CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
Dec. 2, 2009 – 12:02 a.m.
American Indians Exercise Political Clout
By Kerry Young, CQ-Roll Call
American Indians may be the original Americans, but they have commanded little attention in Washington over the years, in part because of their small numbers and smaller incomes. Their influence reached a particularly low ebb after the fall of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, convicted in 2006 for bilking tribes of millions in casino profits.
Yet, American Indians have been steadily and quietly building new clout on Capitol Hill. Aided in part by those same casino profits, as well as the shifting electoral landscape, American Indians have wielded growing influence in the past three election cycles — both by making significant donations to candidates and, perhaps even more important, by turning out in much greater numbers to vote.
Indeed, the votes of American Indians were credited with helping at least two Democrats defeat incumbent Republican senators. In 2006, Jon Tester ousted Abramoff-tainted Conrad Burns in part by campaigning in Indian country. Increased tribal voter registration may have aided Al Franken ’s 312-vote victory in Minnesota over Norm Coleman last year, which helped give the Senate Democratic Caucus its much-coveted 60-vote majority.
As a result, American Indians are now in position, for the first time in decades, to make demands on Congress and the administration to address long-neglected problems in tribal communities where, as recently as nine years ago, 12 percent of reservation homes lacked adequate plumbing.
President Obama signed a law last month that contained the biggest spending increase for the Indian Health Service in 20 years, and he installed at its helm the first American Indian woman to hold that position. Obama also followed through on a campaign pledge to appoint a White House policy adviser for Native American affairs, and he has pushed congressional leaders to make time in the legislative calendar for a bill that would beef up law enforcement on reservations.
“This has probably been the best year for Native Americans” in a long time, said Tom Cole , an Oklahoma Republican who is part Chickasaw and the only enrolled member of a tribe now in Congress. “Certainly, in my experience, I have never seen anything like it.”
Not Only About Casinos
The newfound political strength of American Indians grows out of a long history of political disenfranchisement. It was only in 1924 that Congress passed a law making clear that American Indians are U.S. citizens with full voting rights — about a half-century after passage of a constitutional amendment for blacks and four years after one granting voting rights to women. That one federal law alone didn’t prevent states and communities from creating barriers to voting by American Indians, and they — like blacks — were given additional protections in the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
There are more than 560 registered Indian tribes. While money from casinos has undoubtedly helped leverage their influence, fewer than half of the tribes are involved in gambling, so their clout appears to result mostly from a new focus on grass-roots organizing.
Analysts say the earliest sign of the voting power of American Indians may have been the defeat in 2000 of Sen. Slade Gorton, a Washington Republican who was regarded by many American Indians as having tried to weaken their sovereignty with a 1998 bill that would have permitted lawsuits against tribes in federal court. Analysts say votes from the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation probably helped South Dakota Democrat Tim Johnson keep his Senate seat in 2002.
These races “made more of a case for candidates to seek the vote of native people,” said Manley A. Begay Jr., a senior lecturer in the American Indian studies program at the University of Arizona. “Candidates are beginning to say, ‘I’ve got to court that vote.’”
Beyond providing margins in critical races, American Indians have sharply increased their contributions to political campaigns. Tribal campaign donations increased nearly sevenfold to $11.4 million in the 2008 election cycle from $1.7 million in 2000.
At the same time, Indians are more politically savvy, analysts say, because of improved education. The number of college and university degrees awarded to American Indians, including Alaska Natives, almost tripled from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s, said Diane-Michele Prindeville, an associate professor at New Mexico State University. Many graduates have returned to reservations, she said, helping to provide a bridge between Indian communities and the wider political world.
“They’ve really become a whole lot more sophisticated and knowledgeable over time,” Prindeville said.
‘Enclaves of Lawlessness’
Gains in electoral clout come at a time when Indians are increasingly concerned that they need help from Washington.
The Census Bureau in 2000 released the first poverty data for the country’s 4.3 million American Indians, and it found 26 percent were impoverished, slightly more than the poverty rate for blacks (24 percent) or Hispanics (23 percent) and more than double that of the broad population (12 percent). Other statistics paint an even direr portrait of tribal life. Indians are 70 percent more likely than Americans overall to commit suicide, almost three times as likely to die from diabetes and more than six times as likely to die from alcoholism, according to the most recent numbers from the Indian Health Service.
Perhaps more disturbing are the crime statistics. American Indians are twice as likely to die from homicide as the population as a whole, and the Department of Justice estimates that one of every three Indian women will be the victim of rape.
One reason for the high rates is that crimes that take place on reservations often go unprosecuted. According to a 2007 Amnesty International report, an 1825 law and the court decisions that followed sliced up responsibility for handling serious crimes on reservations into a patchwork, and it is often unclear whether federal, state or local authorities are responsible for prosecutions.
