Shawn Terry, Secretary of Health, Interview

The Muscogee (Creek) Nation
Historic and Cultural Preservation Department Oral History Program

“A Twenty-First Century Pandemic in Indian Country: The Resilience of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Against Covid-19”
As Remembered by: Mr. Shawn Terry, Secretary of Health Interview by: Ms. Midge Dellinger
Date: June 24, 2021
Transcription: The Audio Transcription Company
Edited by: Ms. Midge Dellinger
MIDGE DELLINGER: This is Midge Dellinger oral historian for the Muscogee Nation. Today is June 24, 2021, and I’m at my home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, interviewing Mr. Shawn Terry, Muscogee citizen and Secretary of Health for the Muscogee Nation. Secretary Terry is in his office located in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. This interview is being performed remotely due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. I am performing this interview on behalf of the Muscogee Nation Historic and Cultural Preservation Department for the oral history project titled “A Twenty-First Century Pandemic in Indian Country: The Resilience of the Muscogee Creek Nation against COVID-19.” Secretary Terry, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to be here with me today, and to participate in this project. I’m going to start by asking you just a few questions [00:01:00] about your personal life and background. And so, to begin with, I’d like to ask you what is your clan?
SHAWN TERRY: My clan is called Hotvlkvlke, Wind Clan.
DELLINGER: Okay. And where were you born, and can you share just a little bit about life growing up?
TERRY: Yeah. So, I was born at the Wagoner Hospital and I grew up in Coweta. My mother was from Haskell. My father lived in Coweta. And he was in Vietnam. And when I was born, and when he left the military, we moved to Colorado, [00:02:00] to the military base in Colorado Springs for a short time. And then, when he was discharged from the military, we moved to Coweta and I grew up there, and started and finished high school there, in Coweta. And then, I
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left high school and moved to Tahlequah to go to school at Northeastern State University, and graduated college there in Tahlequah.
DELLINGER: Who are your folks? What were your folks’ names?
TERRY: My dad’s Larry Terry and he was self-employed when I was younger. He owned a rod and reel repair shop at a place called Okie Bug, in Tulsa. And [00:03:00] then, he became a machinist at Baker Oil Tools later on during my teenage years. He ultimately retired from there. And my mother is Brenda Joyce Terry. And when I was growing up, she worked at the office in State Farm that was near our house in Coweta. And then, she went to work at the City of Coweta and she was the assistant city manager there for a long time. And then, she retired just a few years ago from there.
DELLINGER: What about your family life now? Will you share a little bit about that?
TERRY: Yeah. So, I have a daughter that’s getting ready to be seventeen in July. Her name is Sydney and she’s very bright. [00:04:00] She has, I think, a 4.1 grade point average. She goes to school in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma. I live in Muskogee. And she, Sydney, as she was growing up, she did traditional ballet training. And so, we spent a lot of time watching her dance and doing that. And then, a couple of years ago, she started running track and we found she had a knack for running hurdles. And so, she placed third at state in the hundred-meter hurdles this year. She set the Fort Gibson school record about five different times this year in track. So, she’s [00:05:00] very bright, very talented. She works hard. And she’ll be starting her senior year this year. I also
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have a fiancé, named Kellie Fallis, and we’ve been engaged for five or six years. She has two daughters. She’s a teacher in Coweta. And we made a decision early on that having stepfamilies was—sometimes it’s rough on the kids when you start blending families and moving kids around. So, we made a decision over the years to maintain our own households and raise our kids and not have that as part of what we do. So hopefully here in about a year, [00:06:00] we will have both of our girls out of high school and raised and we can move on to the next chapter in our lives.
DELLINGER: That sounds great. So, you have spent the majority of, if not your entire career, in the healthcare industry is that correct?
TERRY: Right, all of it.
DELLINGER: Yes. And so, do you know how many years that is?
