Pauly Denetclaw
ICT
The Yomba Shoshone Tribe is located in rural Nevada, mostly dirt roads that make it challenging for some citizens to drop off their mail-in ballots. In 2022, the solution was unusual but it worked for the Yomba Shoshone.
“They’re not just in the middle of Nevada, but I mean it’s complete dirt roads to get there,” said Stacey Montooth, executive director for the Nevada Indian Commission.
Tribal representatives went on horseback to collect completed ballots and drive them an hour to the county seat in Austin, Nevada.
Since 2016, the Native American vote in Nevada has become stronger and stronger. Nonprofit organizations, state and tribal governments have worked together over nearly the last decade to increase the power of the Native vote. The solutions Nevada groups have found to increase civic engagement for rural and urban Native voters is direct engagement, meeting people where they’re at and ultimately, and multiple choices for how to cast a ballot.
There are 20 federally recognized tribal nations that predate the state of Nevada and still live within, what are now, the boundaries of the state. More than 62,000 Native Americans from over 200 different nations live in urban areas.
American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders make up 5.1 percent of the state’s population, according to the U.S. Census. All together the number of Indigenous voters in the state is 158,322.
To put this into context, Nevada’s ninth most populous city, Sparks, has a population of 108,025. The state’s eight most populous area, Paradise, has a population of 191,238. Both are located next to either Las Vegas or Reno.
The journey to increase voter engagement started in 2016 when three Native American veterans and two tribes sued the state of Nevada for violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Some citizens of Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe and Walker River Paiute Tribe were forced to drive at most 96 miles round trip to access in-person voter registration and in-person early voting. On election day, Pyramid Lake Paiute citizens had to drive 32 miles round trip according to court documents. All this effort because there were no on-reservation polling locations or in-person voter registration.
“My elderly grandma who lived on the reservation all her life. She was having to drive 90 minutes to vote and as she got older, she had to find someone to help her get to the polling station,” Montooth said.
In comparison, some of the affluent residents of Lake Tahoe, on the Nevada side, could walk to their polling locations. On the east shore of Lake Tahoe, in Glenbrook, Nevada, the median sale price for homes, in 2021, was $2.17 million according to a Reno Gazette Journal article.
The court sided with the plaintiffs and required Washoe County to establish satellite polling locations on Pyramid Lake Paiute and Walker River Paiute lands ahead of the 2016 general election.
Since then, Native leaders and citizens have taken it upon themselves to increase voter engagement in innovative ways.
“The one solution for Indian Country is actually multiple choices because there isn’t one size fits all,” Montooth, Walker River Paiute Tribe, told ICT.
There are a number of things the state of Nevada has done to make voting easier, including same-day voter registration, and expanding the use of the Effective Absentee System for Elections, created to make voting easy for Nevada military personnel deployed overseas. Tribal citizens who live on their sovereign lands are now eligible to use this system and vote from the comfort of their homes.
The state also created an opt-out system instead of an opt-in system to get voting services on sovereign lands. Before they had to apply to request these services. Presently, every county is automatically required to work with tribal nations to establish voting services every election.
Tribal IDs can now be used to register to vote. If they meet the state requirements of a photo, issue, and expiration date.
Other solutions that tribes have implemented especially for elders, is utilizing community health representatives.
“They’re trusted voices. They go into these people’s houses on a regular basis, and so it just works perfectly,” Montooth said. “Folks complete their ballot, then you give it to the (community health representative) and (they) can drop it off in that conveniently located Dropbox as they’re heading back to the clinic.”
The Duckwater Shoshone Tribe has many Shoshone language speakers and they worked with the county and state to provide language interpreters for those casting their ballots.
In 2022, for the first time Nevada Indian Commissioner Tammy Tiger and executive director Montooth were invited to a post-election debrief hosted by the Secretary of State. County clerks and county registers from all 16 counties are invited to attend.
