2.

On the Voting-Rights Frontline

THE ELECTION OF 2016 WILL NOT go down in history as a victory for rights and justice, except in Indian country. By the time reservation polling places opened that year, hard-fought voting-rights lawsuits and negotiations, along with vigorous get-out-the-vote campaigns, had resulted in greater access to the ballot box in portions of several western states with substantial Native minorities. These included South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Alaska. The most recent litigation followed up on scores of Native-rights suits brought since passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.¹ In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the nation’s first peoples are still fighting county by county for equal access to registration and voting, acceptance of the types of identification they can readily obtain, such as tribal IDs, redrawing of gerrymandered districts, and the opportunity to show up at the polls without fear of harassment.

Participation means empowerment, according to O. J. Semans, the Rosebud Sioux codirector of the civil-rights group Four Directions, whose work since founding the nonprofit in 2003 with his wife, Barb, has been central to increasing Native enfranchisement. I first met Semans in September 2010 when he was in Hot Springs, the seat of Fall River County, South Dakota, to present a demand at a meeting that voters on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation be allowed the same access to the ballot box as voters in white communities.

Hot Springs is a dusty little resort town, where big pickups chug slowly down the main drag, past sandstone buildings housing shops and hotels. In the nearby Black Hills, buffalo graze in pine-rimmed meadows, and the cliffs are studded with rose quartz and tourmaline. The white-majority county’s officials, who run elections on an outsourced basis for most of neighboring Pine Ridge, had quit in a raucous meeting three weeks before, leaving the reservation with no way to vote in person—on Election Day, or during the forty-six-day period when the state’s voters can cast ballots ahead of the day. Fall River’s white voters would be fine, as the officials had retained that portion of their duties.

Advocates sue to obtain voting rights for Native people. Gathering in Portland, Oregon, ahead of a 2014 hearing for the federal lawsuit Wandering Medicine v. McCulloch are, from left, Michaelynn Hawk, Crow, of Indian People’s Action; South Dakota rancher Bret Healy, with Barb and O. J. Semans, Rosebud Sioux, all three from Four Directions rights group; Northern Cheyenne spiritual teacher Mark Wandering Medicine and his wife, Ilo; and Tom Rodgers, Blackfeet, of Carlyle Consulting. (Joseph Zummo)

The large Oglala Sioux Tribe has thousands of registered Democratic voters—easily enough to swing elections in this sparsely populated state—and very few registered Republicans. As a result, the state’s Republican establishment, which holds sway in Fall River, has long been leery of allowing Oglalas near the ballot box. Convenient early voting has been shown to increase participation dramatically on the South Dakota reservations that have managed to offer it, just as it does in any community in the United States.² Trying to keep early voting off Pine Ridge was just one technique to sideline the Native vote, though. Also hobbling Pine Ridge was the fact that Help America Vote Act reimbursements would not be available until the month after the election, which meant that the state’s most destitute jurisdictions (its Indian reservations) would not be able to afford full-fledged elections.³

The state’s GOP also turned up the heat on Democrats’ campaign events on Indian reservations, charging that these frybread fests traded food in exchange for votes. At the same time, the Republicans were curiously closemouthed about the hot dogs they were handing out to predominantly white voters at their own rallies, or about the doughnuts Democrats served up in white communities—making it clear that the vote-trading accusation was leveled at the Native community and intended to appeal to the worst in the non-Native electorate. After the GOP demanded an investigation of the purported frybread scandal, Democrats said they welcomed one, and that was the end of that.⁴

Before heading to South Dakota, I interviewed a Fall River County official about election issues a couple of times by phone, then arranged to meet Semans in Hot Springs, along with his cowboy partner in the voting-rights struggle, South Dakota rancher Bret Healy. Semans, short and muscular with close-cropped irongray hair, arrived dressed in jeans, running shoes, and a plaid flannel shirt that flapped open over a T-shirt proclaiming “Homeland Security Since 1492.” Healy, in a gray suit and cowboy boots, was tall and slim, with brown hair slicked back from a widow’s peak. He had his laptop open throughout our conversation and forwarded me relevant documents as Semans ran down the concerns. “Equal rights make it possible for us to improve ourselves and to protect the earth,” Semans told me. “People always say we have to better ourselves, and this is how we’ll do it. If you don’t vote, you’re not at the table when decisions are made. Keeping us from the ballot box is a way of preventing us from improving our lives, our communities, and our economies.”

After the Fall River County officials jettisoned their Pine Ridge electoral duties, South Dakota’s Republican secretary of state offered Pine Ridge mail-in ballots as a substitute for real voting booths. Semans called this a ruse. He pointed out that because there were no more election officials for Pine Ridge, there was no one to count any mail-in ballots that happened to arrive at the county courthouse in Hot Springs. Semans described the hullabaloo that the walkout created as a distraction that allowed Fall River County and the state of South Dakota to pull a rabbit out of the hat: “Presto! No voting for Oglalas!”

Three attorneys from the Justice Department showed up at the meeting in Hot Springs. Tall and imposing in their severe black suits, they quietly and meticulously explained to the county the requirements of federal voting-rights law, as well as the practical details of holding an election. When county commissioners complained that they did not know how to find the ballot translators they were mandated to provide to Lakota speakers under the law, one attorney suggested that they start by learning whether any of the local Pine Ridge poll workers were bilingual. When the county raised the problem of paying for a Pine Ridge polling place during the additional days of early voting, Semans said Four Directions would donate the necessary funds. In the end, Oglalas got to vote early for a few partial days as well as on Election Day.

On November 2, 2010, I photographed state senator and Oglala Sioux tribal member Kevin Killer and Four Directions legal director Greg Lembrich as they stood in the parking lot of the Pine Ridge voting location, watching youngsters driving around tooting their horns and trailing streamers. One young voter rushed up to me with a brooch beaded with the bright red multipronged tribal symbol on a dark blue background. “It represents all of us,” he said. “It’s all the districts of the reservation voting today.” I took it as a kind of press release in beaded form.

This was not the end of the struggle. To obtain equal access in future elections, Oglala voters eventually had to file a lawsuit, organized by Four Directions; in the process, the county defendants tried to go after the plaintiffs for court costs. As might be expected, this frightened the suit’s plaintiffs. It also reduced the likelihood of additional plaintiffs and voting-rights advocates participating in related work going forward. When Semans found out, he asked sardonically, “Think they’ll take a check?”

Healy called the county defendants’ financial stratagem “breathtaking.” He explained, “They have the insurance public officials typically hold to cover lawsuits of many types. Meanwhile, the plaintiffs include single parents, one with an epileptic child, others caring for infirm elders, from one of the poorest counties in the nation. The defendants are really going to do this? God have pity on their souls.”

