Many Native Americans in North Texas don’t feel their voices are being heard ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Others don’t trust the government to have their best interests in mind.
The over-arching concern for Native Americans is sovereignty, but a lack of engagement within their community and from politicians worries some. And with the expansion of SpaceX in South Texas and the political makeup of the Supreme Court, the nation’s first people have a lot at stake.
Both sides of the political spectrum in the Dallas metroplex have failed to engage Natives, said Jodi Voice Yellowfish, chair of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Woman Texas Rematriate. Voice Yellowfish is Muscogee Creek, Oglala Lakota and Cherokee.
“I feel like with all political candidates, there’s an ignorance around sovereignty and what it means to have a relationship with another sovereign nation,” she said.
A tiny fraction — 0.6% — of people living in Dallas identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
But that number does not tell the whole story.
“We’re not as small as the 0.6% would make us look,” said Stephen Silva Brave, a member of the Lakota Nation and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Arlington.
There are actually far more Indigenous people living in Dallas and its surrounding metroplex than what’s documented, Silva Brave said.
For example, if someone checks off two different races in the U.S. Census survey, they’re counted as multiracial. Someone like Silva Brave, who is Hispanic and Native American, wouldn’t be included in the Native American count. As a result, many Indigenous people living in North Texas, Silva Brave said, feel left behind.
There are 574 federally recognized tribes in the country, and nearly 6.8 million American Indian and Alaskan Natives live in the states. About 4.7 million are eligible to vote.
Before anyone can understand the relationship urban Natives have with politics, they must understand the history of the Indian Relocation Act, Silva Brave said.
In 1956, the United States passed a law encouraging Native Americans to leave their reservations in favor of new lives integrated into urban areas.
The goals of the act were to assimilate Native Americans into the white majority and provide vocational training to incorporate them into the general workforce. Over 10,000 Natives from 82 tribes moved to the Dallas area.
Silva Brave, however, said critics believe the law diluted Indigenous culture and obstructed tribal and community ties. It also forced Natives off land the United States government sought to own and develop.
“They would offer a small amount of support and a lot of broken promises to get the people here,” he said. “It was just like, it’s a worthless fight.”
Now, decades after his great-grandmother struggled through urban relocation at age 18 with no support, Silva Brave said the Indigenous fight for political recognition is far from over in North Texas.
Silva Brave and Rogelio Meixueiro, a member of the Zapotec tribe in Mexico and chair of the Indigenous Peoples Caucus of the Texas Democratic Party, said there is significant attention paid within Native communities to the Palestinian cause and the United States’ decades-long alliance with Israel.
“A lot of people are not going to want to talk about it,” Silva Brave said, “but when you look at what’s happening over there, it’s an exact mirror of what happened to us.”
Meixueiro said, “You can’t be telling Native American people what genocide is.”
“Particularly when it comes to the aspect of food, the aspect of resources, it’s all connected,” he said. “Many Natives support the people of Palestine because we understand it’s tied to imperialism and colonialism.”
But sovereignty, for Native Americans, is ensured by more than just land protection.
Voice Yellowfish said one of the foremost protections of Native sovereignty is the Indian Child Welfare Act. Established in 1978, the federal law, dubbed “ICWA,” became a staple in preserving Native child welfare.
The act emerged after decades of forcibly removing Native American children from their families in the era of Indian boarding schools, which sought to assimilate Native Americans into white culture, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior.
“It’s just a reminder constantly when there’s opposition to letting ICWA work for Native people, that colonization never ended, really,” Voice Yellowfish said. “There’s not an end date to it. It’s continued; it just looks different now.”
ICWA enforcement follows four distinct steps for Child Protective Services workers when removing a Native child from their initial home. The first is to place a child with a Native relative. If that cannot be done, they should be placed with a member of the same tribe. In the instance that no tribal member can care for the child, a Native group home is considered as a last resort.
If none of these options are viable, the child can be placed with non-Native foster parents.
Before the law was signed, nearly 80% of Native families living on reservations lost at least one child to the foster care system.
In the spring of 1968, Dwayne Stenstrom — just 8 years old — saw his grandfather for the last time. A van pulled up to his home on the Winnebago reservation in Nebraska, and the driver told him he’d be going away for the summer for no longer than about four to six weeks.
Stenstrom is a member of the Winnebago Ho-Chunk tribe in Nebraska. He is one of seven children, all of whom were taken from the reservation and placed in the foster care system.
He and his younger brother were driven out of the reservation and into foster care, rotating in and out of homes for months hosted by non-Native families.
Eventually, Stenstrom and his brother were placed with an elderly white couple whose own children had grown up and moved out. He waited for the van, but it never returned.
He turned 18 the year ICWA was signed into federal law.
A year ago, the ICWA was just two votes short of being reversed by the Supreme Court in the landmark case Haaland v. Brackeen, and many Indigenous people in North Texas fear it’s only a matter of time before the law — and their sovereignty — again comes under threat.
“It all starts with ICWA,” Silva Brave said. “It’s the first domino for taking away all sovereignty …because what they want to do is end it, so they can say that tribes don’t have sovereignty, and then they can build the pipelines they want and do whatever they want on reservations on tribal lands.”
The case, brought forth by a couple from Fort Worth, challenged the constitutionality of ICWA.
The couple, joined by other plaintiffs, argued ICWA was discriminatory against non-Native families who sought to adopt Native children. In a 7-2 ruling on June 15, 2023, the court upheld ICWA with a majority opinion acknowledging the importance of Native children to Native survival. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, both Republicans, voted to reverse the act.
With the election in November looming, Silva Brave, a member of the Sicangu Lakota nation, is holding his breath. He called the law “life-saving.”
