Voting in Indian Country

The View from the Trenches

Jean Reith Schroedel

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780812252514, 9780812252514
• eBook ISBN: 9780812297430
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Voting in Indian Country uses conflicts over voting rights as a lens for understanding the centuries-long fight for Native self-determination. Among the American public, there is a collective amnesia about the U.S. government's shameful policies toward the continent's original inhabitants and their descendants. Only rarely, such as during the Wounded Knee standoff in the 1970s and the recent Dakota Access Pipeline protests, do Native issues reach the public consciousness. But even during those times, there is little understanding of historical context—of the history of promises made and broken over seven generations—that shape current events. Voting in Indian Country uses conflicts over voting rights as a lens for understanding the centuries-long fight for Native self-determination. Weaving together history, politics, and law, Jean Reith Schroedel provides a view of this often-ignored struggle for social justice from the ground up.Differentiating this volume from other voting rights books is its use of ethnographic data, including the case study of a county with a population evenly split between whites and Native Americans, as well as oral histories of the people who have chosen to fight for voting rights. The stories of these lawyers, activists, and plaintiffs illuminate both the complexity and the vividness of their experiences on the front lines and their understanding of a connection to broader Native struggles for self-determination—both to control the lands and resources promised to them in perpetuity through treaties and to freely exercise the political rights and liberties promised to all Americans.

PART I

THE QUESTION OF CITIZENSHIP

CHAPTER 1

The Framing of American Indian Citizenship

Two Stories of Political Engagement

Even though pundits devote enormous amounts of attention to changing demographics, pontificating about whether the fabric binding the nation together will hold as the population becomes increasingly diverse, these discussions rarely mention the descendants of the original inhabitants of the North American continent.¹ Perhaps this erasure of Native people’s existence is a way to “whitewash” the past and allow the rest of the country to enjoy Thanksgiving meals without thinking about promises made and broken by earlier generations of American leaders.² The relatively small numbers of Native Americans and the geographic isolation of reservation lands contribute to this collective amnesia. Only rarely do issues affecting American Indians force their way into the nation’s consciousness, as occurred more than four decades ago in the “Red Power” era when activists engaged in highly visible protests, including the seizure of Alcatraz Island, the Trail of Broken Treaties, and the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee.

Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline

The current historical moment is another time when, thanks to heavy media coverage of the Standing Rock protests, it is impossible to ignore American Indians. The Dakota Access Pipeline’s route was shifted away from North Dakota’s capital, Bismarck, after public complaints that an oil spill could contaminate the city’s water supply and rerouted to pass near the borders of the Standing Rock Reservation.³ The Standing Rock Sioux immediately raised objections but were ignored, so they initiated acts of civil disobedience to halt construction.⁴ Even though the protests started in April 2016, most early coverage was limited to web posts on Facebook and stories in Native press outlets. By early November, at least 1.3 million Facebook users had “checked in” to show support on the Stand with Standing Rock page (Tchekmedyian and Etehad 2016). Alternative media were capturing very powerful visual images—young men on horseback, women placing their bodies in front of bulldozers, and spiritual leaders blessing the acts of the protesters, as well as disturbing pictures of security guards with clubs and snarling dogs with bloody muzzles—so going to that chilly corner of North Dakota became de rigueur for the mainstream media. Reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, and even Vogue descended on the Oceti Sakowin encampment (Monet 2016). Enhanced coverage meant people from across the country, as well as around the world, began talking about Standing Rock. The pictures are reminiscent of those taken a generation earlier of law enforcement officers wielding batons and snarling dogs assaulting peaceful civil rights marchers.

While press coverage of 1960s civil rights stories with the visuals from places such as the Edmund Pettus Bridge, near Selma, where police clubbed praying activists, galvanized the nation and led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the Trump administration was unfazed by the public protests. President Trump, who owned stock in the main company doing pipeline work, had received a campaign contribution of more than $100,000 from the chair and chief executive officer of the company and subsequently got a $250,000 donation for his inauguration (Leonard 2019).⁵ Standing Rock, however, may go down as a catalyst for a new era of Red Power activism. The number of American Indians acting as water protectors at Standing Rock was many times greater than the largest protests during the Red Power era.⁶ Thousands of people from more than three hundred different Native Nations, including some traditional enemies of Standing Rock’s Lakota and Dakota Sioux, came in solidarity.⁷