The Oglala lawsuit, Brooks v. Gant,⁵ was one of four suits that Four Directions helped organize around the concept of expanding access to voting ahead of election day. After Brooks v. Gant resolved in 2012 with more voting access for tribal members until the end of 2018, the voting-rights group helped organize another lawsuit in South Dakota, Poor Bear v. The County of Jackson;⁶ one in Montana, Wandering Medicine v. McCulloch;⁷ and a fourth in Nevada, Sanchez v. Cegavske.⁸ The strategy for the lawsuits arose from an experiment by Semans and his wife and Four Directions codirector, Barb Semans. When what South Dakota calls in-person absentee voting came to South Dakota in 2004, the Semanses decided to try it out. They made the eighty-five-mile round-trip from their home on the Rosebud Indian Reservation to their absentee polling place at the courthouse in white-majority Winner, South Dakota. “‘Well, that wasn’t so convenient,’ we said to each other,” recalled Barb Semans. “Later, O. J. and I were talking with Bret Healy, and it hit us all—this is a voting-rights issue!”

The Semanses and Healy realized that voter intimidation, ID restrictions, and gerrymandering are just some of the barriers between American Indians and the polling place. All of these had been factors in the many equal-rights lawsuits brought on behalf of Natives.⁹ But now the three advocates saw that reservation voters also have a hard time getting access to the contemporary, purportedly convenient ways to cast a ballot that are increasingly offered around the nation. These methods end up widening rather than narrowing the enfranchisement gap for reservations. They include voting by mail, last-minute Election Day registration, early voting, and in-person absentee voting. Often, the last three are available only in distant off-reservation county seats. (Early voting and in-person absentee voting differ in legal terms. Generally, an early voter’s eligibility is verified and the ballot counted as it is cast; in contrast, an in-person absentee ballot is verified and counted on Election Day.)¹⁰

Voting by mail poses extreme challenges for reservation voters, as it is dependent on the poor US mail service typically offered to Native communities. Getting a mail-in ballot can also require steps that are daunting on isolated, impoverished reservations with few computers, printers, photocopiers, or notaries and patchy internet access. The prospective voter generally has to download instructions and a ballot application, photocopy the document, along with identification, and get it all notarized before putting this packet in the mail. When Greg Lembrich of Four Directions was on Pine Ridge one year, he decided to determine whether the mail-in process was feasible for the Oglalas who live there. Lembrich had his laptop with him, but even that head start was not enough. After driving into the neighboring state of Nebraska to find a printer and photocopier, he was convinced that mail-in voting was unworkable for Pine Ridge.

Navajo voters in the Utah county that overlaps the northern end of their reservation had a comparable experience. After San Juan County began using mail-in voting in 2014, turnout dropped among tribal voters. Colorado attorney Maya Kane set out to determine why, as part of her pro bono work providing support to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under Law. The group, formed in 1963 at the request of President John F. Kennedy, was looking into the mail-in process to determine whether it was not just cumbersome but illegal. At that point, Navajos had already sued San Juan County repeatedly for equal rights and had succeeded four times in requiring the county to redraw its voting districts (at publication time, the county had not yet complied with the last three court orders, in 2015, 2016, and 2017);¹¹ Navajos had also established their right to federally mandated language assistance.¹²

In Kane’s travels around the area and discussions with residents, she found plenty of leaks in the mail-in ballot pipeline.¹³ She learned that impoverished tribal members did not have rural postal delivery and often shared PO boxes or used general delivery. These factors lowered the odds that they received essential election communications. Many were able to make the multi-hour trips to distant post offices only every few weeks, so that diminished further their chances of getting materials in time to meet registration and voting deadlines.

Even worse, Kane found that reservation postal services were a patchwork of regular post offices, contract offices, and commercial services, some just a counter in a trading post, which might have unique hours and unique deadlines—say 9:00 AM or 1:00 PM, as opposed to the end of the business day—by which point voters must present ballots in order to get them postmarked in time to count for the election. Some reservation mail services did not postmark at all but relied on catch-as-catch-can transport to offices down the line to frank the items. Once in the mail stream, the ballots could take weeks or months to make their way to the county clerk’s office, frequently via sorting facilities in other states. To Kane, reservation postal service was a world away from that most Americans receive. “If a tribal member’s only option is voting by mail, this creates voting-rights disparities right out of the gate,” she said.

Mail-in elections may be especially unreliable on reservations, but they are undependable even in areas with what is generally considered good postal service, according to Jean Schroedel, a political science professor at Claremont Graduate University. In a 2014 expert witness report for Wandering Medicine v. McCulloch, she explained that research shows attempts to vote by mail fail for numerous reasons, including the failure of ballots to get to election officials, the disqualification of ballots because of missing signatures, and other errors that could have been corrected during precinct voting.¹⁴

After the mail-in elections began in San Juan County, Navajo Nation residents who needed or wanted to vote in person had to travel as many as four hundred miles to do so. That was the round-trip distance between a town called Navajo Mountain and the county’s last remaining polling place in the white-majority off-reservation county seat. The trip was time-consuming and so were the preparations. You do not set out across the parched desert and rugged mountains of Monument Valley without tuning up your vehicle, filling the tank, checking the tires, stocking up on food and water, and making certain you have enough money for emergencies, said Terry Whitehat, a hospital administrator living in Navajo Mountain.

Most of Whitehat’s reservation neighbors are impoverished and do not have reliable vehicles and the extra cash for gas and other supplies. For them, the trek was out of the question. Navajo tribal member Wilfred Jones said, “Don’t penalize me because of who I am and where I live. The government put us on this reservation, and now we can’t vote because we live here. We Navajos have a right to vote. This is the twenty-first century. Why has this taken so long?”

Elimination of local precincts in favor of mailed ballots also meant that voters who spoke only, or primarily, Navajo no longer had the translators who had been available at the polling location in each precinct; this made ballot errors common and apparently caused some individual voters to give up and make no attempt to cast a ballot.

San Juan County commissioner Phil Lyman defended the county, saying it made special efforts to remedy mistakes that occurred. When Navajo mail-in ballots arrived with errors, the county’s interpreter took them to voters’ homes for correction, Lyman said in an interview—“even if that meant a seventy-mile drive.” The Lawyers’ Committee filed a complaint¹⁵ about the mail-in election in February 2016, and soon after the county announced its decision to reopen some of the shuttered Navajo polling places.¹⁶ About Navajos’ determined and protracted struggle for enfranchisement, Kane commented that voting rights are the rights from which all others flow. “The Supreme Court has said this a number of times,” she said. “The first instance was in 1886, when the court described voting as ‘a fundamental political right, because it is preservative of all rights.’”¹⁷

IN 2017, O. J. SEMANS BECAME legislative affairs director for the Coalition of Large Tribes. Also referred to as COLT, this influential group includes tribes that have large populations and/or large land bases. When Semans traveled to Washington, DC, during 2017, he found politicians on both sides of the aisle who were willing to listen to a Native perspective. This was despite the dramatic differences between the new administration—headed by a president who freely used “Pocahontas” as a slur during the campaign—and the previous one.

