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      ‘Protect our future’: Alaskan Indigenous town fights ‘destructive’ uranium mine project

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      For generations, the people of Elim have subsisted off the forests and waters of north-west Alaska: hunting caribou and bearded seals in the late winter, gathering bird eggs and wild greens from the tundra in early spring, and fishing the salmon run in the late summer.The Iñupiat community of 350 people lives on one of the state’s most productive and biodiverse fisheries, an inlet of the Bering Sea called the Norton Sound. They refer to their land as Munaaquestevut, or “the one who cares for us”.“We depend on the land to put food on the table, to keep our tribe healthy. We have a subsistence economy with a cash overlay,” said Emily Murray, a resident of Elim and vice-president of Norton Bay Watershed Council, a non-profit tribal organization focused on regional water quality.“We’ve been doing this for generations upon generations.”Now, an intensifying global competition for critical minerals and the priorities of a new administration threaten to put their land, their fishery and their lives at risk, members of the community say.This summer, the Canadian mining company Panther Minerals is set to start exploration for a uranium mine at the headwaters of the Tubuktulik river, adjacent to Elim’s land. David Hedderly-Smith, a consultant to Panther and the owner of mining claims for the property, has said the site could become the “uranium capital of America”.The people of Elim have opposed the mine since last May, when Panther Minerals announced its intention to apply for exploration permits. In interviews, they said they feared for their health, and spoke of the cancer and contamination that followed uranium mining on Navajo land in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.View image in fullscreen“If [the river] becomes contaminated, it will have an impact on the whole Bering Sea. That’s the way I see it,” said Johnny Jemewouk, a resident of Elim.Last summer, Elim successfully pressured the Bureau of Land Management, which manages a small portion of the claim, to deny Panther Minerals’ exploration permit on the land. In December, a regional tribal consortium passed a resolution “categorically” opposing the mine.However, Alaska’s department of natural resources (DNR), which manages most of the land, has so far refused Elim’s requests for a consultation – and brushed aside over a hundred comments from the community over plans for the mine. In October, they granted Panther Minerals a four-year exploration permit, which will allow the company to start drilling wells and taking uranium core samples this June.Elim has appealed against the permit. But with time running out, the community has gone one step further, protesting against the mine using the largest international forum available to them: the Iditarod, Alaska’s grueling annual sled dog race, which passes through their village on its way to Nome.As musher Jesse Holmes approached Elim’s checkpoint and the 1,008th mile of the race, more than 70 students and community members waited for him in the Arctic night. They held signs saying “Protect our future”, and “Keep the uranium in the ground.”It was their chance to tell the world what their way of life means to them.“I want to protect our future,” said Paige Keith, an eighth-grader from Elim. “If they go through with this, it’s going to affect our animals and our water. I want to help try to stop the mine.”‘A race for resources’As global competition for critical minerals intensifies, the Trump administration is eyeing Alaska.An executive order issued on Trump’s first day in office calls on the US to “fully avail itself of Alaska’s vast lands and resources”. The order was applauded by the state’s mining industry.The order reversed a number of Biden-era protections for Alaskan land, opening oil and gas drilling in the Arctic national wildlife refuge and ending restrictions on logging.Several of these reversals put the administration at cross purposes with the Native communities that subsist off Alaska’s land. For example, one of them enables plans for a mining access road in Alaska’s Brooks Range, which a tribal network has called “one of the biggest and most destructive” projects in the state’s history.