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Trahant Reports – What If Indian Country Had Its Own Primary?

March 7, 2016 By NV1

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We’re deep in the primary season — and I have an audacious idea.

This is Trahant Reports.

The primary election is a recent invention. Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic Party’s nomination in 1968 without winning a single primary. Walter Mondale and Fred Harris led an effort at the party convention in Chicago to make that happen even though Gene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy had won state primary votes (Kennedy, of course, had been assassinated before the convention.)

The back room deals at the convention were ugly and it led to the modern primary and caucus system.

When I was an editorial page editor I did not like the taxpayers paying for party primary elections. I thought they ought to be open contests, such as Washington state’s top two primary, or completely private party affairs. In a top two primary, only a couple of candidates move on to the November ballot no matter which party they represent. So in most cases it could be a Democrat versus a Republican in November. But not always. It could be a socialist versus a conservative or even two Democrats. It’s who ever wins first and second.

Would that system work in a presidential election? I doubt it. This year is a good example of why that’s not so good an idea; there would be less choice, not more. But we do need to rethink how we elect presidents and come up with a mechanism that makes certain that more than half of the country is on board with the winning candidate. We need more experiments in democracy.

I bring this up because many in Indian Country are wondering about who is winning that vote? Who does Indian Country support?

In most parts of the country Native Americans are Democrats. (There are significant pockets of Native Republicans in Oklahoma and Alaska.)

Here is what we know: Bernie Sanders won one precinct on Iowa’s only reservation. We know that Hillary Clinton won the delegate rich Walker River Paiute Reservation in Nevada. And that Sanders won Duck Valley but that was only a single delegate to the county convention.

There is not enough data to know which candidate “won” Indian Country in Nevada.

So here is my idea (too late for this cycle): What if Indian Country had its own primary?

If there were money to pay for this, tribal election offices could manage the voting. Perhaps there could even be a secondary system set up to count votes from urban populations.

Think about it: There are primary elections for overseas voters. Sanders won the Super Tuesday vote from New Zealand by a margin of 21 to 6. And voters in Guam cast their ballots today. These elections are not just for fun; delegates are at stake.

There is no reason Indian Country cannot get the same treatment.

This makes sense when more and more federal laws and policies are written with “states and tribes” in mind. Letting Indian Country vote adds to that process.

I especially like the idea of tribal voters going first. A wonderful phrase: First Nations … first in the nation.

Remember primary elections and caucuses are party affairs. Democrats and Republicans could just decide that #NativeVotesMatter and make it so. I am Mark Trahant reporting.

Trahant Reports – Courting Native Voters

February 8, 2016 By NV1

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Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, left, and Hillary Rodham Clinton talk before the CNN Democratic presidential debate Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2015, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/David Becker)

Democrats running for president are starting to make their case to Native American voters.

This is Trahant Reports.

Except for one precinct in Iowa there has not been a lot of reason to court Native voters. Iowa’s Native American population is 1/2 of 1 percent. New Hampshire is 2/10th of one percent. These states do not look like the rest of the country.

But Nevada, where Democrats will caucus on Feb. 20, is even more diverse than the rest of the country.

Brookings Institute scholar William Frey describes Nevada as “the epitome of a state that witnessed an explosion of diversity in recent decades. In 2000 its electorate was 76 percent white, compared with 58 percent now.”

So both Democratic campaigns are in Native communities urging people to participate in their caucus. To win a caucus, you have to get people to go to a meeting; it’s not quite as simple as casting a ballot.

The Clinton campaign has had Native American advisors since last fall when Hillary Clinton addressed members of the National Congress of American Indians via YouTube.

Clinton said:

“Hello NCAI … As Senator I cosponsored legislation to improve health care for American Indians. I worked to improve tribal colleges and other Native institutions. As Secretary of State, I advocated for the U.S. to endorse the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. I did these things because the United States has a sacred trust with Native Americans and we need to do a much better job of keeping that trust. You are our neighbors, our friends, our fellow Americans.You deserve a president who will honor your sovereignty, learn from the past, and fight for your futures. That’s exactly the kind of president I will be.”