Voting on the Pyramid Lake Reservation

Just as the media was descending on Standing Rock, another important, albeit unreported, story of Native political activism was occurring 1,400 miles distant in Nixon, Nevada. Nixon, located roughly fifty miles north of Reno, is the headquarters of Pyramid Lake Paiute.⁸ During the 2016 election, Flora Greene, a ninety-nine-year-old Paiute elder, was able to vote at a polling place on the reservation for the first time ever. Greene, who is respected for her knowledge of traditional handicrafts and her willingness to pass on skills, such as how one softens deerskin through soaking and scraping so it can be used for baby baskets and moccasins, was modest when asked about the significance of her voting.⁹ However, it is worth recalling that when she was born, neither women nor American Indians had the right to vote. Greene was three years old when women got the franchise through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and seven years old when the American Indian Citizenship Act (ICA) that gave citizenship to all Native Americans born within the borders of the country was adopted. While women’s right to vote was ensured by the Nineteenth Amendment, voting rights for American Indians did not automatically follow passage of the ICA; instead, the descendants of the continent’s original inhabitants have been engaged in a nearly one-hundred-year struggle to gain equal access to the ballot box.

The 2016 election was the first time the 2,253 members of the Pyramid Lake Paiute had a polling place in their community. In the past, they had to either vote by mail or travel nearly one hundred miles round trip to Reno to register, use early voting procedures, or vote on Election Day.¹⁰ Greene viewed being able to vote as part of her effort to pass on Paiute traditions: “These days kids don’t really learn about Paiute or any of the things, the traditions, the way I learned them. Having a voice is so important. That’s what Native people need” (Prakash 2016).¹¹

One might have thought the lack of access to voting on the Pyramid Lake Reservation was simply due to an oversight by election officials—something that could be easily solved when officials learned of the need—but that was not the case. The Pyramid Lake Paiute, along with members of the Walker River Paiute, had to sue their counties (Mineral and Washoe) and Nevada to gain the same access to voting that most Americans take for granted (Sanchez v. Cegavske 2016). The defendants described the request for reservation voting sites as “convenience” voting and argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act only applied to outright denial of voting. Judge Miranda Du disagreed, and in 2016 Flora Greene was able to vote in her community, albeit under the watchful eye of monitors from the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (Department of Justice 2016; Richardson 2016a).

Nevada, however, refused a request from the Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada (ITCN) for polling places on other reservations prior to the 2016 elections. The state ignored the plight of people living on the Duck Valley Shoshone Paiute Reservation in the extreme northern part of the state. According to elders, there used to be a polling station at the local school, but it was closed to save money and now they have to travel more than 270 miles to cast an in-person vote. That is the longest distance that any person must travel to reach one of the state’s 437 polling places. The Duck Valley Shoshone Paiute wrote to Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske requesting a site, but she refused (Montero 2016).

Voting rights litigation is expensive. The Pyramid Lake and Walker River Paiute were fortunate in being able to find experienced voting rights attorneys who took their case on a pro bono basis.¹² They also were fortunate that the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a “statement of interest,” which is a way of signaling their position but without committing resources to fighting on behalf of the plaintiffs. The DOJ only brings a small number of actual voting rights cases because the Civil Rights Division’s portfolio encompasses the entire panoply of civil rights issues and its willingness to advocate on behalf of people whose civil rights have been violated varies across administrations. People living on the Pyramid Lake and Walker River reservations benefited from assistance provided by Four Directions, a grassroots Native voting rights organization (Four Directions 2016).

Threads Linking the Two Stories

Nearly a half century ago, Native scholar and activist Vine Deloria Jr. (1969: 54) wrote words that could just as easily have been penned today: “People [white people] often feel guilty about their ancestors killing all those Indians years ago. But they shouldn’t feel guilty about the distant past. Just the last two decades have seen a more devious but hardly less successful war waged against Indian communities.” Both the Standing Rock and Pyramid Lake stories provide insights into current “devious” means used to deny justice to Native people.

While American Indians and Alaska Natives are no longer statutorily disenfranchised, they still face barriers that prevent many from voting. Although the Pyramid Lake and Walker River Paiutes were successful, the Nevada secretary of state refused to extend similar relief to the other reservations. In the course of my research for this project, one Nevada election official bragged to me about how easy it is to register and vote, stating that registration and voting sites probably could be found at every mini-mall in the state, without ever acknowledging that this was not true for American Indians.