The result is what Jacqueline Johnson Pata, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, calls “enclaves of lawlessness” on Indian lands. For fiscal 2003, for instance, Amnesty International estimated that federal prosecutors declined to pursue more than 60 percent of sexual violence cases filed involving Indian women.
David Lisak, a criminal psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, said the low prosecution rate creates a “free pass” for rapists on Indian reservations. Men from outside may seek out women on reservations, he suggested, knowing there is little risk of being caught or brought to justice.
As a senator who owes his election at least partly to American Indian votes, Montana’s Tester has used his seat on the Appropriations Committee to pressure the Justice Department to do a better job with prosecutions on reservations.
Legislation that would overhaul law enforcement on tribal lands is making its way slowly though Congress. The Senate Indian Affairs Committee approved a measure in September, although a companion House measure hasn’t advanced that far. Obama and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. have both called on Congress to pass the measures quickly.
Johnson Pata credits the close relationship of the Senate bill’s sponsor, North Dakota Democrat Byron L. Dorgan , with Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada for some of the progress on Indian issues. “His seniority in the Senate helps elevate solutions to the challenges in our communities,” she said.
Dorgan’s predecessor as chairman of the Indian Affairs panel was Republican John McCain of Arizona, who helped expose Abramoff for overbilling tribes for dubious lobbying. Yet Indians appear to have turned away from McCain in the 2008 presidential election. Although exit polls did not have a large enough sample to gauge how Indians voted nationally, results from reservation precincts suggested that Indian voters had a strong preference for Obama. For instance, three precincts in South Dakota’s Pine Ridge reservation went 89 or 90 percent for Obama.
Paula Mohan, an editor of the research journal Indigenous Policy, described the 2008 election as a political watershed for Indians.
“American Indians also turned out to vote in unprecedented numbers for Obama, reflecting not only support for him and endorsement by American Indian lobbying groups, but also the increased political participation of many American Indians in general,” Mohan said.
Obama seems to have taken notice. In early November, he held a high-profile White House summit with tribal leaders, less than a week after signing a bill to increase the regular funding for Indian Health Services by 13 percent to $4.1 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. And he quickly filled a post that more often than not lacked a Senate-confirmed appointee during the Bush administration — assistant secretary for Indian affairs at the Interior Department. The Senate confirmed former Idaho Attorney General Larry Echo Hawk for that post in May.
While American Indian advocates say they are pleased with such changes in tribal fortunes, some with long experience worry that the attention may be fleeting, especially during hard fiscal times.
“Native Americans have the ability for the first time to sit at the table with competing interest groups,” said Diane Humetewa of Arizona, the first American Indian woman to serve as a U.S. attorney and who is now a principal with the Squire, Sanders & Dempsey law firm in Washington. But she said maintaining that momentum “is going to be the challenge, because of the fiscal situation that the nation is in at the moment.”
Comments
I can not say in all honesty that I like this article. It does strike some nice points, but I wonder how accurate the reporter is in it's information. I know how hard it is for a reporter to write about Native Americans as it's difficult to write regarding all 568 federally recognized tribes; then if you add in the tribes that are only state recognized... then the tribes that struggle to receive any sort of recognition... it is very easy to lump us all together and refer to us as mere "indians" and differentiate us from you "Americans". I was pretty excited to read this article when I saw it on my facebook page as a link. I love reading about how non-Natives see our "rise to political power", mostly because I'm planning on entering this field myself. However, the article took an unexpected, odd, non-sensical turn when it started to go on and on about these horrible crime statistics. It's been long proven that political influence has nothing to do with crime rates or grass roots organizing. It's about biased reporting in news stories and who has the most mazaska around. I wonder where exactly those statistics come from for example. Aside from all of this, it's a cute story. Perfect for a reader who has just discovered that Native Americans still exist.
I am surprised the author did not mention the initial help to Indian Tribes from United States Senator Ben Campbell, an American Indian from Colorado who served two terms and used that time to represent all tribes and make great strides in such divergent issues as indian health, indian water rights, indian schools, indian natural resources, and indian culture. He was an excellent Senator and his absence from the Senate is missed both by the Indian people and by his Colorado Constituents.
The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma spends more on Politicos than on Cherokees. Brad Carson got A Lot of Cash and Lost. The CNO then gave him A job playing Golf and spending Cherokee Cash to fight the Black Cherokee. He is back now they say but just to get his Check no one has seen him. Chad Smith the Chief of the 1975 Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma has A DC office and 2 former BIA people getting A Check also. The only problem with the CNO is they buy out company's and then go broke like Global Energy Group A loss of 14 Million of Federal Funds ? The FBI and SEC are looking at Chief Smith for this. One thing Chad got away with too was admitting he has two set's of Children the same ages ? I thought Bigamy was against the Law too?
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