TERRY: I guess thirty, going on thirty years, ever since 1991. The fall of ‘91, I got out of college and earned my degree in Health and Human Performance at Northeastern State University. And the Cherokee Nation hired me the day I graduated from college as a community health educator. And so, I was going around to all of the rural [00:07:00] communities throughout Eastern Oklahoma, the whole Cherokee Nation, and doing community fitness programs, and wellness programs, and speaking at schools. And that was how I got my start in the healthcare world. And, one day, the medical director approached me and asked me if I would have any interest in becoming a physician recruiter. And I’d never thought about that world, but I
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took on the challenge and we recruited, I think, about twenty physicians that year and we started building the Cherokee Nation medical staff to having [00:08:00] all board-certified family practice physicians and improving the quality of physicians. And that kind of started me on my track in administration and I eventually became a clinic administrator. I ran most of the Cherokee clinics at one point in time. I ran Redbird Smith Health Center for a short time, the Mankiller Clinic in Stilwell for a short time. My first, really, fulltime was at the A-MO Salina Clinic. That was really my first, where I was just out on my own running that facility. And then, I became the director of operations for their health system and stayed there and did that up until 1996—or, I’m sorry, 2006, [00:09:00] when I finally left Cherokee Nation. I can’t hear you.
DELLINGER: And then, you went on to work for the Hillcrest organization.
TERRY: I did. I became an assistant vice president of business development, focusing on building the rural market and the Native affairs liaison there. And I actually first became a consultant, and the Hillcrest system has a sister hospital agency in New Mexico called the Lovelace Health System. And so, I went out and was building their Native American market and
their rural referral [00:10:00] system. And I did that for a couple of years. And then, I went full time in 2008 and worked in Tulsa. I eventually became a vice president there in the Hillcrest system. And I stayed there until 2016. And then, Principal Chief Floyd asked me if I would consider taking this role as running the health system for Creek Nation.
DELLINGER: So, you’ve been with Muscogee Nation for five years now?
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TERRY: I have.
DELLINGER: Okay. And I want to ask you, when you are not working how do you enjoy your free time?
TERRY: Well, I’ve always had fitness as part of my daily routine. So, I try [00:11:00] to run several times a week and row or lift weights. And I try to try to keep in some sort of shape, doing that. Recreationally, I bass fish tournaments. And so, I do it on a small scale, I don’t do it on a very large scale, but that’s what I really love to do. Be on the water fishing is where I’m most at peace, I guess. And then, I also have a small herd of cows and I like being outside with them and doing that as well. So that takes up the majority of my time when I’m not at work.
DELLINGER: Right. All right, well, thank you so much for sharing these things about yourself. What I’d like to do now is go ahead and [00:12:00] transition the interview and our conversation into some questions here about the COVID pandemic. And we’re over a year now into this COVID-19 pandemic, but I’d like to know, as the Secretary of Health for the Muscogee Nation, when in 2020 did COVID-19 grab your attention?
TERRY: Well, we started seeing headlines in the newspaper that there was a virus that, really around January, that there was some talks of this funny virus that was in China, and that it was possibly starting to spread pretty quickly. And then, we watched it start tracking across the world in February. By the time March hit, the first case had landed in the United States. [00:13:00] And when it did that, I called Principal Chief Hill and asked to come and meet with him and told him
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that we’ve been following this virus, it looks very serious, we think that it has the potential to do a lot of damage, and that we needed to get a plan together to address this thing. So that was, I believe, early, in early March.
DELLINGER: And I’m just curious, how did you first learn about this virus? Did you see something on TV, like most of the rest of Americans, that’s how we found out about the virus, or where you receiving information from other sources?
TERRY: Well, [00:14:00] we get different news traffics from Indian Health Service or the CDC and the federal government. And so, they had been following that. We had been getting several alerts about it. And the majority of information, though, we were learning just like everyone else did, we would see it on the news and so forth. But we do receive various types of news and alerts and so forth through various channels, through governmental agencies as well.
DELLINGER: So, when you did initially start learning about this virus that, of course, was in another country, what were your immediate thoughts about it, especially in regard to it reaching the Muscogee Nation? [00:15:00]
TERRY: Well, some of the earliest discussions was they thought it could have as high as a one percent death rate with this virus and we knew that we had about forty thousand patients in our system, and that if this thing did what it said it would do, we were going to lose about four hundred tribal citizens to this virus. So that was what we knew that was potentially ahead of us. And in the public health world, when it comes to fighting a virus and the spread of virus, of
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course, one of the first things that Chief Hill did was declare a state of emergency, so that way, everyone knew that we were taking this seriously. But we really didn’t know a whole lot about the virus. [00:16:00] We didn’t know how it spread. We didn’t know if this thing was spreading on surface contact, or primarily through airborne transmission, person-to-person, how easily was this thing—how transmissible, really, was this virus? And so, we started laying the groundwork of, like everyone, that we knew we had to probably shelter in place for a while, we were going to have to stop the flow of traffic into the tribal service buildings, that we were going to have to scale back services in our clinics, and things like dental, which they have a lot of blood and things that can spread, so we had to back services off. So, there was lots and lots of planning. And we have an incredibly [00:17:00] good infection control team at Creek Nation Department of Health. And those guys were really on top of this from day one, looking at all of the areas of infection control and giving us recommendations on where we needed to start targeting.