During President Barack Obama’s tenure, he signed into law measures intended to help Native communities fight crime, expand employment, and improve health and education. He hired Native staffers and made them part of decision-making at the highest level. He enhanced the federal government’s consultation with tribes on projects that affect them and settled tribal lawsuits against the United States. In 2015, the Justice and Interior Departments paid $940 million to settle a complaint that the federal government had fleeced tribes nationwide for work it contracted them to do in law enforcement, forest management, and other government services.¹⁸ The following year, the Justice Department announced that it had paid $3.3 billion to settle 104 claims for mismanagement of tribal resources.¹⁹ Some of the grievances went back more than a century.²⁰

Obama’s record was not unblemished. His administration’s review of the Dakota Access Pipeline plan to cross the Standing Rock Sioux water supply was belated and half-hearted. He did not figure out how to protect Standing Rock demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly as they faced extraordinary violence from state and private security forces during most of 2016. During that year, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission also issued a presidential permit for a fracked-gas pipeline in Texas.²¹ In September, archaeologist David Keller reported that bulldozers had churned ancient tribal sites in the path of the pipeline into a sea of mud.²²

In the raging chaos of the Trump administration, many Obama-era policies were questioned or reversed. The new president sought budget cuts and federal policy shifts that would fall heavily on already drastically underfunded tribal health, welfare, housing, law-enforcement, land-management, and education programs. Some of the heaviest cuts were proposed for funds that tribes could direct to programs they felt needed them most, observed former assistant secretary of Indian Affairs Kevin Washburn, in an article on Indian Country Media Network. This “takes aim at tribal self-determination and self-governance,” Washburn wrote.²³ Executive memos signed in January 2017 encouraged speedy completion of the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines, both fiercely opposed by tribes.

Voting rights were on the block. Sensitive to his whopping defeat in the popular vote, the forty-fifth president harped on his widely discredited claim that “millions” had voted illegally in the 2016 election, including “thousands” bussed from Massachusetts to New Hampshire. He appointed a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, headed by an election-fraud fantasist. House Republicans introduced a bill to shut down the Election Assistance Commission, a government agency that protects the integrity of elections, including against hacking. Likely important to those wanting to scuttle the EAC, the commission funds ballot-box access for marginalized communities, including money to set up polling sites and hire election workers on Indian reservations. On the state level, legislatures nationwide introduced laws to stiffen ID requirements, shorten the time allowed for voting, and eliminate Election Day registration. In July, the Justice Department withdrew its support for a Texas voting-rights suit that claimed the state’s ID requirements amounted to racial discrimination.²⁴

The massive forces newly ranged against Native people in 2017, including efforts to suppress their participation in the political process, were daunting. However, Semans, in his role as COLT’s legislative affairs director, was determinedly optimistic. He credited the attention he got in discussions with senators and representatives to strides made in Native voting rights. “Our elected officials know that we now have more registered voters and more access to the ballot box,” Semans said. “If a measure or policy will affect Indian country, they can bet we’ll turn out.” Native Americans are not just voting, though; they are also being elected to office. In July 2016, Shoshone-Bannock professor and pundit Mark Trahant wrote that seventy-three American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians were serving in nineteen state legislatures, while two more American Indians held congressional seats.²⁵

The nationwide attention to Native issues and the empowerment of Native people by the pipeline resistance at Standing Rock may have an impact at the ballot box in upcoming elections. The gathering there strengthened alliances and information sharing across hundreds of tribes and tribal organizations, many thousands of tribal members, and thousands more non-Native supporters. After the focus at Standing Rock shifted in late 2016 to the courtroom fight against the pipeline, indigenous people and their allies began turning up at disputes and actions in other parts of the country. In April 2017, when tribal members led the Climate March in Washington, DC, Judith LeBlanc called their prominence a “major movement moment.”

LeBlanc is a member of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma and director of the Native Organizers Alliance, which helps indigenous advocacy groups build their organizations. At the start of the march, LeBlanc stood outside the Capitol Building and watched tribal members assemble with signs reading “Honor the Treaties,” “Keep It in ihe Ground,” and “Mni Wiconi” (Lakota for “Water is Life”). She credited the Standing Rock resistance with improving public understanding of indigenous struggles, partly because the effort had been what she called the largest continuous protest in US history and also because the Sioux and their supporters communicated demands that encompassed far more than Standing Rock’s local needs—protection of its Missouri River water supply, as well as its health, environment, and economy. The larger concerns included safe water for the millions of people downriver, environmental justice, action on climate change, and sensible energy policy for the nation and the planet.

If you are not convinced that this level of engagement will be enough to overcome the burgeoning challenges, Semans will probably remind you of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, when another Native coalition turned out. “And you know how that went,” he told me.

FOR AMERICAN INDIANS, GAINING citizenship and suffrage in 1924 was the first small step toward meaningful ballot-box access, according to University of Utah political science professor Daniel McCool. “To achieve that, Indians would have to overcome a panoply of state laws, constitutional clauses, and court decisions that blocked the way,” he writes in Native Vote: American Indians, the Voting Rights Act, and the Right to Vote.²⁶ Those restrictive measures were rooted in racial animosity and official policies that veered between massacring and “civilizing” Indians. Those in favor of the former were candid and unrepentant. L. Frank Baum, author of the children’s classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, ran a South Dakota newspaper during the late 1800s. In an editorial, Baum called tribal members “a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them.” Five days after Sioux spiritual leader Sitting Bull was killed and just nine days before the massacre at Wounded Knee, Baum asked his readers, “Why not annihilation?”²⁷ McCool quotes a Nebraska newspaper that responded to Custer’s massacre of a Cheyenne village by trumpeting: “Exterminate the whole fraternity of redskins.”²⁸

Those who declared themselves “Friends of the Indian” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hoped for a tidier form of annihilation: cultural erasure. They supported enfranchisement for Natives who embraced “civilization.” Along these lines, some states offered the vote to Native people if they could demonstrate that they had renounced tribal ties or owned “white” clothes, furniture, and houses. After World War II, Native veterans accelerated the demand for equal rights. A Navajo veteran said, “We went to hell and back for what? For people back home in America to tell us we can’t vote?”²⁹

Passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did not guarantee that Natives could cast a ballot. In South Dakota in 1977, then attorney general William Janklow called the act a “facial absurdity” and advised the state’s top elections official to ignore it.³⁰ Native people did not vote in some parts of the state until the 1980s. When South Dakota polling places were finally opened to Native Americans, they faced official harassment. Before the 2002 general election, the state sent agents to Indian reservations to question newly registered voters and root out voter fraud; no one was ever charged.³¹

On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court created a new barrier to equal rights for American Indians. On that day, which happened to be the 137th anniversary of Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn, the court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which had been used to protect minority enfranchisement. The court did so while claiming in Shelby County v. Holder, “our country has changed.” The majority opinion did not mention Native voters and their current efforts to participate in strikingly unchanged civil-rights struggles.³²

“The decision is a great loss for Native Americans,” attorney Judith Dworkin told me the following day. Dworkin was coauthor of an amicus brief submitted on behalf of the Navajo Nation, O. J. Semans, and others, explaining why the court should uphold the law. “I went through the decision to see if there was any mention of Native people and found no references. It was very disappointing.”

Until the Shelby decision, Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act had provided the formula for applying preclearance procedures, outlined in Section 5, to state and local governments with a history of discrimination. If preclearance was required, a jurisdiction had to go to the Department of Justice or the courts to obtain advance approval of new voting laws or practices. These places included Alaska and Arizona, which have large Native populations, and certain South Dakota counties that overlap reservations. The Shelby ruling eliminated preclearance until Congress came up with a new formula for it, which has not yet occurred. Immediately after the decision was handed down, states began devising new ways to limit enfranchisement, including gerrymandering and restrictions on allowable voter identification. “Native people have gone to the courts many times to sue for access that the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing equal protection, say they should already have,” said Greg Lembrich of Four Directions. In an instant, the Shelby decision made that work harder and more critical.

THE NEXUS OF DISTANCE AND POVERTY prevents tribal members from getting to white-majority towns and their courthouse polling places, but so does fear. “They are today the poorest, most isolated and, in some quarters, the most racially castigated population in the country,” sociologist Garth Massey, a University of Wyoming emeritus professor, wrote in an expert report for the Wandering Medicine lawsuit.³³ In 2000³⁴ and 2007,³⁵ the US Commission on Civil Rights held hearings that uncovered hate crimes, murders, and police shootings of Natives in states with substantial Native minorities, such as Montana, South Dakota, and New Mexico. The commission has produced several reports on Native issues and the often desperate conditions on reservations. It heard from community members and experts about high levels of violence against indigenous people, along with a sense that there was a significant undercount of the attacks. Those who testified said that Native people report little of the violence to police, because they mistrust law enforcement and because the incidents are so common the victims have come to consider them normal.

Racial animosity is easy to observe in the West. One Blackfeet official told me that a person could walk into most bars in the region and hear derogatory comments about Natives. However, it is not necessary to hang out in saloons to hear the vitriol. I have found that in areas near Indian homelands, all I have to do is say that I am traveling to or from a reservation to unleash a stream of venom. The hostility pervades the civic institutions of the West and, in turn, has an impact on voting rights. Bret Healy has observed that the seat of Rosebud County, Montana, where Northern Cheyennes must go if they wish to register or vote ahead of Election Day, is named for James William Forsyth, the Seventh Cavalry officer who directed the Wounded Knee massacre. The official who ran Rosebud County elections until a few years ago was married to a Custer descendant. In South Dakota, a county is named for Alfred Sully, another Union officer who went west to fight Indians after the Civil War.

This sense of antagonism fuels a variety of efforts to chill Native turnout. During the 2004 election, a federal court in South Dakota stopped Republican operatives from following tribal voters from the polling place and writing down their license plate numbers so that they might be “improperly dissuaded from voting,” in the words of the judge hearing the case.³⁶ After the 2012 election, Colorlines news site reported what it called Bull Connor–style harassment of Tohono O’odham voters on their Arizona reservation—a reference to the Birmingham, Alabama, segregationist who encouraged violence against 1960s civil-rights advocates.³⁷ Also in 2012, on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana, Bret Healy confronted a Republican operative who was harassing tribal voters. The operative’s aggressive questioning of the voters caused them to fear they would be thrown in jail for casting a ballot.

Greg Lembrich, also of Four Directions, was a twenty-four-year-old Columbia University law student when he first volunteered to poll-watch in South Dakota. When he arrived from the East Coast in time for the 2002 election, he had the impression he had landed in the Wild West. He heard allegations of cops tailing Native Americans to the polls and rumors of dragnets for tribal members. As a poll watcher, he confronted improper voter challenges and white ranchers making intimidating statements to Native people lined up to vote (as in, “I know where you work, I can get you fired”).

Since then, for each federal election, Lembrich has organized dozens of attorneys and law students armed with voting-law manuals to poll-watch in reservation voting places throughout the state on Election Day. There is no lack of work to do. In 2014, during the period when South Dakotans vote early, Pine Ridge get-out-the-vote coordinator Donna Semans snapped a photograph of a white county sheriff slouched in the doorway of the reservation polling place. With his ten-gallon hat and drooping mustache, the lawman looked like he had been sent over from central casting. He also effectively intimidated tribal members, who became too frightened to cast a ballot.³⁸

I met Greg Lembrich and Donna Semans at the tribe’s casino. “Voters walking to the polling place would see the sheriff and veer off,” Semans told us. “If I was driving them to the polls, they’d spot the sheriff’s vehicle out front and tell me, ‘No way. I’m not going in there.’” The moccasin telegraph began working overtime. “Word spread like a grass fire.” When I talked to tribal members, they confided that they worried about why the sheriff was there and what charges he might bring if they dared enter the polling place. The number of Pine Ridge residents contacting Semans’s get-out-the-vote operation for rides to the precinct dropped from more than one hundred a day into the teens. Lembrich began contacting and visiting federal, state, county, and tribal officials to talk about the sheriff’s presence and the effect on voters.

