The Native vote dilemma

Every election year, Indigenous people grapple with whether and how to engage in electoral politics.

In Indian Country, major election years bring a deluge of messaging that “voting is sacred,” as then-Congresswoman and current Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said during the 2020 Democratic National Convention. The push to get out the Native vote is strong; it’s sometimes credited for swinging the 2020 election for Joe Biden.

Every election cycle, Native communities and individuals grapple with a web of dilemmas: Are polling stations accessible? Are any of the candidates not directly hostile to Indigenous interests? Is voting in American elections compatible with Native cultural value systems? And, ultimately, is it even worth doing?

This year marks the centennial of the Indian Citizenship Act, which theoretically gave Native people the right to vote in U.S. elections — though it was several decades before all 50 states actually honored it. But U.S. citizenship and the right to vote in U.S. elections are not universally celebrated by Native people.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy rejected imposed U.S. citizenship as treasonous, and even now considers it a violation of international law. As citizens of the Six Nations, they do not necessarily seek dual citizenship. Indigenous history shows that citizenship and voting rights can actually be a defeat instead of a victory: they assimilate Natives, and face them with candidates who are unlikely to support Indigenous liberation. Given this reality, not all Natives embrace participation in American electoral political theater or see it as wholesome and constructive.

Among those who eventually rejected the right to vote in U.S. elections was the late Diné writer, activist and hard-core musician Klee Benally. In his 2023 book No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred, he argued that voting is simply “maintaining our own oppression.” The Native vote, he said, is an assimilationist tool for solving the “Indian Problem,” employed only when the U.S. military “couldn’t fulfill its genocidal programs.”

This year marks the centennial of the Indian Citizenship Act — but U.S. citizenship and the right to vote in U.S. elections are not universally celebrated by Native people.

Blackfire, the band Benally formed with his siblings, played at get-out-the-vote rallies in the aughts and was even in a short documentary called “Rez Rock the Vote.” Benally later explained that his politics back then were influenced by writers like Henry David Thoreau. But he grew disillusioned by what he saw as the Democratic Party’s “rampant co-optation, tokenization, victimization, and outright political exploitation.” Benally’s interest in Thoreau gave way to more radical influences, like Malcolm X and Industrial-era anarchist Lucy Parsons.

During the fraught 2020 election year, Benally published a zine called Voting is not Harm Reduction, which appeared as a chapter in his 2023 book. In online conversations, he ruffled feathers but also drew in others who shared his sentiments. Benally passed away just after his book was published. It quickly sold out, as the 2024 election year began.

Benally rejected voting entirely. He grounded his position in historical context, tracing the Native vote back to the Doctrine of Discovery, through boarding schools and allotment programs and into assimilationist policies. Native voting, he said, produces Native politicians, who he compared to “Indian scouts” — Natives enlisted “to aid the enemy military.”

“Liberation cannot be found in the occupier’s ballot box,” Benally wrote. “No matter who you vote for,” he concluded, “settler colonialism wins.”

MEANWHILE, Indigenous people who want to participate in U.S. elections still face rampant voter suppression. Jacqueline De León (Isleta Pueblo), staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, co-authored the 2020 report Obstacles at Every Turn, which outlines barriers to Native voting. These include long distances to polling stations, which may be off-reservation, or requiring proof of a home address in areas where legislators know some rural Natives would not have it — a strategy De León compares to Jim Crow “literacy tests.”

“Government gets its legitimacy, under some theories, through the consent of the governed,” De León explained, nodding to language in the Declaration of Independence. “And you express your consent through participation, even though you’re born into a system that’s largely outside of your control.” She understands why some regard voting as a form of consent, as Benally did: “I can respect that perspective.”

But that’s not the only way to think about it, she said. “America is both this colonizing impulse, designed to protect a few in power and retain its systems of power. And it’s a system that is designed to allow folks to engage and obtain power for themselves. It does both of those things simultaneously,” De León said. That’s not true of all colonizing governments, she noted. In its ideal form, American democracy “provides an opportunity for power, if you exercise it and have a fair chance to exercise it.”