DELLINGER: Do you remember the date when that state of emergency was made?
TERRY: I had a whole timeline written out, Midge, that I’ll get you the timeline on the day that it started, and we declared the state of emergency, and we formed our COVID Taskforce, and the Department of Health leadership team, we stayed pretty much locked in a conference room together for about seventeen weeks. And every morning, I started my day in the Principal Chief’s [00:18:00] office. We would update the Chief and the cabinet on what the status of COVID was, what types of recommendations that we had, and I think that we still have a screenshot of the tracking system, when Oklahoma went from having zero cases to one case, and we knew that it was starting to hit home. And so, that was kind of where we had our plan of attack, for that first
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seventeen weeks, was just really nonstop between the Chief and the cabinet, and the Chief’s taskforce from his side to the health taskforce. I think the tribe was very progressive with it. [00:19:00]
DELLINGER: So, having said those things, it sounds like then when the decision was made to shut down most of the Muscogee Nation and to allow employees to shelter-in-place, that that was something that all these people who were involved, you, the administration, these taskforces, everybody was in total agreement of that when that decision was made, is that correct?
TERRY: I think so. I don’t think that there was anyone that was dissenting from that. Of course, shutting down is something that you can’t completely shut down. We knew that we still had to deliver services to people. There still had to be food that got out to our elders, healthcare still had to be delivered, people still had to receive their medicine, people [00:20:00] still had to have access to services. So really, from the Chief’s office on the tribal services side, they were really making plans of, how do we still get people taken care of without having people flowing into our buildings and having to come in in large waiting rooms and to mingle?
DELLINGER: And so, employees, because I remember it like it was yesterday, it was the middle of March, and we were all told to shelter in place, and stay at home. But then, there was the decision made to bring us all back. And I’m just wondering, what went into that decision? And in hindsight, was that decision to have us come back on June 1 premature?
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TERRY: I don’t believe it was premature. [00:21:00] So, a lot of things had gone into this decision. So, keep in mind, one of the things why we sheltered in place and we locked into place was that the COVID virus was causing an overwhelming burden on the health system in New York, if you’ll recall. And people at the hospitals were overwhelmed. And one of the reasons why we were trying to slow the spread of that virus was that we didn’t want the entire health system across the country overburdened. And so, that really was step one in a public health emergency, [00:22:00] is slow the spread. And I know that we hoped that we could slow the spread enough that, if we could get to a point where we could vaccinate, then that would give us a chance. So, really, phase one was really trying to slow the transmission and help ease the burden on the hospital systems to where they weren’t overwhelmed.
So, I think we did a very effective job of doing that because we really didn’t hit the overwhelming of the health system really until about December and when we started seeing the inpatient cases rise. [00:23:00] And what really overburdened the system was when the intensive care beds in the Tulsa markets filled up, we couldn’t get patients transferred from the rural areas into Tulsa, or Oklahoma City. And so, that was happening towards the end of December and the first of January. But also, by then, we started to receive—the first rounds of vaccinations were starting to come out. And so, we shifted. As the intensive care overload was starting to soften, then we started to be able to vaccinate. And so, over the course of the next several months of January, February, March, April, we started making a big push for everyone to get vaccinated. [00:24:00] And so, by May, the positivity rate of COVID got down five percent or below. And so, we knew that it wasn’t going to hit us at a point where it was going to overload the health systems again.
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DELLINGER: So, that’s a situation that you never actually had to deal with. You were always able to take care of the folks that were coming into your facilities?