I went to the polling place to interview the Fall River County election official who runs balloting for Pine Ridge. She told me she had asked the sheriff just to “pop by” periodically. She acknowledged that she had done this during past elections and that she’d heard the officer’s presence scared off Native voters, but she said she did not understand why.³⁹ I also spoke to the sheriff, who seemed more embarrassed than enthusiastic about being told to show up at the polling site; he downplayed the need for a law-enforcement presence.⁴⁰

Were tribal members’ concerns far-fetched? Not at all, said O. J. Semans, who is Donna Semans’s father. “For us, there’s a lot of history behind the sight of a white man in a uniform. You’ll also find that in states with large Native populations, the disparity between Native and non-Native incarceration rates is extreme, which means that we are commonly arrested and prosecuted unfairly. People have a lot of experience with being hauled in by law enforcement for no good reason. It’s like the Old South, except it’s happening in the twenty-first century. And on Pine Ridge, you can’t ignore memories of the Wounded Knee massacre, which happened within miles of the polling place.” The Justice Department got involved, telephoning the county official⁴¹ and placing monitors in the polling place to guarantee that voters had proper access.⁴² The sheriff went back to his usual patrols, and Pine Ridge turnout rebounded to previous levels.⁴³

COUNTIES RUN ELECTIONS IN MOST of the United States, and the county officials who keep turning up in these tales of voter suppression are part of a thin white line that holds the fort against Native enfranchisement throughout the West. They help ensure that non-Natives keep setting the agenda. Explanations I have heard in several states for not providing equal access to the ballot box are many and varied and show a kind of bristling resentment at having to provide equal enfranchisement—the officials are too busy, setting up another polling place is too difficult and complicated, the trip might be dangerous, reservations are too far away, and, finally, the reservation voters who live all those miles from the county-seat polling place just have to try harder.⁴⁴ That means that county officials, though low on the nation’s political food chain, can have an outsized impact on civil rights. “Keeping polling places in county seats and away from reservations is a simple and efficient way to disenfranchise us,” O. J. Semans said.

When visiting the jurisdictions that are determined to suppress the Native vote, one struggles to see how they can afford the million-dollar, or even multimillion-dollar, lawsuits they must fight in order to accomplish this. Rural hamlets with empty main streets, tattered town greens, few businesses, and aging populations seem hardly likely to generate these impressive sums. As it turns out, in some cases they do not have to.

In South Dakota, the state taxpayer-funded insurance pool for governing bodies—towns, counties, and the like—has been the big spender in local crusades against Native voting. In the normal course of business, the South Dakota Public Assurance Alliance offers jurisdictions coverage for litigation concerning anything from a slip-and-fall case to allegations of hiring discrimination. The alliance also pays for the legal costs of defending against voting-rights lawsuits. In September 2015, the South Dakota blogosphere and conventional media were alight with commentary about the alliance’s role in backing opponents of the Native vote.

The Sioux Falls Argus Leader published an investigation into the alliance’s payments to Jackson County, South Dakota, to help it shoot down the voting-rights lawsuit, Poor Bear v. The County, of Jackson. The county overlaps the northeastern portion of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where Oglala residents wanted the same number of days and hours of voting that off-reservation residents got at the county courthouse. The county refused, and tribal members, including Tom Poor Bear, then vice president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, became plaintiffs in the lawsuit.⁴⁵ The insurance alliance was picking up the tab for the county’s defense.

The Argus Leader story included a quote from an alliance official who called the Native lawsuit “frivolous” but “just one of those things you have to put up with.” The story went on to show that when the reporter interviewing the official followed up by pointing out that federal money in the form of Help America Vote Act funding was available for the requested polling place, the official quickly pivoted. He told the reporter that this could mean the insurance alliance would pressure the county to settle. The article also noted that the judge presiding over Poor Bear had scolded the county for trying to have it both ways—claiming that it could not afford a full-service polling place for its part of Pine Ridge while at the same time admitting that it knew all along about the federal funding.⁴⁶

The Dakota Free Press news site scoffed that Jackson County was “happy to stick taxpayers with the lawyer bill for defending their racism,”⁴⁷ while the South DaCola blog mocked the alliance for spending huge sums to help the county avoid paying out “already set aside federal dollars.”⁴⁸ When I interviewed Jeff Barth, a commissioner from South Dakota’s Minnehaha County, he compared the insurance alliance to an auto-insurance company that persists in covering a habitually drunk driver. “Why would we spend one or two million dollars to defend Jackson County against using federal funds?” Barth asked. “Clearly, Jackson County doesn’t want Native Americans to vote.”⁴⁹

Some called the funding fracas a smoke screen for other important issues. “The Voting Rights Act doesn’t allow a jurisdiction to grant voting rights to one group and deny or burden the voting rights of another group,” said the nation’s leading civil-rights attorney, Laughlin McDonald, longtime head of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), author of American Indians and the Fight for Equal Voting Rights,⁵⁰ and a veteran of more than three decades of voting-rights litigation in Indian country. “People must be treated equally,”⁵¹ he added. O. J. Semans described the defendants as “modern-day wannabe Indian fighters who would rather spend millions of taxpayer dollars fighting equality than one thousand dollars implementing it. They, like Custer, are on the wrong side of history.”

THE NATIVE VOTING LANDSCAPE was looking more hospitable in several states by the time the 2016 election rolled around. In October, Paiutes won an eleventh-hour judgment expanding ballot-box access on two Nevada reservations, where tribal chairmen and members had sued to obtain it.⁵² After just two days of Nevada’s early-voting period, turnout on the Walker River Indian Reservation nearly equaled that of the last presidential election, in 2012, according to the tribe’s chairman, Bobby Sanchez.⁵³ On the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation, the number of ballots cast in two days was already double the 2012 total, according to Vinton Hawley, Pyramid Lake’s chairman. “It’s been great,” Hawley said. “We have a voice. We’re involved.”⁵⁴

In another step forward in 2016, a North Dakota federal judge blocked a new state law that rejected the types of identification that Native voters usually carry.⁵⁵ These included tribal ID cards from reservations that lack numbered named streets, which is very common. The new law had banned cards without such data; it did allow tribal voters to obtain alternative IDs, but many live far from offices where they are available. On Standing Rock, some residents have a 120-mile round-trip to the nearest office that issues drivers’ licenses. The election safety net of past years was also gone; North Dakota voters without acceptable ID no longer had such options as signing an affidavit attesting to their identity. The federal judge’s order came in a ruling on a lawsuit brought by the Native American Rights Fund.⁵⁶

By 2016, voting-rights lawsuits recently litigated in South Dakota and Montana had improved Native ballot-box access in several counties. The access was not entirely equal to that of off-reservation voters, but it did mean more days and longer hours than before the legal actions. Natives did not have to sue in Dewey County, South Dakota, which overlaps the Cheyenne River Sioux homeland. For several election cycles, the Dewey County election official has deputized tribal members to run polling places there. The unusual trust and cooperation prompted O. J. Semans to call the county the “gold standard” in equal rights.