“We’re in an age of green transition. We’re looking for other forms of energy. And, with the new administration, there is this push to mine domestically,” said Jasmine Jemewouk, an activist from Elim.“It’s a race for resources and they’re looking at Alaska.”The coming years are likely to see continued conflicts between Alaska’s powerful mining industry and Native communities – especially as the US seeks to onshore its critical mineral supply chain. And while Panther Minerals’ exploration permit is up to the state of Alaska, and not the federal government, advocates and community members said the Trump administration may further embolden Alaska’s DNR to brush aside Elim’s concerns. Alaska’s governor, Mike Dunleavy, has welcomed Trump’s executive orders, saying: “Happy days are here again.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The current administration in Alaska is very industrial extraction driven,” said Hal Shepherd, an attorney and water rights advocate based in Homer, Alaska. “Trump and Dunleavy basically are partners in developing Alaska.”“Our current governor is pretty much a typical Republican. If it ain’t nailed down, sell it,” said Robert Keith, president of the native village of Elim.Alaska’s DNR did not respond to multiple requests for comment.Lack of consultationIn interviews with local media, Hedderly-Smith, the project’s consultant, has said the people of Elim have “been misled and they’re spreading mistruths”, regarding the dangers of the uranium mine.Robert Birmingham, Panther Minerals’ president, did not respond to queries regarding Elim’s health concerns, saying the company had yet to finalize its mining plans and could not comment.“We are positive about the uranium opportunity in Alaska, as it has been underexplored,” he wrote, and said the company would “continue outreach and the conversation with the Elim community” once its plans were finalized.Hedderly-Smith has also said the company would “like to be friends” with Elim if it develops the mine. But while Birmingham said the company had made an attempt to contact Elim in early 2024, Keith, the president of Elim, said that Panther Minerals had never come to their village or attempted to contact the community since they first applied for the permit.For Elim, the plans for the mine raise a history of state and federal failures to safeguard native communities from the harms of mining. In 2008, the community successfully rallied against another Canadian company, Triex Minerals, which had started to explore for uranium near their village. While organizing their opposition, the students of Elim researched the effects of uranium mining elsewhere in the US.They taught the community about the example of the Navajo, and the cancer risks and health problems that came after they allowed uranium mines on their land.Should a mine be built in Elim, Panther Minerals has said it would probably use in situ leaching to extract uranium – a technique said to be less disruptive than conventional methods to mine the material, including those used on Navajo land. Shepherd and the community, however, have said that the project’s proposed use of groundwater threatens to contaminate the fishery and ecosystem.Keith said the community had a reason to be cautious about government promises. Closer to home, he gave the example of Moses Point, a fishing village next to Elim which hosted a military airfield during the second world war. The military had buried or left a lot of material at the site, he said, including thousands of drums of high-octane fuel.“Most of those people where the concentrations of drums were, including my mother – the majority of them survived or died of cancer,” he said. “So we’re kind of sensitive.”Jasmine Jemewouk, the activist, added: “What they’re not realizing is that the community bears the burden. Whatever they leave behind, whatever is contaminated in the process … We’re not being consulted at all.”Her grandfather, Johnny Jemewouk, agreed. He said the time to act is now.“People, the way I see it here, they don’t realize what the future holds for them once they start getting sick. Either they start getting sick, or the food they can’t eat, or the water they can’t play in,” he said.“When that starts taking effect, they’ll want to say, ‘let’s do something.’ But that’s too late.” More