TERRY: Yeah. Well, typically, in Okmulgee and Okemah hospitals, when a patient hits ICU level of care, typically we transfer them to Tulsa. We have a very good relationship [00:25:00] with our hospitalist group. The name of that group is RBI, Regional Brain Institute. And they were a wonderful partner for us because they were taking on those more critical patients when
we couldn’t get them to Okmulgee. And the nurses and doctors at Okmulgee, at the medical center, and at Okemah Hospital, they were really taking care of patients at a higher level than what we’ve ever seen before. And they stepped up and did a fantastic job. But it was, emotionally, a very draining time for all of those healthcare workers.
DELLINGER: One of the questions that I’m asking folks in these interviews, and I’m going to ask you this question is, what is your understanding about the COVID-19 virus? [00:26:00] And so, meaning, for example, how it is spread and the physical impact it has on the body, if you contract it?
TERRY: So, we know that this thing is highly transmissible from person to person, primarily through airborne, so, just like if you were going to breathe the same air as someone. And the closer the proximity you are to that person, the higher chances you are of contracting that virus from another person. We do know now that it’s not as transmissible from surface contact. And if you’ll remember early on, everybody had the gallons of hand sanitizers and wipes, and we were spraying everything down, and being overly cautious. [00:27:00] we know now that the surface
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contact isn’t as transmissible as the person-to-person transmission. So, that is the way that you get this virus, is being around another person that’s positive, and being in close quarters with them. And so, that’s that sort of the basics of that virus. And what was the second part of that question?
DELLINGER: The physical impact that it has on the body.
TERRY: Yeah. So, we know this virus, it attacks the body at a level that is—one of the first symptoms that most people get is [00:28:00] they stop being able to smell, right? So, loss of smell, a loss of taste. You start, then, seeing people having respiratory distress. So, what’s happening is, this virus is attacking the body at the cellular level and causing coagulation, blood coagulation inside the body. And so, then that coagulation gets down into the lungs and there’s infection that will get into the lungs, and you started seeing what they call glass lung appearing onto the x-rays. And then, people were going into respiratory distress, and you started seeing people go [00:29:00] into the ventilator early on. And that was one of the things that we learned from what we saw on TV where all of the people in New York were dying, that they were on the respirators, and there wasn’t enough respirators—or, I’m sorry, ventilators. And because the textbook says you’re your oxygen level drops below a certain level, that it’s time to go on a ventilator. Well, one of the things that we learned was, this ventilator, once you were hooked into it, it’s just circulating the virus inside of your body, and people weren’t able to recover from that. So, I think that’s why so many people were dying early. So, we eventually knew that the ventilator became one of the last things that you really wanted to do. So, we shifted from going to that ventilator [00:30:00] to putting patients on high-flow oxygen, and then we would keep
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them, and increasing that oxygen flow as long as we could. And then, from there, if they still needed, and they still weren’t getting better, they could go to a machine called the vapotherm, which is, it’s circulating oxygen and vapor inside the body to get that to what you need down into your lungs. And then, it was only as a last resort that you would go on that vent. So, this
virus is just attacking the body at that cellular level, causing the coagulation, and it was very devastating.
DELLINGER: Are your facilities seeing any incidents of people who are coming back, [00:31:00] folks who have had the virus who are coming back with any type of lingering, chronic type issues that they’ve developed now?
TERRY: Yeah, we do. We’re actually in the process of trying to start a post COVID clinic. We see there are some folks that are developing higher levels of coagulation inside their body. So, we’ve seen people after they were discharged out of the hospital, after having COVID, we had several people die of a pulmonary embolism because of that coagulation. So, I know that that coagulation [00:32:00] is happening at various levels with various people, so there’s some that are having to go on anticoagulants to manage that. We also know that there’s been folks that’s had the virus that have had higher incidents of myocarditis, as well. So, I think that from our pulmonary and respiratory and cardiac system, this virus attacked and damaged it, and I think that that there’s going to be effects of that, probably, that we haven’t even seen yet, of how long the effect of this thing is going to have on the body.
DELLINGER: Secretary Terry, have you or anyone in your family contracted the virus?
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TERRY: Yeah, my daughter did. Sidney came down with it, actually, in [00:33:00] I think, January or February of this year. I had just finished my second vaccine. I’d had the second dose of the vaccine, I think, for about two or three days, and Sidney came down positive with the virus. But she lost a little sense of smell for a couple of days, and she felt a little run-down, I think, for a day or two, but it was very mild for her, so thankful for that.
