By 5:30 a.m. on Election Day, Carol Davis (Navajo) was set up at her polling site in Dilkon, Ariz., as an observer for the Democratic Party. As the coordinator and director of the Navajo environmental advocacy group Diné C.A.R.E. worked at the polls — a tradition she began as an 18-year-old — her 20-year-old children distributed sack lunches and water to voters waiting in line.
About an hour and 20 minutes west of there, Raina Roanhorse (Navajo), a Native American outreach specialist at the Arizona voter engagement organization Instituto, waited in line at her local chapter house in Wide Ruins, Ariz., to vote in tribal elections. Like many of her fellow organizers, she’d voted by mail in the general election weeks earlier.
And in the seat of the Navajo Nation — Window Rock, Ariz. — Jaynie Parrish (Navajo), a director with the Navajo County Democratic Party, coordinated volunteers getting out the vote.
OJ Semans (Sicangu Oyate) of the national organization Four Directions and his family hired Native people across the country to get out the vote and led voter registration trainings so that volunteers could help their own communities. Semans estimates that those volunteers registered 2,500 new voters on the Navajo reservation.
“We hired individuals and they would just work within their family and their friends. So we didn’t have them pounding on doors of people they didn’t know. We had them working and calling people within their family and their friends that they had daily contact with anyway,” Semans said. “So we lessened the possibility of spreading the virus by utilizing the tribal members in their own network to get things done.”
Source: The Lily; 11/13/20