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      Trump chose the wrong hill to DEI on | Stewart Lee

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      In the second world war, Navajo code talkers transmitted sensitive US military information in their own undocumented language. Which was nice of them, as their immediate ancestors had been dispossessed and destroyed by white settlers, and then had all their water poisoned with uranium. “Were it not for the Navajos,” concluded major Howard Connor, at the time, “the marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.” And that famous photo of the American soldiers raising a flag would just have shown some Japanese boy scouts letting off a party popper.But last month Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, said: “I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength’.” Predictably, some Navajo code talkers had to have bodyguards to protect them from white American servicemen who thought they were Japanese. Plus ça change, as they say over there in that Europe.The Navajos’ efforts went unrecognised. When the son of one of the code talkers got to live the American dream by opening a Burger King in Kayenta on Navajo lands in 1986, he made the building a partial museum of his father’s unit. I visited it 30 years ago, with the comedian Kevin Eldon (Narvi the dwarf smith in TV’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), and it remains the most edifying fast food restaurant I ever ate in. It was even better than that KFC near Bletchley Park that does that delicious Alan Turing chicken strips and alphabetti spaghetti meal deal ™ ®.The Kayenta Burger King also has a more extensive archive of code talker artefacts than any official government repository. Especially since, last week, videos, photos and stories of the Navajo code talkers were temporarily removed online as part of Trump’s assault on diversity. A page commemorating corporal Ira Hayes, a Pima of the Gila River Indian Community, and one of the servicemen photographed raising that Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima, also disappeared for a while in Trump’s thwarting of the woke. Boris Johnson must be delighted. But I wonder if Trump’s actions please the British daytime TV treasure Lorraine Kelly?Kelly’s interview in the Times on 14 March, culled from a book promotion appearance on Times Radio, seemed to suggest she believed gender and racial diversity are wrongly prioritised in the workplace at the expense of offering opportunities to the (presumably white) working class. The headline spoke for itself: “Lorraine Kelly: Diversity push is leaving working-class people behind.” Was our Lorraine an unexpected supporter of Trump’s anti-diversity agenda?Probably not. This is the rightwing press, or the press as I call it, that we’re talking about, and Kelly didn’t quite espouse the view the headline implies. Even the elements of the radio interview that the paper chose to transcribe show a Lorraine Kelly principally concerned about how the cost of living affects working-class access to media jobs, and she made explicit that she hoped to see diversity initiatives tackle exclusion on the basis of class in addition to concentrating on gender and race. It’s a subtly different position and an example of the nuanced thought that has made Kelly the Socrates of the sofa, while her competitor Richard Madeley stares out of his kitchen window at a donkey in a field while thinking about bread.But this is how papers work. For two decades I was lucky enough to review records (remember them?) for the Sunday Times. So when they asked me, 20 years back, to write an insider comedian’s view of attempts to boycott the Edinburgh comedy awards because the sponsor, Perrier, was owned by Nestlé, which pushed unsafe formula milk initiatives to the developing world, what could possibly go wrong? And the money didn’t hurt either!I wrote a balanced piece about how the boycott was morally the right thing to do, with the appended caveat that high-profile supporters were asking a lot of young broke performers to walk away from a cash bung of £10,000 that might shift at least some of their debts. The headline? “‘Emma Thompson needs to grow up’, says comedian Stewart Lee”, which wasn’t anything I said, but perhaps fitted the paper’s agenda better, and left me apologising, cap in hand, to the charity Baby Milk Action and Miss Thompson herself, who has conspicuously failed to cast me in any of her hit films since.Despite the fun-size fascism we’re seeing across the Atlantic, the woke folk panic still sells papers and farms online engagement. The Times got what it wanted out of massaging Kelly’s quotes, and in the US the fourth estate is finished, jeopardising democracy worldwide. Maybe it’s time for writers to work out what they believe and stand up for it. But the British press is staffed by a class of professionals happy to drift between the Times, the Telegraph, the New European and yes, even the last liberal papers, refining their opinions as required by their offshore billionaire employers. It’s as easy as changing the look of your byline photo from sensible suit and tie to a beatnik polar neck jumper and beard. And that’s just the women. These days.Ironically, some wag at the Times has chosen to illustrate Kelly’s interview with an old photo of her GMTV colleague, the black fitness expert Mr Motivator, holding her aloft on the roof of a building. Presumably there were dozens of more motivated white working-class Mr Motivators, but the woke agenda meant they never got the opportunity to lift a Scottish woman. Let’s see if we can’t see a white working-class TV fitness instructor raising Lorraine Kelly high above their head by the end of 2025, but ideally let’s do it without playing into the divisive playbook of Trump, Musk, Vance and Farage, apportioning blame to the disadvantaged, while consolidating their own chrome-plated futures. More

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      ‘A slap in the face’: activists reel as Trump administration removes crucial missing Indigenous peoples report

