Over this summer and into this fall, I had the amazing opportunity to organize with Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign, the Campaign for Change in Nevada. It was exciting and filled with potential for me to reach out to Native communities within my adopted state. The opportunity to go onto the rez and explain why voting was important in this crucial election for a candidate who had a solid plan to mend fences in the Native community.
Unfortunately, I never got that opportunity. I was sent to the rural areas of Nevada where there certainly were Native populations, but the opportunity to organize the Native vote exclusively was never something I was allowed to do. There were Native populations within my assigned areas and I made the best I could out of the situation.
On one excursion I registered voters on the McDermitt reservation on the Oregon border. As was expected, we registered a small amount of the population, the final count being somewhere around seven new voters.
The method was simple, we found an elder on the reservation who'd been active during the Democratic caucus in January and asked her who was not registered to vote. She pulled out a tribal housing list and went through it with us, house by house and gave us the names of young people not yet registered.
It was what I had sought to do in order to empower my fellow Natives in the electoral process and is one of the remaining highlights of my experience in community organizing. Unfortunately, on that same trip, I came across another elder sitting on her front porch.
When I introduced myself and why I was there, she stared right through me with her hollow eyes and simply said, "They're not going to help us. They never help us." Going back to the basics of my training, I tried to persuade her that Obama and the Democratic party had ties with the Native community and that should have been reason enough to want to register and make her voice heard.
She continued to stare into the hills and said nothing more.
It was the first time I ever felt a member of my own race transfer a sense of hopelessness. That elder has stuck with me ever since. Her stare was one that's not easily forgotten. Eyes that told me without even needing to explain her opinion that there was no hope for Native people in the political process.
I will admit that in my brief time as an organizer, I've experienced numerous frustrations at the lack of enthusiasm about the Native vote. On two separate occasions, when I tried to explain my enthusiasm for registering Natives to vote to another staffer, his reply was, "Really? All 12 of them?"
In another situation, I tried to explain the nuances of organizing in the Native community, as opposed to organizing in a non-Native, urban population. The question, as if my explanations meant nothing was, "So why don't Indians organize or register to vote? Is it because they're lazy?"
Those interactions brought into stark relief an idea that had been growing in my mind: we don't count. As sad as it is to say, our votes are never courted because they're assumed to be Democratic votes, leaving the party at large to ignore our cries for funding, housing, improved education and health care. On the other side, Republicans typically don't court the Native vote and in some cases, even try to disenfranchise us because it's assumed we wouldn't vote for them anyway.
And in this election season, it's about the numbers. How many people are going to vote Democratic and how many are going to vote Republican? Who's still undecided and who's still leaning? And how are those voters best reached?
I have a few numbers of my own.
According to the a 2003 U.S. Census Bureau estimate, 2,786,652 citizens were American Indian and Alaska Native alone. Almost half a million and over a quarter of a million of those two million Natives live in California and Arizona, respectively. Two states that couldn't be further divided along party lines this election season. If even 60 percent of those Natives registered to vote, it could give either party a run for its money.
But our people continue to be stuck between a rock and a hard place, politically-speaking. Taken for granted by one party and completely ignored by the other. It's caused me to reevaluate my political allegiance, my family has been Democrat since my grandparents were granted citizenship in 1924, so it's difficult to think in terms of political binaries that I could ever leave my party.
Until I read the most recent column by Tim Giago on the Huffington Post. He's called for Natives to band together and stop going back into a politically-abusive relationship and free ourselves by forming our own political party. It could certainly fail, we haven't ever been included enough in the American political process to care one way or the other; or it could very well be a spectacular success, Native voters across the country and in states with significant Native populations could band together to ask each party what they're going to do to earn our vote.
It's an idea worth looking into, we wouldn't have to rely on lobbying or the whims of congressional earmarks. We could simply offer our vote to the party that is most willing to further and help our cause. I know who I'm still campaigning for and who I'll be voting for on Nov. 4.
But my plans and political affiliations for Nov. 5 are entirely up in the air.