Along with voting, citizens can petition the government when they believe their issues are not being addressed. Before beginning mass protests the Standing Rock Sioux registered their concerns to multiple government agencies but were ignored. Although they failed to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Standing Rock protests forced American Indian issues onto the national public agenda.¹³ Without social media, the issues raised by the Standing Rock Sioux, as well as the use of tear gas, water cannons, and attack dogs to intimidate protesters, whether by private security firms, police officers, or the North Dakota National Guard, would have gone unnoticed.¹⁴ In contrast, the ITCN’s request for polling places within their communities generated no media notice and was refused. Only with outside pro bono legal assistance were the people on the Pyramid Lake and Walker River reservations able to succeed; without those resources, the residents of the Duck Valley Reservation were denied equal access in 2016.

The Nevada story, however, did not end with the state’s denial of equal voting access to other reservations. The legislature, which switched from Republican to Democratic control following the election, subsequently passed legislation allowing for the establishment of satellite voting sites on reservations. Also just after the election, three of the individuals (Ralph Burns, Jimmie James, and Johnnie Williams Jr.) who had sued the state in Sanchez v. Cegavske were given the state’s American Indian Community Leader of the Year award (Richardson 2016b).

Developing a Framework for Understanding American Indian Citizenship

While the protests at Standing Rock generated enormous publicity, the equally important story of the generations-long and continuing struggle of the descendants of the continent’s original inhabitants to gain equal access to the ballot box is largely untold—and telling that larger story of courage and tenacity is the purpose of this book. Also like the Standing Rock protests, the voting rights struggle of the Paiutes cannot be separated from history; instead the past and present form a continuum, where the voting rights struggle is woven into a broader story of Native activism aimed at achieving social justice. Part of that history is the story of the U.S. government making promises and then violating them, but it is also about the continuing existence of Native Nations that predate the arrival of Europeans—which distinguishes American Indians from any other population within the United States. But there are other factors, such as the relatively small numbers of Native people and their geographic isolation, that often allow violations of their civil rights to be ignored. Finally, the experiences of the Standing Rock protesters and the ITCN illustrate the importance of outside support and how difficult it is to gain those resources.

Tripartite Citizenship

Many people are woefully ignorant about the citizenship status of American Indians. President Ronald Reagan revealed this kind of ignorance when asked a question about American Indians: “Let me tell you just a little something about the American Indian in our land. We have provided them millions of acres of land and they, from the beginning, announced that they wanted to maintain their way of life. We’ve done everything we can to meet their demands as to how they want to live. Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we should not have humored them in that wanting to stay in that kind of primitive lifestyle. Maybe we should have said, no, come join us; be citizens along with the rest of us” (Landry 2016). While there are many troubling parts of this statement, the fact that the president suggested that Native Americans are not actually citizens is most concerning.¹⁵

While the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act unilaterally gave national citizenship to all Native Americans, their civic status is radically different from that of both Euro-Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities. The fundamental difference—one that undergirds all other factors—is the “preexisting status of indigenous communities as separate and sovereign peoples with histories that long predate the American republic” (Wilkins and Stark 2011: xxxix). As descendants of the continent’s original inhabitants, their roots do not lie outside of the United States but with the 7–10 million people who belonged to the 500 to 600 nations that inhabited the continent north of the Rio Grande at the time of first European settlement. As such, many maintain citizenship status within those indigenous nations, resulting in their holding tripartite citizenship: U.S. citizenship, state citizenship, and Native Nation citizenship.¹⁶ Individuals who belong to federally recognized Native Nations also have very specific rights based on that citizenship status that are recognized by U.S. law and enshrined in treaties and other legal compacts entered into with the U.S. government. Having access to the ballot box is a necessary element in protecting treaty rights, as well as Natives’ fundamental rights as U.S. citizens.

But the question of Native American citizenship is more complicated. Although Wilkins and Stark (2011: 33) emphatically point out that “indigenous peoples are nations, not minorities,” less than half of the 5.2 million people who self-identify on U.S. Census forms as American Indian/Alaska Native are enrolled members in the 574 federally recognized Native Nations.¹⁷ While some are members of non–federally recognized ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I. The Question of Citizenship
• Part II. The Promise of the Ballot Box
• Part III. Grassroots Perspectives
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments