COVID case in March. A
tribal member had sought care at a hospital for breath-
ing problems and tested positive for the virus. Soon the
individual’s family members and their contacts did too.
Several of the cases were severe, involving hospitaliza-
tions, and one elder who contracted the virus died.
“We were a little epicenter, at first,” says Papakee. He
knew many in the population were vulnerable, either as
elders or individuals with health conditions, like diabetes
and high blood pressure, that put them at greater risk.
Tribal leadership responded almost immediately with a
shelter-in-place order, shuttering the casino and other
operations on the settlement. They continued to pay em-
ployees and asked them to stay home. They had a robust
and accessible testing infrastructure, thanks to the Indian
Health Service. When the tribe opened back up in early
summer, it did so conservatively: It required face masks in
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