Native American voters in northern Michigan hope to keep up 'political momentum'

It was a miserable, rainy election day across Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

But for the volunteers huddled under a tent outside a polling station in Bay Mills Indian Community, it wasn't the biggest obstacle for getting voters to cast a ballot.

"Some of the feedback I've heard 'Well, why would I vote? That's what white people do,'" said Joshua Hudson, manager with the Native Organizers Alliance.

"Being Anishinaabe, we decided things through council and that's group decision-making and voting is group decision-making. So this is traditional, just because it's on paper doesn't mean it isn't."

The 35-year-old and other volunteers from Bay Mills, an Ojibwe community of 1,800 just west of Sault Ste. Marie, spent the day driving voters to polling stations and handing out free coffee and T-shirts.

"Native voters aren't reached out to as much by the various campaigns," said Hudson, adding that his group is also targeting "data invisibility," making sure that the electoral records parties use to plan their campaigns identifies Indigenous voters.

"There's the cloak of invisibility. We're harder to be seen. We're harder to reach. But we're very active and politically engaged voters."

Hudson says one of the great victories in recent years was the appointment of the first Native American to the federal cabinet.

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a Pueblo from New Mexico, had the slur "squaw" removed from some 500 place names and also toured the country speaking to former students of Indigenous boarding schools, leading to an apology from President Joe Biden last month. 

"This is showing the political momentum of Indian country," said Hudson. 

Volunteer Christian Perron says there was little debate about this presidential election in Bay Mills, where people seemed pretty "entrenched" in their positions.

"I don't know if I've ever met one, but certainly not in this cycle have I met an undecided voter. I'm not even sure they exist," he said.

Daanis Teeple said some of the voters in Bay Mills she was speaking with were de-motivated by an infamous CNN report from 2020 listing the racial voting groups in America as: 'white, black, Hispanic and 'something else.'"

"And so just seeing that way that we are misrepresented to where somebody might not want to or feel comfortable," said the 24-year-old.

Teeple says one of the voters she did get to the polls was her grandmother, who was involved in the American Indian Movement in the 1960s and 1970s that saw a resurgence of Indigenous culture across the United States.

"She was excited that we came to vote together," she said. 

"She was there when Native people weren't allowed to practice their culture. I think it's kind of the same mission."