Patricia Whitefoot lives in the center of the wind-scoured Yakima Nation in central Washington. To receive her survey in the mail, the 70-year-old grandmother recently traveled 25 miles on hole roads, but nothing would help it.
“Like the first peoples of this country, we are intrinsically committed to seize this land,” says Whitefoot, who, when she stays as her 5-year-old grandson, remains busy transmitting voting data to other Native American voters over the phone. . and computer.
“It’s more complicated now because of the pandemic,” Whitefoot says, “but we help others get the vote out. “
COVID-19 disproportionately upset or killed Native Americans in the United States, creating an election day challenge for a poor and geographically remote population already suffering to triumph over rigid electoral barriers ranging from discriminatory electoral law to remote polling stations.
While this election has noted that many Americans turn to mail voting to expose themselves to COVID-19, some Native Americans may ignore their vote given the limited and inefficient nature of the postal service in many rural reserves. Irregular Internet access also makes it difficult. to access data on how to vote in the event of a pandemic.
Tribes are suffering to get the vote as it is: only 1. 8 million Native Americans voted in 2016, roughly part of the eligible electorate among the country’s 5. 2 million Aboriginal people in approximately six hundred tribes, about 30% of whom live in reserves.
Despite still-low turnout, which Native American voting rights activists seek to reinforce, those running for Election Day can run when President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden compete for votes in highly controversial states like Wisconsin. Michigan and Arizona.
In 2016, Trump won all 10 votes from the Wisconsin Electoral College after defeating Hillary Clinton by 22,177 votes.
“Right now, we have 80,000 registered voters in Wisconsin and we will make a difference there and in states where margins were narrow,” said Kevin Allis, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians.
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In the lead up to November 3, activists are specifically targeting 40% of Native Americans under the age of 25. They highlight the pressing disorders of environmental and federal investment and put in tension the desire to have a voice and vote on who takes the white paper. House, since the federal government, not the state, the law has a wonderful influence on those who live on the reservations.
“People like to say that Indians are statistically insignificant because there are only a few million of us,” says Judith Le Blanc, director of the activist organization Native Organizers Alliance and a member of oklahoma’s Caddo tribe, whose organization helped free a native. American. ” Non-voting resource called Natives Vote”. But we are politically important. “
Despite many obstacles, the strength of Native Americans is increasing. In 2018, Congress welcomed the first two Native American women in their ranks, Reps. Deb Haalos angelesnd, DN. M. , De los angeles Laguna Pueblo and Sharice Davids, D-Kan. , De Ho-Chunk Nation. Washington State Democrat Debra Lekanoff of Coastal Salish, the first Native American woman to be elected to the state assembly.
“We have a lot of advocates who help people sign, army veterans who call nieces and nephews in the kitchen with an aunt with the voting paper who can read a little bit,” Lekanoff says. “Our purpose is to expand the polling stations where we are in the vote. In the meantime, it’s up to public servants like me to remove barriers that may arise. “
The defendant story of the Amerindians is filled with horrific bloodshed and damaged promises. After moving the maximum number of tribes to reserves, the U. S. government granted Native American citizenship in 1924, but it was half a century before all states identified their right to vote.
This heist has had a lasting impact. Of the approximately 3. 6 million Native Americans of voting age, one-third are not yet registered. Activists point to ongoing efforts to suppress voters, many of whom have faced legal challenges, as an explanation for why many Native Americans have still exercised their constitutional right.
In Alaska, where 120,000 Native Americans live scattered across a state nearly 3 times the length of Texas, the state Supreme Court upheld an abatement court ruling on October 12 that eliminated the need for a witness to be signed on ballots by mail. a rule that saw many votes rejected in the last elections.
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The court noted that the signature requirement is a pandemic for voting procedure, especially when citizens of such a giant geographical domain will have to rely on mail voting. Native American legal activists claim that the signing requirement was inherently racist and can be traced back to a U. S. Supreme Court ruling in 1831 describing a parent-child relationship between the government and indigenous peoples.
“It’s a relic from a time when Native Americans were under the guardianship of the state,” says Natalie Landreth, a lawyer at the Anchorage-based Native American Rights Fund.
In Montana last month, Landreth’s organization, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, succeeded in repealing a state law interfering with native Americans’ votes. margin in 2018, limited who can collect the number of ballots and imposed fines on anyone who delivers their friends and family’s ballots to the post office.
The law has been seen as discriminatory by activists, as ownership of a car is evident to many Native Americans and post offices may be hours away on unhealthy roads.
And in February, Native American activists favored an settlement in a lawsuit against North Dakota, which ruled years ago that a portion of the identity with a residential front required registration to vote. Issued.
All those legal lawsuit situations have been successful. On October 16, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to grant members of the Navajo Nation their request to count votes from the Arizona part of the country up to 10 days after the election.
The court argued that accepting this request would impose a burden on election officials, who would necessarily know if a vote came here from a Navajo voter and threatened to grant extension to others by accident. The activists who filed the lawsuit argued that the deficient postal service in the reserve – which spans Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah – threatened delays that would invalidate the Navajo votes.
Four Directions, a voting rights organization that supported the lawsuit, recently tested mail in the Navajo Nation and discovered that first-class mail took 18 hours to reach a county registrar’s workplace from the city of Scottsdale, Arizona, compared to six days for letters from navajo country.
“If middle-class whites crossed the barriers built by the Navajo, the white electorate’s involvement would fall,” says OJ Semans, co-ceo of Four Directions, based at the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reserve in Mission, South Dakota. “The pandemic frightens me. I’m afraid of the finale of polling stations. But Native Americans are in a position to vote. “
The classic demanding situations of the election year were stirred this year by the coronavirus pandemic, especially for Native Americans.