DELLINGER: Yes, yes. From your knowledge, what has been the total of death in the Muscogee Nation from the COVID-19 virus?
TERRY: Well, we’re not always notified when a citizen dies. [00:34:00] We don’t see the death certificates. They don’t come into the Department of Health. We suspect that it’s somewhere in the several hundred, a couple of hundred range of citizens that we lost. We do know, just because we’re friends and family with our patients, as well, that we lost a lot of elders that are pastors in our Indian churches, and we’ve lost Mekkos at our ceremonial grounds. We’ve lost some of our Creek speakers, Creek language speakers out there. So, even just a few hundred, when you talk about the small amount of people that speak our language and hold our traditions, those are devastating numbers to a tribe this size.
DELLINGER: Yes. And [00:35:00] throughout the country, thank goodness we’ve had these frontline workers, doctors and nurses who just went to their jobs every day with this pandemic going on and people just dying right and left. Did you lose any frontline workers here in the Muscogee Nation?
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TERRY: You’re talking about losing them to the virus?
DELLINGER: Yes.
TERRY: I know that we lost one. I believe we might have lost one elderly employee, maybe one or two elderly employees that we have. I should know the number exactly. I know that we did lose a couple. [00:36:00] I don’t believe that we lost any of the frontline health workers, doctors or nurses, that contracted it, at work, though. So, I think the majority of employees that contracted this virus probably got it at home, that was brought home from another relative, or they got it at another location. But by and large, all of our infection control methods, as far as keeping COVID out of the facilities, and stopping transmission in our facilities, we were very effective at doing that.
DELLINGER: So, compared to other cities and states and health care systems, and I know you have already touched on this a little bit, how do you think the Muscogee Nation healthcare, [00:37:00] or the Muscogee Nation Department of Health, as a whole has managed the pandemic, including going back to the beginning of it with the testing, the patient care, and then the vaccination services?
TERRY: So, I think that we were leading probably not only just the Indian health industry, I think that we were also leading all healthcare industries in the region. We started testing very early on. We had access to the rapid testing probably earlier than anyone. And we were able to
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turn tests around. There is a health information exchange in Oklahoma called MyHealth. It’s operated by a physician that’s affiliated with the University of Oklahoma. [00:38:00] His name is David Kendrick. He was on our daily taskforce call. And part of what MyHealth does is, all of the health information from hospitals and labs and so forth, goes into this comprehensive database. And we saw that our testing results at the Muscogee Nation was reported, we had a turnaround time, I think, of anywhere from nine to ten minutes. And there were some systems that it was seven to ten days of reporting.
So, we did extremely well with testing. And we set up drive-through testing at all of our sites that patients never had to get out of their vehicles. All of our clinics, [00:39:00] a patient pull up to the door and we would have employees, they would be in full PPE and go out and swab the patient and they never had to leave the vehicle. So, we did very well with testing. And then, as we moved on into patients that were getting sick and coming in the hospital, one of the things that we did early on was, we were one of the first early utilizers of the monoclonal antibodies. And we started infusing patients with those antibodies very early on, and we became probably the highest utilizer of that of anywhere in the area. And then, once we [00:40:00] received the vaccine, I believe that we have probably done as good of a job as anyone, maybe in the nation when it came to vaccinating and getting access to vaccine and getting vaccines out to folks. So, I would give our healthcare workers an A-plus on how they responded anytime that something had to get done.
DELLINGER: From the very beginning of the pandemic up till now, up to today, what has been the biggest challenge or challenges for you and your effort to keep the Muscogee Nation open, yet safe, for its employees and Muskogee citizens?