Several Minnesota counties were similarly welcoming. When Bret Healy made polling-place requests on behalf of Minnesota tribes during the summer of 2014, he was surprised and pleased at the reaction. “The belief expressed at one county commission meeting was that every eligible voter should be able to vote. You could have knocked me over with a feather,” Healy said. The Minnesota legislature had approved no-excuse absentee voting the year before, but long trips to the courthouses where it was offered kept the option out of reach for reservation residents. Since tribal members already go to their own capitals to do business and pick up mail—just as non-Natives may go to the county seat for the same reasons—putting offices in tribal capitals helped solve the equal-access problem.

In Alaska Native villages, voters have been using newly available early voting, language assistance, and ballots in their traditional languages since 2014. The Voting Rights Act requires translations for members of language minorities who are not proficient in English. However, it took two major federal lawsuits to ensure this assistance in Alaska—Nick v. Bethel, settled during 2009 and 2010, then a second trip to federal court, Toyukak v. Treadwell, in which the judge made an oral decision in 2014. A settlement for the case was negotiated in 2015.⁵⁷

Alaska Native voters had long struggled with the Englishlanguage text of the state’s ballot, according to James Tucker, one of the attorneys who argued Toyukak. When I interviewed lead plaintiff Mike Toyukak in his home in Manokotak, Alaska, he told me through an interpreter that Native voters had been upset by a badly translated referendum that resulted in them allowing alcohol to be sold in their villages when they intended to ban it. Lists of candidates, the convoluted legalese of referenda, and detailed instructions for signing, folding, and other manipulations of the ballot that had to be done perfectly for the vote to count added more confusion for those whose first language was a traditional tribal one.

During the 2014 national election, election workers helped voters get to the polls in Togiak, an Alaska Native village in the remote and pristine Bristol Bay region. (Stephanie Woodard)

The state’s half-hearted attempts to comply had been little help. Translators, whose credentials were apparently not verified, had made blunders. During the trial, the press continually reported the gaffes, which were reiterated in hours of embarrassing testimony and many pages of court documents.⁵⁸ A ballot measure about parental consent for minors’ abortions had been mistranslated for Natives as requiring parental permission to become pregnant. “Absentee voting” was rendered as the equivalent of “voting for a long time.” About one mistranslation, a state worker emailed, “What the heck, it’s a similar word and hope that it goes right over their heads!” At times, the state’s interpreters tossed in English words when they did not know the equivalent in a Native language, even though it was obvious that non-English-speaking voters would not understand them.⁵⁹ Tucker said that without correct translations and language assistance for those who wished it, casting a ballot was “a Hail Mary play” for Native voters.

After the judge’s decision in favor of the tribal plaintiffs, the state of Alaska was thoroughly flummoxed by the loss and by its officials’ experience in court. When Alaska Native leaders sat down with state officials and simply announced that they would bring early-voting capabilities to their villages, the officials acquiesced immediately. “It was the perfect political storm,” recalled Nicole Borromeo, general counsel of the Alaska Federation of Natives, or AFN. “We said, ‘We will sign up the locations,’ and the state agreed. Eleven days later, we had added one hundred and twenty-eight locations.”

In Alaska, the ability to cast a ballot ahead of Election Day can mean the difference between voting and disenfranchisement. In isolated Alaska Native settlements, subsistence hunting, fishing, and gathering activities are in full swing in the weeks leading up to the election, as people put up food for the long Arctic winter. During Election 2014, I saw voters casting ballots while still wearing their waders or hunting gear. In Manokotak, election official Arline Franklin described the demanding yearly round of fishing, berry picking, and bird hunting in spring, summer and fall, followed by seal, moose, and walrus hunting as winter sets in. “As we speak, my son is headed for the lake to fish and to see if there are any ducks left,” Franklin said. “Our hunters go out several times a week, and the rest of the time we’re processing what they bring in.”

There are no other viable food sources in the distant villages. A tiny store in Manokotak stocks a few shelves’ worth of supplies, including four-dollar cans of beans and twelve-dollar boxes of breakfast cereal that villagers cannot afford on a regular basis, or at all. This means that hunters who are on the trail of a catch that will feed their families for days or weeks cannot drop everything to go to the polls on Election Day, Franklin said. Yet Alaska Natives see political participation as a critical way to play a role in governmental decision-making and protect their traditional lands and lifeways. The opportunity to vote ahead of the day expands their options and, in the name of equality, gives Native voters the same access to the polls that the state’s white-majority urban voters have.

During the 2014 election, Alaska Natives enjoyed their newly affirmed rights and participated with enthusiasm. Turnout soared. In some villages, virtually all eligible voters cast a ballot.⁶⁰ Voters in Togiak, Alaska, on the shore of Bristol Bay, started filing into the election office when it opened at 7 AM. At midday, the voice of village resident Rose Wassillie crackled over the local open-mic VHF radio: “Go Togiak! It’s just noon, and one hundred and twenty out of five hundred have voted! Let’s make those numbers climb!” Most voters were speakers of Yup’ik, the language most often heard around town, and wanted either a Yup’ik ballot or an interpreter, as federal law allows. The translated ballot was a big driver of turnout, according to Togiak city administrator Clara Martin. “In the past, I never felt my vote counted,” Martin said after the polls closed. “It seemed that people who didn’t know anything about our way of life were making decisions for us.”

Togiak is distant from the centers of power and decision-making. I got there via a tiny aircraft that flew between, not over, the snow-covered shoulders of jagged mountains and above crystal-blue seas. When the pilot pointed out the safety gear in the back of the plane to the four passengers who barely fit, packed in shoulder to shoulder, I found it hard to believe that the gear would make any difference if the plane ditched in the frozen expanse. For Alaska Natives, enfranchisement bridges this huge geographical gap. “The new ballot tells us our vote means something. Someone out there is listening,” Martin said.

Togiak celebrated the conclusion of the election with a feast created with ingredients from the surrounding Bristol Bay region. Residents lined up in the village hall and scooped onto their plates pungent stewed seal; domino-like rectangles of black whale meat and white whale blubber; beaver and moose meat in sweet-and-salty sauces; caviar-like herring roe on fronds of kelp; baked, dried, and jerked salmon; and several versions of agutak, a chilled dessert of tundra berries and fat. Thanks to tribal voters’ active participation, they helped elect a Native lieutenant governor, raise Alaska’s minimum wage, and create barriers to placing a copper, gold, and molybdenum mine in the watershed of the bay. “We live in exciting times,” Martin said. Said Nicole Borromeo of AFN, “Our people have a hunger to vote. They go to huge lengths to do so and overcome barriers no one else in the country faces. Now, Native people feel included. This feels different.”