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      Since January, Donald Trump’s presidency has been marked by a series of radical changes. Of note is the way troves of previously publicly available information on government websites such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or National Institutes of Health (NIH) have quietly gone dark.One such page is the Not Invisible Act Commission’s final report from November 2023. The Not Invisible Act Commission was mandated by bipartisan legislation and signed into law by Trump himself. The report was a collaboration between the justice department and the interior department to address, document and respond to the missing and murdered Indigenous peoples (MMIP) crisis, in which Indigenous communities experience disproportionate rates of abduction, assault and murder. Accurate statistics about the MMIP and missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) crises can be limited and dated, but, as of 2019, homicide was the third most common cause of death for Indigenous girls aged 15 to 19 and Indigenous women aged 20 to 24.The Not Invisible Act Commission’s final report was a culmination of seven in-person field hearings held across the country and a one-day virtual national hearing. Nearly 600 people attended the hearings and 260 people, including survivors, victims, family members, advocates and law enforcement gave testimony to the commission. As a result of those hearings, the commission issued its final report of recommendations to address the crisis.Having a resource like the Not Invisible Act Commission’s final report provided Indigenous people and governments, as well as federal, state and local branches of the US government, with data and suggestions on how to reduce the crises. The act itself was historic, not only because it shed light on an issue that Indian Country has faced for decades, but also because it was the first bill that was introduced and passed by four Indigenous US congressional members.Despite the report no longer being available online, advocates say the fight to bring light to and end the MMIP and MMIW crises continues.Tracking numbersCharolette Gonzales, the policy and advocacy director of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women (CSVANW) said that she and other staffers were shocked when the Not Invisible Act Commission’s report was removed from the federal website.“They were like, ‘What does this mean for the future of other information that supports our work?’” said Gonzales, who is Diné and San Ildefonso Pueblo. “[We] make sure that our communities are informed. What does that mean for them?”The coalition focuses on preventive work, or trying to stop violence against Indigenous women before it happens.“When doing this education, we are better able to equip them with the ability to advocate for themselves, and that work is really important as we move forward, especially with these unprecedented times of this current presidential administration,” she said.Karrisa Newkirk, of the Oklahoma-based MMIW Chahta, an organization that supports affected families through financial assistance, provides training opportunities for law enforcement agencies, and works with victims to help them heal after experiencing violence, said that the work doesn’t stop just because of a decision made in Washington.“When it comes to our work and what we do, I don’t feel like we’ve missed a step,” she said. “We’re going to continue to serve our families exactly how we should and always have. When it comes to other MMIWs across the United States, I truly feel like it kind of puts us back in time a little bit, where people aren’t going to see what a real crisis it is.”Newkirk said that after the commission collected the data, it should have been used to make tangible changes. Still, having a national database that tracked MMIW cases was vital.“Even though there were great strides in the last couple years, them removing that was like a slap in the face. It was a huge step back.” she said. “It felt like we were being heard and recognized, and then all of a sudden it felt like that was no longer what it was any more … When you think about that as someone that’s in the work and you know how many people already don’t know about it, and then it’s removed from the United States website, it’s definitely disheartening.”The CSVANW has begun discussing creating a database of its own, one built with information that the organization has collected over the years, including documents and reports that the Department of Justice previously issued. This method of ensuring that vital documents and resources are stored somewhere other than on government agencies’ websites is something that some advocates have been pushing for since the website purges began.The National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, Inc (NIWRC), a non-profit organization that works to end violence against Native women, children and communities, for example, has a version of the Not Invisible Act Commission’s report that is still accessible.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We’re taking it upon ourselves to collect as much information as we can as it slowly becomes unavailable to us on purpose,” Gonzales said. “I think the censorship is a really hard hit to our communities, especially to our work. We already have limited resources as not only just a Native organization and survivor-led organization, but also as tribal people who live in these pueblos and work with our people.”MMIW Chahta also tracks its own numbers, and is trying to overcome racial misclassification by law enforcement.Tribal communities are also concerned about whether treaties, agreements made between sovereign nations, will be upheld by the US government, Gonzales said. The US has had a long history of violating treaties even before Trump’s election.Since he was sworn in, Trump and Elon Musk have called on the General Services Administration to terminate the leases of roughly 7,500 federal offices, including 25 regional offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. On Friday, Trump rescinded a Biden-era executive order, which aimed to strengthen tribal sovereignty for the 574 federally recognized tribes in the nation.Following the removal of the Not Invisible Act Commission’s final report page, federal agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid, including, “indigenous community”, “tribal”, and “Native American”. Defense department websites removed pages about Indigenous code talkers, whose usage of Choctaw and Navajo languages to communicate messages were vital for winning the first and second world wars.Of the extreme changes being made by the administration and their implications for Indigenous people, Gonzales said: “A lot of community members, along with our staff, are emotionally exhausted every day we hear about new executive orders coming out.“Our survivors and our resources truly help decrease the violence that happens in our communities … And so, once we heard this, I think our mind instantly went to the fact that Native women will die if we don’t have federal funding. That’s just a fact.” More

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      Tribes and Students Sue Trump Administration Over Firings at Native Schools

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      A group of Native American tribes and students is suing the Trump administration to reverse its recent firing of federal workers at Native schools that they said has severely lowered their quality of education.The firings, part of the series of layoffs led by the Department of Government Efficiency that have cut thousands of federal jobs since January, included nearly one quarter of the staff members at the only two federally run colleges for Native people in the country: Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan., and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque.Instructors, a basketball coach, and security and maintenance workers were among those who were fired or forced to resign in February. Although the total number of layoffs was not clear on Sunday, the reductions also included employees at the central and regional offices of the Bureau of Indian Education, a federal agency. Some staff members, but not all, have been rehired, according to a statement from the Native American Rights Fund, which filed the suit on Friday in federal court in Washington. About 45,000 children are enrolled in bureau-funded schools in 23 states.As a result of the cuts, dozens of courses at the two colleges lost instructors, according to the lawsuit. And because of the loss of support staff and maintenance workers, school dorms were quickly overrun with garbage, students reported undrinkable brown water, dining halls failed to adequately feed students, and widespread power outages hampered students’ ability to study.“Unfortunately, these firings were done without preparation and without regard to the health and safety of the students, and that is a continuation of a history of neglect and disrespect,” Jacqueline De León, a lawyer for the tribes and students, said. “We are here to fight to make sure that it doesn’t continue.”Lawyers with the Native American Rights Fund filed the suit against the heads of the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Office of Indian Education Programs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Histories of Native America and the Port of Los Angeles Win Bancroft Prize