For her, having that fair chance is essential before people can decide whether they want to engage. Owing to voter suppression, “we haven’t received a full and free and fair invitation to participate in the American system to begin with,” she said. “Until that happens, I just don’t think that question is ripe.”

Both De León and Nick Tilsen (Oglala Lakota), president and CEO of NDN Collective, pointed out that voting can create better conditions under which to organize. “We can be building towards the nationhood of tribal communities while at the same time voting in our (local elections) so that our sacred sites don’t get destroyed,” Tilsen said. In America’s flawed, inequitable and corporation-infiltrated version of democracy, he sees voting as a tactic. “We can be doing multiple different tactics.” In fact, Tilsen was doing that the day I spoke to him — organizing protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in solidarity with those demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. He was there with NDN Collective’s director of policy and advocacy, Janene Yazzie (Diné). They’d protested at the Republican National Convention the previous month.

“Our strategies don’t begin and end at the ballot box, and don’t begin and end with this two-party system,” said Yazzie. Partisan discourse, she said, is just smoke and mirrors: “The two parties are actually very much in alignment on many policy positions that have a detrimental impact on Indian country.” As an example, she cited U.S.-Mexico border control policies which criminalize the migration of transboundary Native communities that predate the border.

In his book, Benally points out that “resource colonialism was and continues to be a bipartisan effort.” In this context, the two parties are “nearly indistinguishable,” both being “allegiant managers of settler authority.”

Even if a Native casts tactical votes in state and local elections, what are they to do when faced with the kind of devil’s bargain federal elections present? Pressure to vote is noticeably high this year, awhirl with online rhetoric about voting as “harm reduction,” or the need to “vote blue no matter who” to “save democracy.”

“Our people don’t deserve that messaging,” Yazzie said. “When has this ‘democracy’ worked for us?” she laughed. “We have a responsibility to honor our lived experiences, to honor our ancestral memory, our histories of resistance.”

Benally wrote that pressuring non-voters is paternalistic and reflects the fragility of American democracy. “Policing civic engagement through shame and victim-blaming is a debasing tactic,” he wrote. He called voting-as-harm-reduction “the government issued blanket of the Democratic Party.” To heal, he said, we have to end the harm, not lessen it, and “restore healthy and just relations with Mother Earth and all her beings.”

“Liberation cannot be found in the occupier’s ballot box. No matter who you vote for, settler colonialism wins.”

RADICAL LANGUAGE can sometimes fracture communities and families. But De León, Yazzie, Tilsen and Benally himself seem to agree that the whole point of asking these questions is to find a healing path toward unity and freedom. “We all have to acknowledge that we’re starting from a position of pain,” De León said. “Here I am, advocating for America in some sense, and at the same time I’m fighting, day in and day out, hostile state and county governments that are denying basic civil rights.” It takes work to reconcile these contradictions, she added.

Benally expressed weariness at fighting for inclusion in settler society. “Why not fight to end the entirety of their violent global project? Why not fight for liberation?”

According to Yazzie, focusing too narrowly on voting-versus-not-voting is missing the bigger picture. “I don’t think voting is sacred — I think our resistance is sacred,” she said. She called Native resistance both a gift from our ancestors and a prayer for the next seven generations. To heal community division, Yazzie suggests individuals re-root themselves in the prayer or vision they hold. “What are we fighting for? What is that vision we have for our families and our communities?” she said. “That’s where our real unity comes up — not whether we all decide to vote or not, but what we decide we are working towards.”

The blueprint of American democracy, she noted, is “a poorly copied interpretation” of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s — one that’s abandoned Indigenous principles like matrilineality, matriarchy and responsibility to the land and to others. “We’re fighting for that right to restore those lifeways, to restore those practices,” she said.

This article appeared in the October 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Is voting sacred?”