The 2014 turnout pattern was similar in South Dakota, where the only places to see increases in participation that year were four counties that overlapped reservations. Native voters were credited with helping raise the state’s minimum wage, renaming a county after its majority Oglala Lakota population, electing tribal members to that county’s commission, electing or reelecting Native representatives to the state legislature, and replacing the white sheriff who had been parked in the doorway of the Pine Ridge polling place. A Native candidate won the sheriff’s badge with 80 percent of the vote.⁶¹ “The voters made their voices heard,” said South Dakota state senator Kevin Killer. These victories have profoundly affected American Indian voters’ view of what is possible when they assert their rights as citizens, according to Killer. For him, having Oglala Lakota County on the nameplate on his desk in the legislature was a particularly meaningful, and indeed emotional, change.⁶²

Casting a ballot in Togiak, an Alaska Native village in the Bristol Bay region. In some villages, ballot translation and easier access to polling places meant nearly 100 percent of voters voted in 2014. (Stephanie Woodard)

Native voting-rights advances of the last several years were aided mightily by the Obama administration’s Justice Department, which undertook numerous efforts to support voting rights nationally. Starting in 2009, the department submitted amicus briefs and statements of interest supporting Native voting-rights lawsuits in South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Utah, Nevada, and Alaska. To prevent voter intimidation and other problems, Justice Department attorneys monitored elections in counties with significant Native populations. In an unusual move, the department also proposed legislation of its own to remedy Indian-country access issues. The measure, which was not enacted, would have placed at least one election office in each tribal community that requested it.⁶³

Though the Obama administration was often supportive of Indian country, it would be a mistake to think that Democrats are necessarily the heroes of Native voting-rights sagas.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF MARCH 9, 2014, the Montana Democratic Party leadership was holed up in a small stone building in the state’s capital, Helena. Inside were the state party chairperson, members of the party’s executive board, and two Democratic National Committee members. Across the street was the state capitol, and on its lawn was the larger-than-life bronze statue of Montana’s first territorial governor, Brigadier General (and Democrat) Thomas Meagher, astride a warhorse and brandishing a saber—forever in command.

For today’s Democrats inside the building, the mood was decidedly less so. They were talking to Northern Cheyenne spiritual teacher Mark Wandering Medicine and representatives of additional Montana tribes and tribal groups, who were trying to persuade the Democratic leadership to throw its support behind the voting-rights lawsuit for which Wandering Medicine was lead plaintiff. The press was barred, so I was outside on the sidewalk, along with photographer Joseph Zummo, who was shooting my article for Indian Country Media Network, and a separate documentary film crew. No local or national mainstream newspapers had shown up.

“They said no,” Michaelynn Hawk called out, as she ran down the building’s front steps about an hour after the start of the meeting. A Crow tribal member, she is on the board of Indian People’s Action, an advocacy group in Butte, Montana. As the sunny afternoon wore on, Democrats began exiting the building as though on a perp walk. They hurried down the front steps, chins tucked, grimacing. They refused to comment on their rejection of Wandering Medicine’s request. Zummo caught party officials bolting out the back door. “Look, there goes another one!” exclaimed William “Snuffy” Main, Gros Ventre tribal member and former chairman of Fort Belknap Indian Community. Apparently, it was embarrassing—if not surprisingly impractical—for the Democratic Party to rebuff equal rights in the second decade of the twenty-first century, in an election year, for a large number of people of color who were almost entirely Democrats.

Just as Oglalas had already done on Pine Ridge, in Wandering Medicine v. McCulloch Montana Natives were suing for the ability to vote ahead of Election Day. They wanted satellite voting offices on their reservations during the state’s monthlong in-person absentee-voting period. This would give reservation residents the same ballot-box access as those living in mainly white-inhabited county seats, where voters can register and cast ballots in the courthouse during that month. For some Montana tribal members, including Wandering Medicine, the journey from home to the courthouse was as many as two hundred miles round-trip.⁶⁴

The lead defendant in the lawsuit was Montana’s secretary of state and top elections official, Linda McCulloch, a Democrat. The other defendants were a mix of Democratic and Republican county officials. The Department of Justice joined the suit on the side of the Native plaintiffs and asked University of Wyoming geography professor Gerald Webster to quantify the barrier that distance creates for American Indian voters in Montana. Webster’s study showed that residents of three of the state’s reservations traveled two to three times farther than non-Natives to get to the polls in their county courthouses. They were also less likely to have a vehicle or sufficient gas money for the trip.⁶⁵

At Fort Belknap, one of the reservations in Webster’s study, tribal member and former councilman Ed “Buster” Moore told me that if he had to travel to the county courthouse to vote that very day, he could not afford it. He would have to save for a few weeks to make sure he had enough cash for the trip, while during the travel day, he would lose the income he earns making crafts and selling them locally and via the internet. Fort Belknap is part of a rural transportation system, but unpredictable connections meant that if Moore were to use it, instead of a private vehicle, he would have to carry enough money to cover a night in a motel, in case the trip took more than one day. “Without on-reservation access to early voting, Indians in big rural states like Montana have one day to vote, and everyone else has many days, with the exact number depending on the state,” said Snuffy Main. Four Directions legal director Greg Lembrich called the extra costs Native voters bear to get to the ballot box a “backdoor poll tax.”

The Montana Democrats did endorse an alternate resolution promising Native Americans early registration. An early draft of the party resolution provided to Wandering Medicine, as lead plaintiff, showed the word “equal” crossed out and “equitable” inked in above it. Later in the document, the word “equality” did appear, as in “continuing to fight for equality in voting access.” This seemed to advocate a process that could result in equality, but fell short of supporting equality itself. O. J. Semans was furious. “I wasn’t there back when the treaties were written, but now I see how it worked,” he said. “Democratic party operatives and their lawyers know perfectly well what means what. They guaranteed us early registration—which we already have in Montana! They thought, ‘Those dumb Indians will never figure it out.’ They had the temerity to treat us the way they did two hundred years ago, twisting the English language and the law with intent to deceive us.”

Bret Healy was admitted into the building along with the Native voting-rights advocates. He was not allowed to speak, but he could observe. “They couldn’t even say the word ‘equal’ to an Indian,” he said afterward. “Did they really think they could ignore federally recognized tribes, tribal leaders, tribal associations, Native spiritual leaders, and Native combat veterans? The meeting was a disaster for the party. It was like watching a wreck occurring in slow motion.”

Later, when I asked a state party official for a comment on the meeting, he was indignant. He told me that questioning the Montana Democrats’ commitment to Native voting was “presumptuous.” He pointed to the party’s promise to fight for equality.⁶⁶ When I called the Democratic National Committee, in Washington, DC, its spokesman backed the state operatives, saying that in theory the national party approved of the tribal request for satellite voting offices. However, the party official said, the DNC believed that “technical logistics” were the real problem. They prevented the counties from setting up the polling places. Patience was necessary.

