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Friend,
Members of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians have good reasons to distrust the government.
The Choctaw, descendants of ancient cultures that thrived for centuries in the Mississippi River valley region, once occupied vast swaths of the Southeast. During the Revolutionary War, they fought as allies of the Continental Army – and did again in the War of 1812. Still, in the 1830s they became the first Indigenous tribe to be forced from their ancestral lands under the Indian Removal Act, a federal law that prompted a brutal act of ethnic cleansing carried out on behalf of white farmers who wanted their land to grow cotton. Tens of thousands of Choctaw and other Indigenous people were marched to lands west of the Mississippi River in what became known as the Trail of Tears.
Some Choctaw remained in Mississippi, and today the Band has just over 11,000 members living on about 35,000 acres in 10 counties.
But nearly two centuries after the Trail of Tears, they remain an underserved community, and when election season rolls around many members see little point in voting for local, state or federal candidates.
“Going back at least to the 1830s, tribal members do not trust the government of the U.S.A.,” said tribal member Cynthia Massey. “Elders speak about being cheated out of our land, lied to, forced to move, starved and much more. Seeing the importance of voting is remote and a betrayal of their shared memory with our elders.”
Tribal leaders today are working to change that.
Last year, the Band received $55,000 from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s nonpartisan Vote Your Voice (VYV) initiative – a partnership with the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta – to mobilize voters and encourage civic engagement in advance of the 2020 election. This year, it received a multiyear grant of $50,000 for the 2021 and 2022 election cycles.
The Choctaw Band is one of 64 grassroots organizations, primarily in five Southern states, that have received $23.3 million in Vote Your Voice grants. The SPLC has committed a total of $30 million from its endowment to help fund such groups through 2022.
Massey, supervisor of the Choctaw Band’s Vote Your Voice committee, said the program has helped identify tribe members who aren’t registered to vote and to reach out to tribal members, many of whom live in remote, hard-to-reach areas. They discovered that of the 6,500 voting-age members, only about one-quarter were registered.
As with all voter engagement groups, the COVID-19 pandemic drastically altered outreach activities. But the group found creative ways to educate and mobilize members.
As Election Day approached in 2020, the tribe – which also operates manufacturing, service, retail and tourism enterprises – hosted “drive-through” dinners during which they handed out face masks and literature. They participated in a trick-or-treat event on Halloween. They hosted a live trivia show on their Facebook channel on the eve of Election Day, with the opportunity for viewers to win prizes.
“For our Tribal members who are fluent speakers and readers, we translated phrases from English into Choctaw and utilized it in announcements, newspaper ads, T-shirts, banners, yard signs and flyers,” Massey said. “We also sponsored a Facebook challenge for Tribal members to post selfies with a message of why voting is important.”
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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