IGNACIO – According to the Ute peoples’ history, their ancestors have lived in the mountains of Colorado, eastern Utah, and northern New Mexico and Arizona since the beginning of time.
So it remains a source of some cognitive dissonance, Southern Ute Indian Tribe Vice Chair Lorelei Cloud says, that Native Americans were denied citizenship and the right to vote as a matter of law until June 2, 1924 – 100 years ago today (June 2).
“The first Winter Olympics happened before we became citizens,” Cloud said.
Even though the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, also known as the Snyder Act, formally granted Indigenous people citizenship and the right to vote, in accordance with the 15th Amendment passed in 1870, it was not until decades later that the right was realized.
White women were granted the right to vote in 1920.
The centennial of the Snyder Act’s passage is less a day of celebration for Utes and more a moment for education and reflection, Cloud said.
“We’re using this moment to help educate others on the amount of disparity that tribes and Native people have endured for more than 100 years,” she said. “It’s a bittersweet moment, I suppose.”
All along the Hall of Warriors, the main entrance to the Leonard C. Burch Tribal Administration Building, an exhibit opened Friday discussing a century of Southern Ute accomplishments.
The series of posters reflects on the last century to demonstrate the tribe’s accomplishments and contributions to the region and country despite Native people’s relatively recent ability to exercise the rights of citizens.
“Just because you become a citizen doesn’t mean in any way that that becomes a practice,” said Director of the Cultural Preservation Department Crystal Rizzo.
The exhibit makes mention of contributions, including the tribe’s advanced air quality monitoring program, the recent $80 million investment in broadband infrastructure and donation of part of the land where Mercy Hospital now sits.
“It’s always important for tribal members to think about what we have done, where we have come from, and where we’re going,” Rizzo said. “But I think it’s also important for those who aren’t members to understand the contribution that Southern Ute has made to this region and to this country more broadly.”
For Southern Ute tribal members – citizens of two sovereign nations – the right to participate in American democracy is both critical and fraught. To vote is to partake in the tradition of a nation that colonized the Ute people; to abstain is to relinquish the power to make one’s voice heard in that system.
“(Voting) helps us to remind our elected leaders, since sometimes they don’t remember, that we are here, that we’ve been here since time immemorial,” she said. “We get left out of policies and laws that really affect us. … They forget to include us in some of those conversations.”
She also tied the power of Indigenous voters to the rising number of Indigenous officials serving at the state and federal level. Just last year, Cloud herself became the first tribal member to serve on the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
The tribe’s own government was established in a 1936 constitution. Today, the tribe’s 1,400 members vote to elect tribal councilors.
Although Native Americans’ right to vote was established in 1924, it was not until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which did away with racial barriers to the ballot box, that the right was actually realized.
Those barriers persist today in some parts of the country, Cloud said.
La Plata County’s top election official, Clerk and Recorder Tiffany Lee, said the tribe has been a strong partner when it comes to voting access. Her office opened a 24-hour ballot drop box in Ignacio in 2015, before it was mandated by state law, and Lee said she will have a voter service center open for four days before the November election this year at the request of the tribe.
“There’s been efforts in the past few years to improve that voting access,” Cloud said. “Those efforts have included additional voting boxes for both Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute … within our reservation boundaries.”
In 2020, the Colorado Secretary of State celebrated a 70% turnout of voters living on Southern Ute tribal lands.
“It’s very empowering to know that we can work to shape our future and our country, not just for what’s happening now, but for our future generations,” Cloud said.
rschafir@durangoherald.com
