Boosted by your donations, campaign to get out the Indian vote in South Dakota showing good results

Dustina Gill has been spending the past five days knocking on doors to get out the Indian vote in South Dakota. Here she is on the Standing Rock rez, once home to the Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull.

At the time I finished writing this, more than 8,200 members of the Daily Kos community had raised more than $98,000 to support the effort to get out the American Indian vote in South Dakota. That’s a spectacular effort in just a few days with the potential for giving progressive Democrat Rick Weiland the margin of votes he needs to win the U.S. Senate seat of retiring Sen. Tim Johnson. It also could bring out enough voters to elect several Indian and other progressive candidates for down-ticket races and put the name Ogala Lakota County onto what is now Shannon County, named for a guy instrumental in separating Indians from their land in the late 19th Century.

The money being raised goes directly to the Great Plains Get Out the Native Vote project focused on the state’s nine Indian reservations. South Dakota’s registration deadline is Monday, Oct. 20. Voters can cast ballots the same day they register. So the first step obviously is to do the hard work of getting as many people registered as possible and taking advantage of early voting at satellite offices.

To that end, state Rep. Kevin Killer, an Oglala-Kiowa who lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Dustina Gill, a Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate who lives on the Lake Traverse Reservation, and Chase Iron Eyes, a Lakota who lives on the Standing Rock Reservation, have organized a six-day GOTV tour of all nine reservations as well as other activities across the state. Gill and her brother Joshua have been making that long, slow trek from one reservation to another, driving the mini-bus nicknamed the “war pony.”

On Wednesday, day three of the Rez Tour, Gill reports, the activists visited elders at Standing Rock who are staunch voters and 18- and 19-year-olds who are getting ready to vote for the first time. They also spoke with one family that includes several veterans who served for 10 years in the military but never previously registered to vote. And they spoke with staff at Indian Country Today about the news outlet’s concerns over who from South Dakota running in this election will represent Indians best in Washington. The consensus was that Weiland is the right guy to do that. As they drove across the sprawling reservation, Gill says:

Having bald eagles fly with us and coyotes run with us as we drove down the long windy roads was something else. Sitting at woodpiles that took months to stockpile to prepare for the cold winter months and listen to ehanna [old-time] stories are forever etched in memory. I left Standing Rock feeling honored to have shared time with Sitting Bull’s people who are part of the [Lakota confederacy known as] Oceti Sakowin— [the seven council fires].

Next, it was on to Pine Ridge, home of the Oglala, Crazy Horse’s people, a 230-mile drive over what are far from the nation’s best roads.

Pine Ridge is 3.2 million acres encompassing 22 communities and a potential of 13,000 voters, but only one satellite voting center. Earlier in the week, Rep. Killer said some 120 people had registered and voted, so many that the satellite office ran out of ballots.

Dustina Gill, (left) the Thompson family of Standing Rock and Chase Iron Eyes,

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