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      The award, one of the most prestigious among scholars of American history, honors “scope, significance, depth of research and richness of interpretation.”A sweeping history of Native Americans and a study of the creation of the port of Los Angeles in the 19th century have won this year’s Bancroft Prize, one of the most distinguished honors for scholars of American history.Kathleen DuVal’s “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America,” published by Random House, was described by the prize jurors as “a seamless panorama of 1,000 years of American history,” which draws on both written records and Native oral histories to tie together the stories of the more than 500 Indigenous nations who inhabit what is now the United States. “By crafting a historical narrative that introduces readers to a new national story,” the jurors write, “DuVal helps explain the Indigenous cultural and political renaissance of our own age.”DuVal, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is part of a new wave of scholars of Native America, who challenge the idea that the defeat of Indigenous people was inevitable, and who emphasize their resilience and continued cultural vitality. Hamilton Cain, reviewing the 752-page volume in The Minneapolis Star Tribune, called it “intimate yet comprehensive,” adding, “No single volume can adequately depict the gamut of Indigenous cultures, but DuVal‘s comes close.”The second winner, James Tejani’s “A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America,” published by W.W. Norton, reconstructs the complex interactions between 19th-century engineers, merchants, military, Native tribes and others that turned the tiny San Pedro estuary into what is today the busiest seaport in the Western Hemisphere.“By returning the attention of historians to infrastructure, material objects, and logistics,” the Bancroft jurors wrote, “Tejani opens our eyes to a new way of thinking about the trans-Mississippi West.”Tejani, an associate professor at California State University, grew up near San Pedro Bay, and occasionally weaves personal observations into the history. Julia Flynn Siler, reviewing the book in The Wall Street Journal, described it as packed with “detailed, careful scholarship” that turns the story into “a lens through which to view American expansionism.”The prize, which awards $10,000 to each winner, was created in 1948 by the trustees of Columbia University, with a bequest from the historian Frederic Bancroft. Entries — 249 this year — are evaluated for “scope, significance, depth of research and richness of interpretation,” according to the prize announcement. More

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      ‘Day of Reckoning’: Trial Over Greenpeace’s Role in Pipeline Protest Begins

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      Energy Transfer, which owns the Dakota Access Pipeline, is seeking $300 million, a sum that Greenpeace says could bankrupt the storied environmental group.Lawyers for the pipeline company Energy Transfer and Greenpeace fired their opening salvos in a North Dakota courtroom Wednesday morning in a civil trial that could bankrupt the storied environmental group.The suit revolves around the role Greenpeace played in massive protests against construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline nearly a decade ago. The pipeline, which carries crude oil from North Dakota across several states to a transfer point in Illinois, was delayed for months in 2016 and 2017 amid lawsuits and protests.The trial commenced on Wednesday with opening arguments in a quiet county courthouse in Mandan, N.D. Greenpeace says Energy Transfer, which built the Dakota Access Pipeline, is seeking $300 million in damages.Energy Transfer, one of the largest pipeline firms in the country, accused Greenpeace of inciting unrest that cost it millions of dollars in lost financing, construction delays, and security and public-relations expenses. Trey Cox, its lead lawyer, told the nine-person jury that his team would prove that Greenpeace had “planned, organized and funded” unlawful protests. He called the trial a “day of reckoning.”Everett Jack Jr., the lead lawyer for Greenpeace, gave a detailed timeline to rebut aspects of that account, saying Greenpeace played a minor role in the demonstrations, which drew an estimated 100,000 people to the rural area.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Deb Haaland, Ex-Interior Secretary, Is Running for Governor of New Mexico