Fear of the virus is superior, as long-standing economic and fitness inequalities mean native Americans are 5. 3 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than white Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This means that other people are more likely to remain locked internally and are no longer accessible door-to-door and exit booking campaigns, where the virtual divide is significant. According to the US census, the US census has not been able to do so. U. S. , Only part of the Native American report has access to the high-speed Internet, compared to 82% of the U. S. population. America as a whole. This issue of connectivity is when you are looking to register to vote online or when voting rights teams have gone from face-to-face visits to explosions on social media.
In some states, the pandemic may have already reduced the participation of Amerindian voters. In New Mexico, home to the Navajo and members of 19 indigenous tribes, there was a 1% drop in mail votes for native classes in this spring’s presidential primary, according to a recent Common Cause report. Overall voter turnout at the state level, however, saw an 8% increase in participation consistent with the absentee ballot.
Another impediment to Native Americans’ vote is similar to geography: large native American reserves mean offices and polls are remote.
In Fort Peck, Montana, Native Americans have to travel up to 35 miles in each direction to the nearest post office, which is generally inconsistent with limited hours, according to the Native American Rights Fund. In Arizona, Navajo have only one polling station consisting of 306 square miles, compared to one consistent with thirteen square miles for Scottsdale residents, according to defense organization Four Directions.
Efforts to raise polling stations have been strained. In Nevada, a 2016 lawsuit against the state was required through the Pyramid Lake Paiute and Walker River Paiute tribes to bring early voting locations to the region’s reserves.
“The fight for the right to vote has been a component of our mandate since our inception in 1944,” says Allis of the National Congress of American Indians. “Beyond the total elimination tactics through the laws, we are faced with herbal barriers like bad roads. Not only do you face a long wait if you pass a polling station in an Indian country, but probably be a dangerous road just to get there. “
In addition to transport deterrence, Allis says teams have stepped up their voter registration efforts in the run-up to the election.
“It’s about educating other people about the importance of being heard,” Allis says.
Online projects like Natives Vote 2020 and Every Native Vote Counts are just some of the tactics activists hope to enroll more Native Americans in the final days of the 2020 campaign. They remain positive that between successful victories and a full-life electorate, the voter’s turnout may hold a record among Native Americans.
“There have been so many engagement paintings in network paintings, and other people are everything from phone trees to social media and Zoom conversations to connect with voters,” says Elizabeth Day, network paint participation assignment manager at the Native American Community Development Institute, whose efforts have directed those living in Minneapolis’ Native American cultural corridor.
These tactics come with everything from voter registration driving events, where appeal comes with homemade fried bread tacos, to using artists to motivate their work.
In recent months, Jeremy Fields, an artist of Pawnee, Apsaalooké and Chickasaw, has painted with the artwork of his wife, Collins Provost-Fields, 14 works of art at Native American networking centers in Minnesota and Dakota.
To underscore the importance of voting for the next generation of Native American voters, some works of art show young people running around holding pieces of paper with the word “vote. “
“It’s about making our families and houses well represented,” Fields says.
Brandon Yellowbird-Stevens, a member of Wisconsin’s Oneida Nation tribe, said he will paint October to register new voters. Spend hours every day making calls and texting in delivery mailboxes in and around Green Bay.
Yellowbird-Stevens says the tribe is “generally nonpartisan” and prefers paintings with politicians in any of the corridors. But, he said, this is “a key election,” noting that the Trump administration disappointed some Native Americans last year when it proposed a 14% cut in investment to the Home Office, which oversees the Indian Bureau of Affairs and the Indian Office of Education.
Although hardly a monolithic electoral bloc, Native Americans are largely liberal, with 51% registered as Democrats, 26% independent, 9% Democratic Socialists and 7% Republicans, says Crystal Echo Hawk, founder of IllumiNative, a nonprofit organization in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I challenge negative stereotypes.
“Our message to our constituents is ‘hide or mail’,” says Echo Hawk, who is from Pawnee Nation.
Echo Hawk says many Native Americans are eager to vote this year as a component because the harsh effect of the pandemic on tribes has highlighted the federal government’s inability to keep Aboriginal peoples in shape. such as school care and fitness.
“The federal government has a duty to accept and hold tribes accountable for physical care,” he says. “We had to surrender our land in exchange for that and education, and frankly, this administration did not maintain that commitment. And in terms of COVID-19, his reaction was simply outrageous. “
In New Mexico, Amber Carillo is helping members of state tribes obtain data on how productive it is to register before the October 31 deadline. A member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe with relatives in Acoma Pueblo, Carillo becomes distressed every time he learns that some other old man has died of complications of COVID-19.
“These are other people who convey our cultural wisdom and language,” says Carillo, a native American voting rights organizer for the activist organization Common Cause New Mexico. “For us, when they die, it’s as if the Library of Congress catches fire. “
Whitefoot, a former nation of Yakima, is one of the custodians of tribal wisdom and traditions, and is also a soldier engaged in the crusade to get the vote of Native Americans.
Although she remains largely at home because of the pandemic, the former director of indigenous education in Washington state remains the educator, social media, and phone calls to succeed in resuming others across the West and disseminating information.
“An older woman, she’s 85 and a great-grandmother, asked me where to get the ballots in the mail, so I’m going to help with things like that all the time,” she says. “We have the legal responsibility recently my grandson asked me, “What is a president?” and I said it by someone who represented us, so we have to have an opinion on who he is. “
Follow USA TODAY correspondent Marco della Cava: @marcodellacava