“We were representatives of Native America. We got invited and it was really historic, but on the other hand, it just seems so logical and simple. It’s crazy that it took all this time,” Montooth said.
Tiger represented urban Native voters and Montooth represented rural Native voters.
The wins in Nevada, while expedited over the last eight years, build upon the work of many generations of Native people who fought for their right to vote. One that was granted 100 years ago but that wasn’t really available until the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Up to the 60s, Native voters were being denied their right to vote on lands they’ve managed since before this country was even a thought.
“I don’t have words for it because I think about what a change it’s been in our community in just a couple of generations,” said Taylor Patterson, executive director for Native Voters Alliance Nevada. “I think about my grandparents and the spaces that they never had access to.”
Building civic engagement has led to monumental wins in the sagebrush state for Native people.
There is one Native American elected to the Nevada Assembly, Shea Backus, Cherokee. The state has passed legislation to codify the Indian Child Welfare Act and require local police to take reports of missing Indigenous people regardless of jurisdiction as well as upload that information to the National Crime Information Center and National Missing and Unidentified Persons databases.
“During the redistricting process, it was the first time that tribes really got a seat at that table and that we were able to lobby and ask, ‘Why is Walker River Paiute Tribe in two assembly districts and two state senate districts, and two congressional districts?” said Patterson, Bishop Paiute Tribe. “And also talk to Walker River about why that matters.”
Looking toward the future, there has also been a push to increase Native poll workers. Reno-Sparks Indian Colony has a volunteer election committee that runs the tribal elections. During state and federal elections, this committee goes as a group to train in Washoe County to be poll workers for their nation.
“It just makes such a big difference when you go to vote, to see someone that looks like you,” Montooth said. “Better yet, (someone) you know, it just improves the experience so much.”
Commissioner Tiger, Choctaw Nation and Muscogee Nation descendant, was a poll worker at the Moapa Band of Paiutes voting location during the primary election a couple weeks ago. She drove three hours roundtrip, waking up at 4 a.m., to get the polling location set up by 7 a.m. to welcome voters.
Tiger was borned and raised in the Las Vegas metropolitan area and describes herself as an urban Native.
“I know some urban Natives came from down in southern Nevada to work, I went to work the Moapa polls. Some folks went all the way up to Reno, and this is how we envision this statewide,” Tiger said. “How do we work together to support one another and make sure that all of our people have access to voting?”
One way to increase voter turnout would be to make election day a holiday, Montooth said.
Another resource needed for urban Native voters, especially in the Las Vegas metro, is a nonpartisan voter guide that just lays out the facts for each candidate.
“We’ve got 20 judges on a ballot, and so it’s like, what are these trusted sources that are really going through and doing candidate questionnaires and collecting information so you have a more informed vote?” Tiger asked.
For Patterson, it’s increasing the number of Indigenous people elected to city, county and state office. The state needs 61 elected Native American, Alaska Native or Native Hawaiian people elected to gain representative parity, according to Advance Native Political Leadership. They currently have one, Nevada Assembly member Shea Backus.
“We do not have the Native candidates that are representing us and so it was a really big deal to us to make sure that Shea got elected and we were really putting as much energy as we could behind her,” Patterson said.
Born in 1917, Flora Greene, Pyramid Lake Paiute, wasn’t considered a citizen of the United States. When she was 7 years old, the Indian Citizenship Act was passed that would theoretically allow her to vote at 18. She didn’t cast her first ballot until she was 99 years old.
“There had always been something that had come up,” Montooth said.
In 2016, after litigation made the county provide on-site voting for her nation, Greene cast her first ballot in the general election.
“When you think about 90-year-old people who couldn’t go in the front of restaurants in downtown Fallon, or couldn’t use certain public transportation, and they just… they’re so tenacious that Ms. Flora was able to let all that go. And on the one occasion where we’re all equal, I mean she had a little extra pep in her step because she was doing it on her land,” Montooth said.
That was the only presidential election Greene voted in before she passed away in 2018.
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