Five years since COVID-19 pandemic

It’s now been five years since COVID-19 shut down the community. 

By the second week of March, a global pandemic had already been declared, with the first of the cases just beginning to sweep through Canada. Soon a COVID-19 task force was formed in town, and measures were quickly put in place to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus.

“I think we all realized immediately that this was something like none of us had ever experienced, and I think we knew that we needed to do this right if we were going to serve our community properly,” said Joe Delaronde, the public face of the COVID-19 task force back then.

Restaurants, bars, and other businesses were ordered to close down. Large gatherings became forbidden. Visitors could no longer see their loved ones at the Kateri Memorial Hospital Centre. The Mohawk Council of Kahnawake (MCK) sent the majority of its workforce home and ordered all employers to bar workers over 70 from coming into work.

Organizations were instructed to only provide the most essential of services, and ironworkers were asked to choose whether they wanted to stay in town or remain in New York State. By March 18, Kahnawake already had its first confirmed infection. 

“It was a very challenging time. We all went through it, we all know, but it was in its own way very exciting,” Delaronde said. “I’m glad for myself that I had a role to play to help make things a little better for people.”

He was the press attaché back then for the MCK, hosting the updates filmed live each day for community members watching from Facebook.

“We think we did about 125 or 150 updates over the course of COVID-19,” he said. “For two or three months, we did an update every day, seven days a week.”

Also on the task force was Lloyd Phillips, commissioner of public safety, as well as Lisa Westaway, the former executive director at the KMHC. Other leaders in the community, like police chief Dwayne Zacharie and Derek Montour, the executive director at Kahnawake Shakotiia’takehnhas Community Services (KSCS), also sat on the task force. 

The quick action Westaway and Montour took to put a stop to visitations at the hospital and Turtle Bay Elders Lodge prevented many deaths, Delaronde said. 

“They stopped that practice here before it could really spread in Kahnawake, because we saw what it did to a lot of the other hospitals and facilities where older people were dying, by the hundreds at that point,” he said. “We were very proud of that. We knew we had an important role to keep the community safe. So we stopped (the visitations), the stores were closed. All the actions that had to be taken were taken.”

Workers at KSCS stepped up to support the most vulnerable in the community, like elders and those with special needs that were isolated. Emergency food baskets started being delivered to those who couldn’t leave their homes. 

“We had community members that were experiencing stress and distress,” Montour said. “We had to reach out to all of them, and all of the special needs community members. We had to keep tabs on our elders.”

The organization also took the lead on securing shelter for anyone that needed a room to isolate in for 14 days, he said, working with the Host Hotel over the course of the pandemic. 

It wasn’t an easy time for leaders in the community, Montour said. They took a lot of heat, himself included, he said, especially once the vaccine rolled out and a movement spread against taking it.

There was also backlash after the task force announced it would be implementing a vaccine passport in August of 2021, prompting protest. The 207 Longhouse immediately opposed the decision to mirror the passport created by Quebec.

And whenever someone in the community became seriously ill because of the virus, it weighed heavily on everyone, Montour said.

“Those first cases really hit us, because we tried so hard to protect our elders and our community members with special needs. When it hits you feel guilty,” Montour said. “Those were challenging times.”

By April of 2021, over 73 percent of community members eligible for the vaccine had been immunized. Over 2021, Kahnawake moved in and out of a state of emergency multiple times as infections fell and then rose again. It still took until February of 2022, however, before it was lifted for good. 

Montour said community members are still feeling the effects of the pandemic. Isolation, limits to personal freedoms, and just the general stress of having to navigate the crisis, was traumatic for many, he said, especially for frontline workers.

“This led us to realize that there’s a lot of trauma in the community,” he said.

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