Native Americans fight barriers to voting, 100 years after being recognized as U.S. citizens
Source: USA Today
Published 5:08 a.m. ET Sept. 15. 2024 | Updated 12:18 p.m. ET Sept. 15, 2024
WOLF POINT, Mont. – Louise Smith sits at her daughter’s dining room table on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, poring over photographs and newspaper clippings – the everyday scraps that weave a tapestry of her 101 years of life. She revisits the decades she spent as an Indian Health Service nurse; her retirement to care for her husband, Buck, before he died; and how, late in life, she was named the grand marshal at a parade this year marking the 100th anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act.
With an umbrella in hand to shield her from rain, she rode the parade route in a convertible clad with a banner that read: “Montana’s Oldest Native American Voter.” The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 took effect nine months after Smith was born, recognizing Native Americans as U.S. citizens and, on paper, extending the privileges of citizenship to them. Yet for decades, states continued to block Indigenous people from voting.
Utah considered anyone living on tribal lands nonresidents and ineligible to vote. Other states, including Arizona, barred people under guardianship from registering to vote and used a court case that likened the relationship between tribal nations and the U.S. to that of “a ward to his guardian” to enforce that ban against Native Americans.
It wasn’t until Smith was in her 40s that the federal government overruled state laws and guaranteed Indigenous people the right to vote by way of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Even now, Smith still casts a ballot every election. “It’s important,” she says, “because you want to know who you’re voting for or what they’re supposed to do for you after you get them in. “We all should be voting, you know?”
Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/09/15/states-restricting-native-americans-access-voting/75097055007/
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