Delphine Red Shirt. Photo by Rich Luhr / Flickr
Native American voting rights
On the outside looking in
By Delphine Red Shirt
www.nsweekly.com When our lands were taken away, we were sovereign nations capable of governing ourselves as a people. We had our own ways of selecting our leaders, as Lakota people, and these ways were abandoned due dealings with the federal government, first through treaties, and then through policies at the federal level. If you consider the fact that we as Native Americans have not yet celebrated a century of citizenship on our own lands, you begin to understand why Native American history is always swept under the rug, so that other nations don’t see the actual dealings that a great and proud nation has had and continues to have with its own Indigenous peoples. Currently one of the areas that states like the state of South Dakota retain control of are voting rights over the Lakota people. Take for example the 30 page document submitted on October 9, 2014 in the United States District Court in the District of South Dakota Western Division by Thomas Poor Bear, Don Doyle, Cheryl D. Bettelyoun and James Red Willow against the County of Jackson, a political subdivision and public corporation organized under the laws of the state of South Dakota. The case is known as Poor Bear versus Jackson Country. If you think that we, as now citizens, have the basic right to vote, you are right. But, as this case, a lawsuit brought by four enrolled members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe (OST) painfully shows, we as Lakota people are often denied access to the ballots. With an important election coming up this year, we need to be aware of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, in order to be sure that we can mark the ballot for our person of choice. We are all aware of civil rights as told to us in history books about the struggles of African Americans in the south, especially with voting rights, etc. What we aren’t aware of as Native Americans is that the history books omit us entirely. Sometime after the Louisiana Purchase and Lewis & Clark, we disappeared from history books. So, we know more about Jim Crow laws, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, but we don’t know about Native Americans who fought for those same rights, long before the 1960s. As one of my students in Introduction to Native American History brought to my attention, there was a young Paiute girl, Alice Piper, who in 1924 fought for the right to attend an all-white school in Big Pine, Calif. My student argues that Alice Piper’s case set the precedent for the famous Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 that we all know from American history books that gave African-Americans the right to attend all-white schools. Why is it that we don't know of this case in 1924 involving a Native American girl? The Owens Valley Paiute people recently erected a statue in Alice Piper’s honor. Hopefully, in future history books in the state of California, Alice Piper is at least mentioned as she helped open the door for not only Native people but for Chinese immigrants and others who were denied access to education in the state of California. In a similar way, we will probably never hear about Poor Bear v. Jackson County in any history book on voting rights cases and Native Americans. It involves Jackson County which has a population of ½ white and ½ Native and appears to favor the town of Kadoka (90% white) over Wanblee (90% Native). The voting age at the time the case was filed was equal in both places. Jackson County eventually agreed to open a satellite office in Wanblee for the 2014 election where similar services offered at Kadoka would be available. There, in-person voter registration was available 15 days before election-day and this overlap allowed a window of time where one-stop voting, where someone can register and vote at the same time was available. The state of South Dakota has a “no excuse” absentee voting, so Native and non-Native voters can take advantage of in-person absentee voting and one-stop voting, but the situation with no satellite office in Wanblee made it unavailable to OST members. This case seeks to provide a permanent office on the Pine Ridge reservation for all future elections. Unwilling to provide this basic right to people in Wanblee, Jackson County filed a motion to dismiss, but was denied a year ago.
Read the rest of the story on the all new Native Sun News website: Native American voting rights (Contact Delphine Red Shirt at Redshirtphd@gmail.com) Copyright permission Native Sun News
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