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      Ms. Haaland, one of the first former cabinet officials in the Biden administration to announce a run for office, would be the first Native American woman to serve as governor of a state.Deb Haaland, the former secretary of the Interior who was the first Native American to serve in a presidential cabinet, on Tuesday announced a bid for governor of New Mexico.Ms. Haaland, a Democrat, previously served as a congresswoman from the state. She is widely seen as a favorite to succeed Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who is not running again in 2026 because of term limits.Ms. Haaland, 64, a member of the Laguna Pueblo, would be the first Native American woman to serve as governor of a state. Her campaign described her as a “35th generation” New Mexican.She is one of the first top alumni of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration to announce a run for office since Democrats lost power.This article will be updated. More

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      ‘Disenfranchised and demobilized’: Native Americans face ballot box barriers in Arizona

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      The calls started coming in to the Arizona Native vote election protection hotline around 6am on election day.Voters in Apache county, where a sizable chunk of the population is Diné, also known as Navajo, were seeing problems at the polls. One location was locked and several others were having trouble printing ballots, according to an affidavit filed in state court. As the day went on, voters reported hours-long waits and observers reported that people were leaving. A local judge would eventually agree to extend voting in nine precincts in the county by two hours.“It was just a mess from what we could tell and from our folks,” said Jaynie Parrish, the executive director of Arizona Native Vote, a nonprofit civic engagement organization focused on Native communities.While delays in opening polling sites and glitches that lead to long lines are not uncommon, they can be particularly acute in Native communities, where voters can travel hours to get to the polls and face other unique barriers, like non-traditional addresses and language access issues. Taken together, those barriers result in a significant gap between turnout among those living on tribal lands and those who live off of them, according to a new study from the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit that studies voting rights and elections.“There are systemic issues that prevent Natives from getting to the ballot box – some intentional,” said Samantha Blencke, a staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, which had poll watchers in six states this election. For a voter who travels a far distance to cast a ballot, a polling place not opening on time could make a big difference, she said. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s their one shot to vote.”Native American voters are an influential voting bloc in Arizona, where they comprise 5% of the population. Both Republicans and Democrats courted Native voters this year. Election results analyzed by the New York Times showed that Donald Trump gained in many counties where Native Americans comprise a majority of the population.In addition to long travel times, Native voters also face a litany of unique hurdles. Many lack traditional addresses, making it more difficult to vote by mail. Tribal identification cards can get rejected at the polls. And there can be significant issues in translating ballots into Native languages.Turnout among those living on tribal lands was on average 11 points lower than turnout among people living off them between 2012 and 2022, according to the Brennan Center’s study. In presidential elections, the gap was 15 points.Tribal lands that had the highest share of Native voters also had the lowest turnout rates, the study found. And those who live on tribal lands were also less likely to use mail-in voting than those who lived off them.“These findings demonstrate that Native Americans living on tribal lands are uniquely disenfranchised and demobilized from participating in federal elections,” the report says.This year, after election day, Navajo voters sued Apache county again. Arizona gives voters five days after election day to address any issues with mail-in ballots. But county officials had delayed making public the number of voters who had problems with their ballots until two days before the deadline, the lawsuit said. With just two days left, they notified that there were 182 people who needed to cure their ballots, setting off a scramble to contact them.A judge rejected the request after elections employees said they had made a reasonable effort to contact anyone who was at risk of having their ballot rejected.For years, Leonard Gorman, the executive director of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission has been concerned about the way ballots have been translated into Navajo. Translation is required under the Voting Rights Act, and accurately describing things like ballot measures on abortion and fentanyl can be immensely challenging, Votebeat reported earlier this year. Navajo is a historically oral language, and translators come up with audio that those who are not proficient in English can listen to at the polls, according to Votebeat.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOver the years, Gorman said he’s heard glitches and poorly worded audio. And when he showed up at a polling location in Apache county in late October, the machine that offered the audio translation wasn’t working, he said.“It only said in literal translation or interpretation: ‘If you want to listen to the ballot, press any button,’” he said. When he pressed a button, the instruction would simply repeat. “That was the worst experience I’ve ever had.”Apache county election officials did not respond to an interview request.Chelsea Jones, a researcher at the Brennan Center who co-authored the nonprofit’s study, said its findings showed that people who live on tribal lands face unique barriers that haven’t thus far been addressed by federal laws. A piece of legislation, the Native American Voting Rights Act, that would address many of the systemic challenges Native voters face, has stalled in Congress.“Any of these common ways that we participate in elections have really layers of barriers for people who live on tribal lands,” Jones said. “Each of those numbers represent hundreds of thousands of people who are not able to or have a harder time participating. And so that’s what’s the hardest for us to grasp is that this many people are being left out of what is a fundamental right for all Americans.” More