The Clinton campaign has three senior Native American policy advisers, Rion Ramierz Jr., Holly Cook Macarro, and Charlie Galbraith.

Now the Sanders campaign has its team in place.

At a recent meeting of the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, Nicole Willis was introduced as a special advisor to the Bernie Sanders campaign. Willis is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon, she has worked for the Obama administration, and was with the Obama campaign.

She said Sanders has already staked out positions. If elected president, Sanders will continue with the annual Tribal Nations Conference started by President Obama, hire a senior Native American advisor on at the White House, and expand the Violence Against Women Act. Sanders has also said he would find additional money for the Generation Indigenous initiative.

Sanders also promised that tribes would have a seat on the table on a broad set of issues. In the first 100 days he said there would be a summit on climate change and tribes would be full participants.

This is Mark Trahant reporting.

Trahant Reports – Redrawing Indian Country

September 8, 2015 By NV1

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler speaking at the Brookings Institution recently. #FCCGov (Photo by Paul Morigi, courtesy of Brookings)

The Federal Communication Commission has a novel idea: Redrawing “Indian Country” boundaries in Oklahoma by using a map from another century. This is Trahant Reports.

So where did this idea come from? The Federal Communication Commission has been rethinking the rules for its Lifeline program. This 1985 program is supposed give poor people have access to telephones, essential tools for finding and keeping jobs, connecting with family, or calling a clinic to make a doctor’s appointment.

The nature of life in this digital age means that American Indians and Alaska Natives need to find a way to be connected. But even simple ideas run up against the complexity of history and the challenges of defining tribal lands and sovereignty.

The Lifeline program became a pipeline for fraud because it was phone companies that determined eligibility, even filling out paperwork for clients. So a couple of years ago the FCC scaled back the number of eligible consumers.

The FCC says Oklahoma is a particularly thorny problem because some two-thirds of the state was considered on “Indian land” and so people were eligible whether or not there they had ties to a tribe.

The FCC’s solution is to invent a new definition of tribal lands in Oklahoma.

Defining tribal lands is easy in a reservation setting. (Or at least it should be.) But it is far more complex in Oklahoma, Alaska, Nevada, and other regions where the history is different. The FCC proposal uses a map from 1870 to 1890 to identify “former” reservation lands. Only tribal citizens within those century-old boundaries will be considered eligible for the subsidy.

Brian Howard, a legislative analyst for the National Congress of American Indians, says that the use of these maps are problematic because they’re not real boundaries. There is not even a map that can be plotted with Geographic Information Service data.

What’s more: This Oklahoma map has no statutory authority. It’s an invention of the FCC. A second proposal would eliminate “urban” areas, even in tribal lands, could impact other Native communities in Arizona, Nevada and Alaska. The FCC is especially interested in eliminating residents of Tulsa from their tribal lands’ definition.

The important thing to remember is that tribes were not involved with fraudulent subsidies for Lifeline. Those crimes came about because private telephone companies were helping people enroll as well as producing the supporting documents. Yet instead of working with tribes to come up with a solution to the problem, the FCC has set in motion a new rule that weakens both tribal authority and control over boundaries.

At its most recent meeting, the National Congress of American Indians asked the FCC to work with tribes — Instead the FCC is stuck on inventing new law.

I am Mark Trahant reporting. This story is a partnership with Native Public Media.

Trahant Reports – Missed Opportunities: Indian Country’s Economic Case for Medicaid Expansion

June 15, 2015 By NV1

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A new White House report details the economic impact of Medicaid expansion and is sharply critical of the 22 states that have not done so. But the White House fails to calculate what an expansion means to Indian Country. That’s a missed opportunity because you cannot build an economic case for Medicaid expansion in Alaska, Oklahoma, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Arizona, New Mexico (and even Washington and Oregon) without at least back of the envelope estimates about Indian Country.

The Medicaid system, of course, makes no sense, going through states. A much sounder approach would be for tribal, urban or nonprofit health centers to get funding and administrative rules directly from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Then Alaska, Oklahoma, or the other states that are currently rejecting Medicaid expansion would lose their say about what happens to American Indian and Alaska Native patients.