WMC News & Features

100 Years After Suffrage, Native American Women Still Fighting to Vote

Wmc features Louise Mc Donald Herne 082020
Louise McDonald Herne, condoled Bear Clan matron of the Mohawk Nation Council of Chiefs: “Women of all nations, step into your inherent authority, without apology.”

One hundred years ago, the 19th Amendment was passed, guaranteeing women in the United States the right to vote — or so the story goes. But after 1920, Native American women had to keep fighting for the right to vote in the U.S. — a struggle that continues to this day — despite a history of strong influence of Native American women on suffragist ideas, a history that still remains hidden to most Americans.

Throughout most of the 1800s, leading suffragists Lucretia Mott, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were visiting, studying, documenting, and becoming increasingly influenced by the women of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — six Native American nations more commonly known as the Iroquois Confederacy — because “Native women had power beyond their wildest dreams,” according to Sally Roesch Wagner, executive director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Center for Social Justice Dialogue.

Lucretia Mott spent months on Haudenosaunee lands. In 1893, Matilda Joslyn Gage was both arrested for registering to vote by colonialist authorities and honorarily adopted for her views on women’s rights by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — specifically the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk. Unlike European women, women of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy had full political and social equality: proof for the suffragists that women’s subordination was neither natural nor ordained by God.

The agenda of the 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights convention borrowed heavily from the political and social equality that key organizer Lucretia Mott saw at Haudenosaunee. Seen as the doorkeepers to life, women had the inherent right to recall leaders and the right to veto war. Women of the Six Nations had total control over their own bodies, including the right to abandon an unwanted pregnancy; control over property; custody of the children; and rights to initiate divorce, to satisfying work, and to a society generally free of rape and domestic violence. Iroquois women had the power to select the chiefs and to remove the chiefs for murder, theft, or sexual assault. They participated in all major decisions.

“In Haudenosaunee life ways, a leader speaks little of himself and is measured by humble character and kindness to the people,” says Louise McDonald Herne, condoled Bear Clan matron of the Mohawk Nation Council of Chiefs. “Leadership is not self-serving, and a man of truth dodges his prominence until he is called by the uterine voice of his clan, a Clan Mother, and not until she bestows his emblem of authority upon his brow (deer antlers) does his voice become endorsed to speak on behalf of the people he is to serve.”

From the very first encounters, the male European colonialist was threatened by matrilineal authority and was determined to destroy it. Early on, colonial authorities refused to interact with Iroquois women, who were removed from treaty negotiations. Once European men achieved dominance, they set about limiting the rights of both Native women and men to participate in the political system of the United States. For Native women, it was more than ironic that so much of the thinking of white suffragists was influenced by Six Nations women while the 19th Amendment didn’t guarantee Native American women the right to vote.

Initially designed to deny American Indians the right to vote, the U.S. electoral system continues to actively propagate voter suppression, racism, and disenfranchisement of American Indians. American Indians didn’t become U.S. citizens until the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, and even then, they continued to be denied voting rights until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). While the VRA helped improve access for Native American voters, challenges continued. For instance, states would often require Native people to renounce their tribal citizenship in order to vote — a direct violation of the U.S. Constitution, which provides dual federal and tribal citizenship for American Indians. Most ballot boxes are located outside of reservations in unfriendly border towns requiring traveling hundreds of miles over terrible roads to get to the polls.

Just before the 2018 midterm elections, a voter ID law went into effect in North Dakota requiring a residential address and prohibiting the use of P.O. boxes as residential addresses, according to “How the Native American Vote Continues to Be Suppressed,” an article by law professor Patty Ferguson-Bohnee published earlier this year in the American Bar Association magazine Human Rights. Since reservations often do not have residential addresses, this left more than 5,000 Native Americans without the required ID. Tribal leaders were told that voters could be assigned an address by the county 911 coordinator. For Sioux County, where the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is located, the 911 coordinator is the county sheriff, “which posed a deterrent for community members wary of law enforcement,” according to the article.