“If the next president replaces two justices with two very far right-leaning people, everything is on the table again,” Silva Brave said. “And I’m sure they’ll try it again.”
Still, even with ICWA in place, some Native children have fallen through the cracks.
Sandra Blackbear Ramirez, 73, is a member of the Kiowa tribe and a descendant of the Kiowa Apache, or the Apache of Oklahoma. For more than 30 years, Blackbear Ramirez worked as a regional nurse consultant for Texas Child Protective Services and often served as an Indian Child Welfare expert for the department.
When Blackbear Ramirez first started at Texas CPS in 1986, she was told there were no Native American children in CPS custody.
“Back then, they thought it was true,” she said, “until I went and started identifying them.”
According to Texas Department of Family and Protective Services documents, the state had 18 documented American Indian children in foster care at the end of the 1986 fiscal year.
Blackbear Ramirez was handed the book of children who were eligible for adoption. In the catalog of children organized by race, she noticed there was no section for Native American kids.
“There was a section that said mixed, and so I happened to flip there,” she said. “I discovered they had children who were two or three different races, including Native American, and I said, ‘Do you realize that you do have Native Americans?’”
“And I told [a co-worker], you’re required under the Indian Child Welfare Act to notify the family,” Blackbear Ramirez said.
Blackbear Ramirez said without ICWA or its proper enforcement, the result would be an unfathomable loss of culture.
“They’re not funding Indian Child Welfare programs in Texas,” she said. “I’ve always wanted somehow to work with them to try to educate Texas’ Court Appointed Special Advocates on how this works and do lateral training where the CASA worker learns the spirit of the Indian Child Welfare Act and what’s supposed to happen with that.”
“But at this point, we don’t have that,” Blackbear Ramirez added, “because of funding. It could come from the state, it could come from the federal government, but I think they both need to take responsibility.”
Several Natives in Texas said they are also fighting for increased classroom representation. Silva Brave said Natives and allies have been advocating for a Native Studies class for several years — the State Board of Education delayed decisions about the course in April.
Silva Brave also is watching a struggle farther south in Boca Chica, a small town just outside of Brownsville on the edge of the Texas-Mexico border.
“Especially in the state of Texas, it’s a constant struggle to remind people that you are sovereign and that this is your land,” Silva Brave said. “The SpaceX stuff is built so close to tribal lands, and they’re always having to fight to keep their ancestral land safe from being taken over.”
“We need representatives who care about this no longer happening.”
Meixueiro, whose close friends are involved in Indigenous organizing in Boca Chica, said lands connected to major tribal water sources are at risk of contamination in the face of pollution from Elon Musk’s SpaceX venture, which has a large launch site in the area. The Environmental Protection Agency found Starbase violated the Clean Water Act after discharges from rocket launches ran into the wetlands.
“We’re scared,” he said. “We’ve seen the harm and the fires, and there’s been no studies yet of the environmental impact that is positive.”
About 66 percent of the known eligible Native American voting population is registered to vote, according to a 2020 report by the Native American Rights Fund.
The population generally leans Democratic, according to a 2022 poll conducted by the African American Research Collaborative. In the 2022 House races across the country, Natives supported Democratic candidates at 56% compared to 40% of Native voters supporting Republicans.
However, Nita Battise, tribal council vice chairperson for the Alabama Coushatta located in Livingston, said bipartisanship can be the greatest strength of Indigenous peoples.
“By maintaining bipartisanship, you have the attention of both parties,” Batisse said. “As tribal leaders, we attend both party-sponsored events because you must always be in a position to negotiate and engage them in conversation.”
“We’re not asking to just be recognized, like another category,” Meixueiro added. “But rather, we’re trying to make sure that we’re carving out the space for our community, and that is actually there.”
Silva Brave said that Dallas City Councilman Omar Narvaez has been a loyal ally for the Native community in DFW at the local level, as well as Aicha Davis and Marissa Perez-Diaz on the State Board of Education.
Within his community, Silva Brave said there is a significant amount of political apathy colored by an unforgivable history and a feeling of resignation. But to rectify Native distrust in the government, officials must demonstrate a commitment to listening to Indigenous voices.
“When you’re talking about politics, I think it’s easy for people to say, ‘We can’t focus on such a small voting bloc,’ ” he said. “We’re just now getting people to understand the concept of us as not a race but as political entities.”
Silva Brave recalled an overwhelming sentiment of community trust that supersedes the desire for political participation, particularly for community elders.
“American Indians have gone through so much: genocide, wars, famine, boarding schools, relocation, and through all of it, we’re still here, without support and despite the government not working for us,” he said. “So a lot of the time, we think, ‘Why do I even need to do that? My life is going to be the same. My community has my back.’”
For Natives to secure political representation, they must ensure access to the ballot box.
Meixueiro, who visited El Paso on an organizing trip aimed at encouraging Natives to vote in 2020, said several Indigenous people reported not being able to present their tribal ID to vote. Tribal identification cards qualify under federal law as the mandatory identification required to participate in elections.
“What we’re seeing is that in bigger cities where people don’t know this is a federal law, people are being turned away,” he said. “And that’s just another form of Native erasure.”
Battise said the reservation, located just an hour and a half north of Houston, is an official voting station, which helps secure the Native vote.
She said beyond making voting more accessible to Indigenous people, electing and appointing Native leaders to positions in government is another means for ensuring Natives are represented in American democracy.
Battise pointed to Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna and the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, as an example of positive Native representation in mainstream politics.
But they aren’t finished.
“There should be a Native American Supreme Court justice,” Silva Brave said. “And we need to be voting accordingly.”