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TERRY: I think the biggest challenge was, one, [00:41:00] this pandemic caused a lot of anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation. And the mental health aspect of this pandemic was really, I think, one of the hardest things to have to deal with. By and large, healthcare workers, we get into this business to take care of people, and our people met that challenge. And they did that. But having to distance yourself from your loved ones, not being able to attend church and social events, not being able to have friends over and be around people, I think had an extremely difficult effect on people around [00:42:00] here. And so, I know that we’re going to be also dealing with the behavioral health effects of this virus for quite some time, so we’re really focusing a lot of our mental health services trying to meet the challenge of that. So, that’s one. I think that making sure that—we were always second-guessing how to best protect our citizens. And that’s something that you never know, are you doing enough? Are you doing enough communicating? Are you getting the right information into people’s hands so that they can make good decisions with this? [00:43:00] So for us, that was always the struggle is how did you best communicate? How do you get information into people’s hands? And so, it was all—I don’t think that we had any more difficulty than anyone else. It was just dealing with the entire aspect of having our communities shut down and dealing with the effects of that.
DELLINGER: From a healthcare perspective, how do you think the State of Oklahoma has performed in handling the pandemic?
TERRY: Probably not as well as what we would hope [00:44:00] to see. I think that we would have liked to have seen more coordination when it came to the vaccinations, once again, sharing
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information, being able to get information. We know that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, we were really ahead of the state in declaring a state of emergency. So, we were ahead of the game there. But at the same time, we’re a pretty rural state. We live in rural areas. And rural healthcare is difficult. We have multigenerational families that live in proximity to each other. So, it’s really simple for me to say to [00:45:00] a grandparent, “You need to shelter in home and not see your kids and your grandkids.” It’s really easy to say. But I don’t know very many parents or grandparents that, if their kids or grandkids want to come and see them, that they’re going to tell them, “No,” especially in our population. So, these rural areas, and as tied as we are to our families, and the multi-generational families that live in proximity to each other, we rely on our grandparents to be our babysitters after school, right? We rely, sometimes, on our grandparents to be the one that’s picking us up and taking us to school, while Mom and Dad’s working nights. [00:46:00] And a lot of times, we have our grandparents raising us in a lot of circumstances. so, you always would like for the perfect scenario of public health to play itself out, but it’s not practical a lot of times in these rural areas. And so, it’s hard to criticize anyone, the State of Oklahoma, or really anyone. It’s hard to give criticism because you’re doing what you can with the information that you have in front of you. And I think that’s always what people are—I think, by and large, people want to do the best they can.
DELLINGER: Okay. Will you share some of your thoughts [00:47:00] and insights about the vaccines that have been made available?
TERRY: Yeah. So, there’s three vaccines available. There’s the Pfizer vaccine, there’s the Moderna vaccine, and then there’s the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The Moderna and the Pfizer
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vaccine are both two shot doses, or two dose vaccines. They seem to be effective up to ninety something percent, I want to say ninety to ninety-three percent effective, in preventing the COVID infection. And then, also, if it doesn’t stop the COVID infection, it seems to reduce the severity, [00:48:00] if you do catch it. Then, there’s the Johnson & Johnson vaccine that is the one dose vaccine. The thing that’s made the vaccine the most difficult to administer is that these vaccines come in doses of five and ten. So, if you think about the way that a flu vaccine happens is, every year, you walk into the doctor’s office, or you can walk into Walgreens, or you walk in to some place, and they say, “Do you want a flu shot?” And you can get your flu shot, right? They just come out and give you a shot. Well, that’s because those flu shots are in single doses that you can just pull up a dose and do that.
So, [00:49:00] because of the fragility of this vaccine, whenever we opened up a vial, we had to try to make sure that we had ten people, or five people, or however many people, that once we opened that vial, that we had to administer. So, that was very difficult, in administering the vaccine. And so, early on, when we first received the vaccine at the Nation, the first doses we got to our frontline healthcare workers. And we vaccinated about forty percent of our employee base in the first couple of weeks that we received that. And then, the second round of vaccine that we received was the Moderna vaccine. I want to say we [00:50:00] received around five thousand doses that first go-around. So, what we did is, we made a list of our elderly patients, and we went from the oldest down to the youngest. And we started trying to call and schedule folks to come in and get that vaccine. So, we worked through that list over the course of the next couple of months. And we always had variations of that. So, we tried to keep a short list of people that wanted the vaccine so that if we got to the end of the day, and we had opened up a vial and we still have three or four doses left, we didn’t want to waste that three or four doses.