“When a Standing Rock Sioux tribal member called to determine her residential address, the sheriff told her that he was transporting prisoners and could not assign addresses that day,” Ferguson-Bohnee reported. “Another voter was assigned a residential address corresponding to a nearby bar, exposing that tribal member to fraud if he voted based on that address.”

Ferguson-Bohnee reported several examples of “extreme distances Native voters must travel and the obstacles they must overcome in order to exercise their constitutional rights to vote”:

  • In 2008, the Alaskan government eliminated polling locations for Alaska Native villages as part of a “district realignment” that resulted in voters having to travel by plane in order to vote.
  • In the Southwest, non-Hispanic whites are 350 percent more likely to have mail delivered to their homes than Native Americans.
  • In 2016, the Pyramid Lake and Walker River Paiute Tribes in Nevada filed a lawsuit prior to the general election in order to get polling locations on the reservation.
  • Also in 2016, San Juan County in Utah switched to a mail-only voting system and offered in-person early voting only in the majority-white part of the county. In response, the Navajo Nation sued to ensure in-person locations and compliance with the language assistance requirements under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act.
  • For the Kaibab Paiute Tribe in Arizona, in 2016 and 2018, voters had to travel 280 miles one way to vote early in person.
  • When Pima County closed early voting on the Pascua Yaqui Reservation in 2018, tribal members reported that they had to travel over two hours on public transportation to reach the nearest polling location.
  • The closure of polling locations on the Mandan Hidatsa Reservation in North Dakota resulted in voters having to travel 80–100 miles in order to cast a ballot.

    Voter turnout for Native Americans is five to 14 percentage points lower than that of other racial groups. And the Supreme Court’s invalidation of the Section 5 preclearance formula in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision removed one of the most powerful tools Native people had to ensure their participation at the ballot box.

    Obstacles at Every Turn: Barriers to Political Participation by Native Voters, a groundbreaking recent study by the Native American Rights Fund and Native Voter Initiative, found that “every barrier imaginable is deployed against Native American voters” — in registering, casting ballots, and even getting ballots counted. Only 66 percent of the eligible Native American voting population is registered to vote, which means that more than 1 million Native Americans who are eligible are not registered. Yet according to the report, “Native American voters have made a difference in elections for both political parties in numerous states.” The report found that the Native vote made the difference in the elections of Senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska and Senator Jon Tester in Montana. In Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Colorado, the Native vote can determine who wins in 2020.

    American Indians are now winning more representation in states like Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Alaska, which each have a population that is at least 10 percent Indigenous. In September 2018, Kimberly Teehee became the Cherokee Nation’s first delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives. Her nomination followed the historic 2018 midterm elections of Representatives Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) and Sharice Davids (D-Kan.), who are the first American Indian women to serve in Congress.

    The story of the Haudenosaunee women and the suffragists is nearly lost to history because ideas of women’s agency and equality retain their power to threaten the forces of oppression. Through their time with the Wolf Clan, the suffragists saw firsthand that there were societies in which women were not treated as inferior to men. Finally, women of all colors and from all corners of the United States are coming together to demand a democratic system designed to invite their participation. Now is the time to demand full political and social equality. In the words of Louise McDonald Herne: “A straitjacket imprisons our memory, and the newcomers to this land are stuck in a process where leaders rise to power by the campaigns they purchase. The land is a lady and ladies, you are the law. Women of all nations, step into your inherent authority, without apology. You’re a doorkeeper to life: Choose a leader, and legislate the full power of recall.”



    More articles by Category: Politics
    More articles by Tag: Women's leadership, Activism and advocacy, Elections, Native American, Indigenous
    SHARE

    [SHARE]

    Article.DirectLink

    Contributor
    Categories
    Sign up for our Newsletter

    Learn more about topics like these by signing up for Women’s Media Center’s newsletter.