Potlatch for politicians

By Timothy Egan

Friday, Oct. 24, 2014 | 2:02 a.m.

An editor with multiple graduate degrees once called me with a story idea hatched among fellow trend-sniffers in New York.

“Indians,” he said, with practiced urgency. “Something’s going on with American Indians. Look into it and tell me what you think.”

Dutifully, I reported back that the first Americans were still poor, still forgotten, still there — albeit with casinos and better lobbyists in Washington. The forgotten part applies especially at elections, given that natives who list themselves as “Indian alone” on the census form make up less than 1 percent of the total U.S. population.

But — news alert! — with barely two weeks to go until the midterm federal election, the most underrepresented people in the country could be the kingmakers for control of the Senate. Let us pause for the cynical voice of an Indian friend who thinks elections don’t matter.

“Democrats, Republicans, they’re all white to me,” he says.

Still, the fact that all the money and manipulations of the Koch brothers could be undone by a handful of native voters living in some of the poorest and most remote parts of the land is a tribute to our teetering democracy. More time has been wasted defending the name of the Washington NFL team than has ever been spent discussing tribal sovereignty or how the modern diet is killing too many natives. Yet now, important-sounding people have been forced to learn a phrase in Yup’ik, or find Shannon County, S.D., on a map.

The Senate, by design, is unrepresentative. Why should Wyoming have as many senators as California, which has more than 60 times the population? That design also means people in crowded states occasionally have to feign concern for residents in wide-open spaces.

Thus we find ourselves in Alaska and South Dakota, where the native vote could be all that stands in the way of a Republican-controlled Senate. Alaska voters, though quirky and contrarian no matter what the race, seem poised to give Republican Dan Sullivan the seat now held by Democrat Mark Begich. Except typically, the polls are more misleading in the Last Frontier than a fish finder’s sonar in a bathtub.

Only about 250,000 people are expected to vote there. Of those, almost 1 in 5 has some Alaska Native or Indian blood — the highest percentage of any state. Begich has been feverishly working native villages in advance of the state’s two weeks of early voting. If the race is a nail-biter, look for late returns from, say, Kotzebue, an Inupiat town on a gravel spit 33 miles north of the Arctic Circle, to decide the winner.

In South Dakota, Native Americans are the largest single minority group, and they tend to vote Democratic. In a three-way race, heavy turnout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation might be enough to prevent the fading Republican front-runner, Mike Rounds, from picking up the seat. Tribal elections are the same day, as is a ballot measure to change the name of Shannon County, which is more than 90 percent Indian, to Oglala Lakota County. In 2012, the tribes of North Dakota provided the winning margin for Democrat Heidi Heitkamp, who won her Senate seat by just more than 4,000 votes.

“The candidate who learns best how to ask Indians for their votes could be the winner,” Indian Country Today, the national tribal paper, reported in a recent story on South Dakota.

What no vote can change are the woeful conditions in many parts of Indian country. Suicide, substance abuse and chronic unemployment are the scourges of many tribal homelands. Half the people in Shannon County live below the poverty level.

Depressing, yes. So what we talk about when we talk about Indians seldom gets beyond caricature. On the left, measures such as Seattle’s new designation of the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day is the kind of empty, feel-good measure that sets up a comically liberal city council for mockery. It’s not a real holiday, just enough of one to insult Italian-Americans who feel slighted at the dis of Christopher Columbus.

On the right, there is a hysterical fear of granting Indians any real power. So the Violence Against Women Act almost didn’t make it through renewal last year because Republicans didn’t want to allow tribes to prosecute non-Indians who assaulted Indians in Indian country.

Obamacare is a pundit’s punching bag in much of the country. But on reservations, it has made a life-or-death difference for thousands of people whose health has been improved by some of the law’s lesser-known provisions.

At the center of most questions in the native world is a construct that Americans often forget or ignore: nations within a nation. Tribes point to their treaties that grant a degree of sovereignty, signed by long-dead presidents, backed by Supreme Court decisions. If they can get a politician to understand that at election time, it’s a minor victory.

Timothy Egan is a columnist for The New York Times.