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So, we had people kind of on a quick call list that we could just reach out to and say, “Hey, I have three doses, do you want to come and get a dose?” So, [00:51:00] all of that was happening in that first few months. We had some real success. We did a drive-through event at the Tulsa Fairgrounds, where I think we vaccinated a couple of thousand people over the course of two days. We did that in partnership with the Indian Health Service, and we had the Claremore Indian Hospital, and the Pawnee Service Unit helping us staff that event. So, that was a really nice win for us. We also did some really nice vaccination events at the River Spirit Casino, and we used their facility and their parking facilities. In their parking lots, we set up tests. So, River Spirit Hotel and Casino, they were very good partners for us in giving us facilities in Tulsa to vaccinate [00:52:00] from. So, by and large, I think that we did a good job with the vaccination. One of the discouraging things, though, was that there was a lot of controversy with the vaccine in the media, and in the news. And so, we heard lots of conspiracy theories, right, about the vaccine, and that they were putting chips in the vaccines so that they could track you, and that this was a vaccine that could possibly kill you. And so, it was very difficult trying to overcome the disinformation with the vaccine. And just with vaccines in general, whether it’s childhood vaccines or adult vaccines, [00:53:00] people are hesitant about putting things in their body that they don’t know exactly what it is, right? So, you can understand why people are nervous to do that.
But one of the stories that I tell pretty much everywhere I go, goes back to a story that you used to hear a lot about the gentleman, his boat overturned in the middle of the ocean, and that he prayed to God to save him. And he floated out the middle of the ocean for a while, and this jet ski came by and saw the guy and he said, “Hey, do you need a ride?” And the guy said, “No, God’s going to save me.” And so, the guy goes on and a little later, a helicopter flew by and
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saw the guy floating out in the middle of the [00:54:00] ocean, and he went down and he yelled at the guy and said, “Hey, do you need a lift?” He said, “No, thank you, God’s going to save me.” Well, the guy drowned. And he went to heaven and he told God, he said, “God, I trusted you that you were going to save me.” And He said, “Well, I sent you a jet ski and a helicopter and you didn’t take it.” And that’s the way that I feel about this vaccine. Our Nation prayed for something to stop this virus and we have it. We received this. They produced this vaccine in record time. We have something that will stop our people from dying. We have to get this. It’s the only chance that we have. We don’t have any other hope of preventing [00:55:00] people from dying. It’s only from spreading the virus and getting vaccinated. And so, that’s been my message to people. We’re out attending elderly nutrition sites right now, begging people to get the virus [sic]. We’re out talking to schools. We’re out talking to any kind of community event. We’re going to be set up at the Drillers baseball game tomorrow night in Tulsa. So everywhere we go, everything that we do, we’re really trying to send the message that this is the only hope we have, so we need to take it.
DELLINGER: Well, listen, hearing these things, I just want to say I appreciate your efforts with that, and trying to keep our people safe. It sounds like you’ve been really proactive with that since the vaccines first rolled out, so that’s great. I’m going to ask you one last question here, [00:56:00] and with this question we’re thinking about future generations of Muscogee who may find themselves trying to survive a global health and economic event such as our current Coronavirus pandemic. And so, with that in mind, what words of advice or wisdom do you have to share about living with and surviving such a catastrophic event?
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TERRY: Well, I think that our people are our greatest strength. And we care about each other. And we come together when there’s times of emergency. And we have very, very smart people. We have very, very industrious people. We have people that are able to get things done. [00:57:00] And so, I think that coming together, and talking about what’s happening, and trusting your people to go do what they were trained to do, I think that that’s one of the things that we did. We put the information into our people’s hands, we saw workers from the tribe, whether it was from childcare workers, whether it was our food workers, whether it was our transportation workers, whether it was anybody, they did what they had to do, when we told them whether it was required to mask, or whether it was protecting yourself, or whether we had to go get food deliveries out to our [00:58:00] elders, whether it was walking out into freezing cold temperatures to vaccinate people, we stood out in the middle of snowstorms and in ice storms. We’ve been through rain. We’ve been through heat. Never underestimate the strength of the Muscogee people.
DELLINGER: I think that’s an excellent message. Well, listen, we’re going to wrap things up. And again, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to sit down and do this interview with me. Your thoughts and words about this pandemic that we have all been living through are so important, and it’s so much appreciated. So, Secretary Terry, mvto, thank you.
TERRY: Mvto. Good-bye.
END OF INTERVIEW
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