“The heart of the question in Montana from the Democratic perspective is how do we get to where we all want to be,” the DNC spokesman explained. “It has to do with technical questions, who has the authority to do it, and who will write the check.” Still, the official stressed, American Indians are a “core Democratic constituency.” He said he had consulted with the party’s Native advisors just that week. He could not recall their names.⁶⁷

“That’s what’s been going on throughout this lawsuit,” Wandering Medicine said. “Double-talk and dragging out the process.” As a matter of recognized constitutional law, “technical questions” don’t override equal rights, Laughlin McDonald of the ACLU commented: “Administrative inconvenience cannot justify practices that burden the fundamental right to vote.” When I checked with Snuffy Main in 2017, he said that polling sites were open for more days on his Montana reservation during the 2016 election than they were before the Wandering Medicine lawsuit, though unevenly, with more days offered in the northern portion, which was closest to the county seat, than farther south, where people have the greatest distance to overcome if they have to register or vote in person. No part of the reservation had the same number of days as, say, one of the state’s white-majority cities.

Wandering Medicine said that Montana tribes have many concerns that require political participation, including energy development, jobs, rural transportation, education, and health care for veterans. About the Northern Cheyenne Tribe’s interests, he added, “We’re facing massive coal and methane development in the Powder River Basin. What will be the cultural, economic, and environmental impacts on us? Will our tribal members be able to get jobs there? We need to participate in the electoral process to be a part of the decision-making.” Nevertheless, Wandering Medicine remained optimistic, describing the delay as “a stumbling block to progress, but only that.”

Keeping voting inconvenient for Natives is a peculiar choice for the party of Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama. What would Martin Luther King do? I asked Healy. He responded, “About Native voting? He sure as hell wouldn’t dither about technicalities. Read Dr. King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ on the subject of waiting for rights.” In the 1963 letter, Dr. King decries the person “who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.” He writes that “wait” almost always means “never.”

The Democratic obstructionism in Montana did not appear strategic. In a state of hard-fought elections and razor-thin victory margins, Native Americans make up 8 percent of the population and register and vote overwhelmingly Democratic. In 2012, the Obama-Biden ticket received more than 90 percent of the vote in seven reservation precincts. The state’s Democratic senator, Jon Tester, credited his win that year and in 2006 to the Native vote.⁶⁸ Those weren’t the only times American Indians decided a national election. In South Dakota, Democrat Tim Johnson held on to his US Senate seat in 2002 by five-hundred-some ballots, which included 92 percent of Pine Ridge ballots, out of nearly three thousand cast there. In the 2002 Arizona governor’s race, Navajo turnout helped Janet Napolitano eke out a victory. “Without the Native American vote, I wouldn’t be standing here today,” Napolitano told the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Other senators and former senators with decisive tribal backing have included Washington State’s Maria Cantwell, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Al Franken of Minnesota, and Mark Begich of Alaska, all Democrats.⁶⁹

Democrats cannot take Native voters for granted, though, Professor Daniel McCool said. He described tribal members as acutely aware, issue-specific voters who have supported Republicans as well. These have included Arizona’s Senator John McCain and Alaska’s Senator Lisa Murkowski, who beat back a 2010 Tea Party challenge with a long-shot write-in campaign that benefited from Native support.

Blackfeet tribal member Tom Rodgers, the founder of Carlyle Consulting and the whistleblower in the Jack Abramoff scandal, suggested that the Montana Democratic Party’s 2014 shenanigans were part of a balancing act. Rodgers speculated that the party wanted some Native votes to help push national candidates over the top but worried that having too many tribal members lining up at the polls would rile constituents in areas near reservations, thus alienating the Democratic base. If Native voting turnout were to increase substantially, the balance of power would shift in rural areas, Rodgers said. Tribal voices would be heard when decisions were made.

A Northern Cheyenne tribal member who served for a time on his local county commission agreed. Danny Sioux pointed out that you cannot vote without registering and that putting election offices on reservations would embolden tribal members to take that essential first step. “We could explain voters’ rights,” said Sioux. “On the Northern Cheyenne Reservation alone, our current four hundred active registered voters could become three thousand and impact elections all the way up to the federal level.”

That would mean a sea change in Native participation and inevitably well-being, said Glacier County commissioner Michael DesRosier. “More people would have to deal with us when we want to talk about our issues. Otherwise, all they recognize is our ‘plight.’”

WE AMERICANS LIKE TO THINK OUR COUNTRY was founded on democratic concepts. Not so, said Laughlin McDonald in an interview for my article marking his thirtieth year of fighting on behalf of Native voting-rights. “It was actually founded on principles of aristocracy, with voting originally restricted to white male property owners over age twenty-one.” Though the franchise was eventually extended to African Americans, American Indians, and women, he said, states have continued to pass new suppression measures. “Those in control have shown great willingness to adopt a whole range of discriminatory measures so they can stay in charge, ranging from literacy tests and poll taxes to whites-only primaries and outright intimidation. We at the ACLU Voting Rights Project see increased participation by minority voters on the one hand and efforts to stymie it on the other. It’s an ongoing process, with progress despite setbacks.”

According to McDonald, some of the hurdles Natives face can be ascribed to the sense of apartness, of separation from the mainstream, that we see in other ways in other chapters. This results in a knowledge gap, local and national. “Indian country is a blank for most non-Native people, whether they live far from a reservation or right next door. Many have little knowledge of the concept of sovereignty, or even that Indians are US citizens,” McDonald said. He described a case he argued in Fremont County, Wyoming.⁷⁰ “I took a deposition from a county commissioner who had driven through the Wind River Reservation but had never stopped, never visited, never gotten to know tribal members. She was embarrassed to realize she knew nothing about many people in her district, and she wasn’t the only county official in this position.”

Wandering Medicine compared the Native fight for voting rights to his people’s flight from prison in Nebraska in January 1879. In a four-hundred-mile trek that Northern Cheyenne youngsters retrace in a spiritual run each winter, the tribe faced bitter cold, starvation, and death in order to return home to Montana. “Back then, thanks to the wishes of a greater force, our ancestors succeeded against great odds in preserving our way of life. Securing our voting rights will also be good for us.” And it will be good for America, Wandering Medicine said. “Survival depends on sharing.”

Snuffy Main, of Fort Belknap, said that attaining equal rights will empower Natives to define their own needs and find their own solutions. Inclusion in the political process will allow them to pursue self-determination. It will also bring their ideas and energy to the nation. “There will be more Native elected officials and a greater involvement for us in our traditional lands, which, taken all together for the US tribes, encompass the United States of America. We volunteer for the armed forces in a greater percentage than other groups,⁷¹ which means many of us are veterans. We have fought for this country, and we want to be part of taking better care of it.”