In South Dakota’s Indian Country, getting to polls is half the struggle

ROSEBUD, South Dakota — Rose Cordier is driving her Dodge Grand Caravan down a desolate patch of highway when she spots a woman walking along the shoulder, leading a little girl dressed in a Hello Kitty T-shirt by the hand.

 As she so often does when she sees people — particularly women and children — walking by the side of the road on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Cordier slows the car, rolls down the window, and hollers, “Where you going? Need a ride?”

Marlene Metcalf, 22, hops in, no questions asked, introduces herself and tells Cordier that she’s going to the neighboring St. Francis community, about eight miles away. As the van whizzes past long stretches of barren, empty fields, her three-old-daughter quickly falls asleep in her lap.

“Hey, are you registered to vote?” Cordier asks.

Metcalf shakes her head.

“Oh darn,” Cordier says. “It’s too late now.”

“What’s it for?” Metcalf asks.

“For the senators and the politicians.”

For Cordier, a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe who has been registering voters on the reservation every election cycle for 20 years, the process of getting Native voters in her community to the polls is often a hit-or-miss, labor-intensive effort. Weeks before the voter-registration deadline, Cordier and a small team of volunteers from the tribe fanned out across Rosebud’s 20 communities, spanning 2,000 square miles, knocking on doors and encouraging participation.

“This year, there hasn’t been that much interest,” Cordier said. “Most people here, they don’t have cars and people that do have cars don’t have the money to buy gasoline. Even if people here are registered to vote, they don’t find it important enough.”

Sometimes Cordier works with a candidate or a voting organization. This year, she said the midterms have flown so far underneath the radar that she did not think to apply for funding and has mostly spearheaded a small grassroots effort. On Election Day, she’ll be out in her van again, giving rides to anyone who asks to go to a polling station.  

Despite the challenges to access, Native voters have proved that they can be a critical voting bloc in South Dakota, where they constitute about 9 percent of the population, according to Census Bureau Statistics. In 2002, a strong showing among the tribes helped Sen. Tim Johnson, a Democrat who is retiring, eke out a slim 524-vote victory over his opponent, with ballots from neighboring Shannon County, where the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is located, giving him his narrow margin of victory.

“He went to bed down a few hundred votes, and when he woke up, he had won by 524,” said Zach Crago, executive director of the South Dakota Democratic Party. “Folks understand what kind of impact [Native Americans] can have in Senate elections.”

This year, Democratic candidate Rick Weiland is hoping Native votes can make the difference for him in South Dakota’s unexpectedly competitive four-way Senate contest. As the only hopeful who opposes the Keystone XL pipeline — a hot-button issue among Native Americans, the majority of whom are adamantly against its construction — and the sole candidate who has aggressively courted votes on reservations, he’s been endorsed by all nine tribal nations in South Dakota.

But the challenge is translating that support into ballots.

“The Indian Country voter turnout model is a little bit different,” Crago said. “For the same reason that they’re hard to see in polls, they’re hard to reach for traditional get-out-the-vote efforts.”

Cordier’s trek across Rosebud Reservation shows the difficulties that remain with a population that experiences disproportionate levels of poverty and has myriad reasons to distrust the electoral process.  As her van passes by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailers repurposed into government-subsidized homes and ramshackle neighborhoods with stray dogs roaming the streets, Cordier laughs about accusations of voter fraud in Indian Country.

“I really don’t think that’ll ever happen here,” she said. “We can barely get people to vote once, much less two or three times.”

When asked about the problems on the Rosebud Reservation, Cordier rattles off a long list. The median household income is approximately $19,000, according to 2010 Census figures, and 44 percent of people live below the poverty line in Todd County, which is the seat of Rosebud's tribal government. Unemployment on the reservation hovers around 80 percent. In addition, Cordier cites high homelessness, rampant alcoholism, and a woefully underperforming health care system, as well as the Sioux’s biggest grievance — that their treaties with the U.S. government have not been upheld.

In 1978, the United States Court of Claims – in handling one of the numerous disputes between the Sioux and the federal government – said of the U.S. government's conduct toward the tribe, "a more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealing will never, in all probability, be found in our history."  

“I want people to learn there is help available but we have to speak up for it, to relay to our senators and congress people that we have these problems that need to be addressed,” Cordier said. “I know they can’t do it alone, but what I ask of the candidates who come here is that when they’re in office to at least mention our issues and our treaties.”  

In St. Francis, Cordier rolls down her window again to give a Weiland yard sign to an acquaintance. Kerwin Eagleman, 60, is waiting outside a senior center, looking for a ride from anyone who is willing to take him to a liquor store in neighboring Nebraska.

Eagleman too said he would be supporting Weiland on Election Day because he’s the only one that’s bothered to show up on Rosebud and has promised to fight for sovereignty for the Indian tribal nations. Eagleman’s polling place, however, is in Mission, 20 miles away, where he originally registered to vote. To get there, “I figure I’ll start jogging,” he said.

Still, there is some good news with regard to voting access on the reservations this election year. After Four Directions, a legal advocacy group that works to encourage Native American political participation in the Great Plains, served up a series of legal challenges to state and county officials who were blocking satellite early voting sites that would cater to Native American voters, such offices have opened on nearly every reservation in South Dakota and were operational for 46 days of early voting.

O.J. Semans, the executive director of the group, said it could mean the difference between a two-mile trip to the satellite office and a 25-mile slog to the nearest county seat to vote. Semans can’t see any logical rationale for blocking the sites, especially since South Dakota has received millions of dollars in federal funds through the 2002 Help America Vote Act for the explicit purpose of helping poor and remote communities exercise their voting rights.

“You don’t have to be rocket scientist to realize that if you give one group of people 46 days to vote and then you give another set one day, we don’t stand a chance,” Semans said.

In Todd County, where there’s a satellite office for the first time, the results are promising: 12 percent of active voters have already cast their ballots, the highest percentage in the state, according to numbers compiled by the local newspaper the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.

“If our treaties were honored, which they have not been, we would not have to participate in the election process because we would have the things we needed taken care of,” Semans added. “Now, we have no choice but to try to get Congress to understand.”

Four Directions too has been canvassing across the tribal regions registering voters and will be organizing rides on Election Day.  

For all the barriers to participation there may be in Indian Country, a number of those who spoke with Al Jazeera America were deeply engaged in the election.

Teddie Herman Rogers said that she felt the Native American vote had been suppressed for years, but that it was still vitally important.

“I remember a few years back over at the county building, there were a lot of people standing outside in suits watching us vote because they thought that there was cheating going on. It just seems like they do whatever they can to keep our numbers low,” she said. “We need someone in there to give us a voice to try to overcome all the oppression we’ve faced.”