By Farah Javed
Rosetta Walker, 62, a tireless advocate for getting out the Native vote in Arizona, recalls a recent conversation she had with a young Navajo woman, a PhD candidate in her late 20s.
Asking whether she was registered to vote, Walker said the woman replied no, she didn’t believe her vote mattered. It’s a response Walker, a certified deputy registrar, hears often as she reaches out to Native Americans, providing election resources to prospective voters in places like the Native Health Phoenix Clinic and Phoenix College.
“I had to come to the terms that you can’t change everybody’s point of view,” said Walker, who is Sioux and moved to the Phoenix area in the 1990s. “But what I was able to point out to her was that your ‘no’ vote is a ‘yes’ vote for the other party. If you choose not to vote, then you’re giving up that right.”
With Arizona’s upcoming midterm elections, Native women like Walker are leading voter outreach efforts to register and protect Native Americans’ suffrage.
One tool they use is the VAN, Voter Activation Network, a database that Arizona Democrats and progressive parties can use for fundraising, organizing and finding voters. As a precinct committee member, Walker uses VAN to reach out to all voters in district 12, including members of the Gila River Indian Community, just south of Phoenix, who are part of her district.
“We pulled the list and saw that this new area in our district now is about 10 square miles, but there’s only six voters. There’s only six neighborhoods, six houses, because it’s the reservation,” she said. “You drive 10 miles down the road, there’s another little pocket of community, another 10 miles, so that’s what the reservation is.”
Jaynie Parrish, Executive Director of the Navajo County Democrats, tries to bridge that gap during elections by using organizers who live in more distant, rural areas to reach Native Americans.
They also use VAN to target so-called high-potential voters, who rarely vote in midterms elections. However, reaching these Native American voters comes with challenges since there is a lack of broadband access and phone service on many reservations.
“Their phone numbers aren’t working,” said Parrish. “So how did we get a hold of these people? You know, where they live; you know, what communities they are in; you know their P.O. box. Having a strong offline is still important to us.”
Parrish’s midterms strategy reflects the community-driven approach to engaging with voters that her organization used during the pandemic and leading up to the 2020 presidential elections.
The Navajo County Democrats delivered personal protective equipment, water and truckloads of food to Natives on reservations who otherwise would have had to drive hours to receive supplies. They restarted registering people to vote before the primaries, and ultimately saw a large increase in mail-in voting in Navajo County and a three-fold increase among Apache voters.
Parrish and her organizers also pushed for other nonprofits to hire Native Americans; she credits that strategy with the successful voter turnout in 2020.
“They may not fit your resume checkbox over there, but you know what? Sandra Nelson is the best burrito lady in Winslow, and she comes back every week with the highest voter-registration numbers because she knows everybody because she’s the burrito lady,” Parrish said.
She pointed to “matriarchs, grandmothers, aunties” and her own mother, as people in the community who speak to family members and get them to register. Additionally, The Navajo County Democrats hosts postcard writings, flea markets and phone banks every Thursday that matriarchs participate in.
While Parrish’s organization focuses on getting voters to the booth, the Indian Legal Clinic’s Arizona Native Vote Election Protection Project seeks to defend the right to vote on election day.
The project tries to “reduce the number of tribal numbers turned away from polling sites,” according to Torey Dolan, Native Vote Fellow and member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is one of five women leading the project.
It also contains a network of volunteer lawyers, ready to litigate or advise on any issues on election day. The clinic partners with the Native American Bar Association of Arizona, the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona and the National Congress of American Indians.
While the project is devising strategies for any voter intimidation and possible violence in the upcoming midterm elections, Dolan remains concerned about how funding and burnout could impede outreach.
Parrish shares a similar concern.
“Ninety-eight percent of our operating budget is from individual donors,” Parrish said, adding that donations during the 2020 election season often came through connections that volunteers had in California, where supporters saw more value in donating to voter outreach in Navajo country than in their local communities, which were heavily Democratic.
Parrish said the out-of-state donations offset what she considered limited financial support from the Arizona Democratic Party. “We did get a $20,000 grant last year from our state party,” she said. “But there’s still little to no investment.”
On April 9, Gov. Doug Ducey signed H.B. 2569, prohibiting “the state, city, town, county, school district or other public body that conducts or administers elections from receiving or expending private monies for preparing, administering or conducting an election.” This ban applies to any part of the election process, from installing drop boxes to registering voters. While the implications of this bill have yet to be fully understood, Parrish explained that it will have an impact on her county.
“We were able to get grant money for our county to get more ballot boxes,” she said. “Boxes cost anywhere from three grand on up, but we helped connect the county election office to a non-profit organization that gave them like $10,000 to purchase more ballot boxes. We’re not sure how that’s going to work now.”
In addition to budget concerns, activists and voter organizations have several other contentious issues to balance.
“So many voting rights organizations put everything they had into 2020. It was a presidential election year and there was so much attention on Arizona, but then Jan. 6 happened, and the audit happened and the state legislature just came out against voting rights in ways that they never had before,” Dolan said. “There’s been a lot of turnover in terms of like work and who’s holding what jobs and organizations.”
Despite these challenges and the charged political environment surrounding the 2022 Arizona midterm elections, these Native women show no sign of slowing down their efforts.
Angela Willeford, an intergovernmental relations project manager for the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, tries to motivate Native youth to get interested in voting.
Her efforts to connect with tribal members ages 18 to 24 resulted in a Star Wars-themed ‘May the Vote Be With You’ event on May 4. It featured a cosplay contest, raffle and booths that educated attendees on how to become a poll worker and check one’s voter registration, as well as the importance of elections.
“Am I registered to vote? Do I need to update my voter address? Do you want to run for office?” Willeford said. “Then, we have another vendor. Then we have higher education that we included because of the age group.”
She also explained that the event included a video of the history of the Native vote. Willeford has her own role in voter outreach, having coined the phrase she uses to motivate young Natives to vote, “Our ancestors couldn’t vote, but you can.”
“Because when I first started, I realized that young people didn’t care about voting; they’re like ‘my vote doesn’t matter’,” she said. “How I got them interested was saying, well, historically, you weren’t able to vote. We weren’t able to vote until 1970.”
Willeford’s approach to getting the youth interested in voting proved successful as the COVID-19 pandemic led to older poll workers choosing to not work elections. Instead, the youth in the community stepped up to fill the poll-worker shortage.
Despite some initial issues in getting these volunteers trained, Willeford worked with the county, which will now provide training to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in late June.
“I just want our community members to be able to work in our polls on election days,” she said. “So that is in the pipeline, and we’re hoping to, I hope, it actually will be successful.”
With over 50 voter suppression bills in Arizona as of May 2022 and a lack of in-state funding among outreach groups, Native Americans face a particularly uphill battle in protecting and exercising their right to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. But nothing can stop these women, they say, from fiercely protecting their communities’ right to vote.
“As an older woman, as a Native American, I will stand up and I will have my few choice words,” Walker said. “If you want to say something about it, then go right ahead because this person is going to vote.”