Continuing the Fight for Political Representation | 100 Years After Women's Suffrage

Good afternoon everyone. My name is Rachel Hardigan, and I'm a senior writer with National Geographic. Today, we're continuing our conversation, our celebration of women's suffrage, and talking about the ongoing fight for political representation.

It took more than 70 years for suffragists to get the vote for women. But even after the 19th Amendment passed, state and federal laws still made it difficult, if not impossible, for women—if not non-white women—to vote. One hundred years later, equal political representation still hasn't been achieved. But we have people here who are working on it.

I'm thrilled to be here with two women who are continuing the centuries-long tradition of women fighting for equal rights. Nicole Montclair Donaghy is the executive director of North Dakota Native Vote. She's coming to us from Bismarck, North Dakota, and Ijen Poo is the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, co-director of Caring Across Generations, and co-founder of Super Majority. She is joining us from Chicago. Thank you to both of you for being here.

So let's jump right in. Among the women who couldn't vote when the 19th Amendment passed were Native people, who weren't acknowledged as citizens until 1924. Native communities now still face barriers to voting. So, Nicole, can you tell us about the work of North Dakota Native Vote?

Sure! So, thank you for having me. North Dakota Native Vote began in 2018 in response to the voter identification law that was upheld by the Supreme Court that same year, which required all North Dakotans to have a physical address on their identification cards. This limited a lot of people from even trying to get a ballot because, on reservations, we don't have traditional street addresses. All of our mail comes by post office, and so that's how North Dakota Native Vote came into being.

Since then, we've created a full year-round organization that is working on enhancing Native leadership, building power for our tribal communities, and getting people involved in community organizing so that they are at the table when decisions are made for our people.

Thank you, Nicole. Also looking back, women labor activists were crucial to pushing women's suffrage over the finish line. Ijen, can you talk about how the three organizations that you work with form a similar intersection of labor activism and political representation?

Sure! Thank you for having me, and it's really an honor to be in conversation with you and Nicole. The National Domestic Workers Alliance is an organization that represents the millions of women—mostly women of color—who work in our homes providing caregiving and cleaning services. It's incredibly vital work, and it's the work that makes everything else possible, right?

It makes it possible for us to do what we do knowing that some of the most important parts of our lives—our most important people—are in really good hands. And yet, it's some of the most undervalued and invisible work in our economy today. There's a long history behind that, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance is a growing community of domestic workers that's trying to change that to bring dignity and respect to the work and to make domestic work jobs, and all care jobs, really good jobs that you can take pride in, support your family on, and see real opportunity.

Caring Across Generations is a coalition that we started in 2011 to bring together all the people who need care—older people, people with disabilities, family caregivers—together with the caregiving workforce to put forward a new vision for the care economy that would not only allow for wider universal access to the care that we need to take care of our families but ensure that all the jobs in the care economy are really good jobs.

As a sister organization to that family of groups, there's also an organization called Care In Action, which is a 501c4 organization focused on building political power and representation for women of color, especially women of color working in low-wage service jobs like domestic work.

Super Majority does a lot; I have a lot of hope. Super Majority is a new-ish organization that was launched to capture and project the power of the supermajority of women in this country, who power everything and yet are still underrepresented. We hope to build the largest woman-to-woman voter mobilization program in history to participate in this election.

Our conversation is sort of based on the assumption that representation is a good thing, which seems kind of obvious, but can you both talk about why representation is important in general, and maybe specifically in the communities that you're working with? I don't know who wants to start.

I can kick it off by saying that whether it's in our democracy or in our economy, you cannot value what you cannot see. For us, representation is not just about what we see but what that makes possible. What representation from our communities makes possible in politics but also in policy, right?

Having the ability for young girls of color to see women running for every office up and down the ballot and to know that they could be the president of the United States or a vice president is really transformative because it opens up the realm of what's possible. That visibility is not just about that visibility; it's about the realm of what's possible.

In policy, it's the same thing. It's what representation from the experiences of our communities means when you're trying to solve problems, create policy, or change systems. Being able to do it from the vantage point of some of the least visible and most vulnerable communities in the country is essential to creating policy solutions that lift everyone, where no one is left behind.

So I just think it's not just about who we see, but it's about what that means in our politics, our families, our communities, our sense of self, and also from a policy standpoint. Policies can't be developed if you don't know that they're about the people they're supposed to be serving or helping.

What about you, Nicole? Why do you think representation is so important?

Yes, so like you said earlier, Rachel, Native American people could not vote until 1924 in the best cases. So we've been on what we call turtle island since time immemorial and we're just now at a point where other communities are realizing that we also need to be represented. Native American people have been here forever; we need to have that representation, and we need to be at the table when these decisions are made or at least be involved when decisions are made.

Tribal nations—when you live on a reservation—you have to deal with five different forms of government: state, city, county, federal, and tribal. We should always be aware of what's happening to us, and we should always have the opportunity to use our voice.

While working in the oil and gas communities, decisions were being made that people didn't know about. These decisions affected pollution and the externalizing of operations, which impacted the land, the water, and the air that they breathed. I think that representation is important at all levels, from nonpartisan seats like school boards all the way up to the governor. We need to have that voice.

Does it make a big difference that in 2018, finally, two Native American women were elected to Congress?

That is an amazing feat, and I am inspired by them, Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland. It also goes to show that there are more Native American women coming. There are more of us on our way, and one great case in our state is Ruth Anna Buffalo, who is the first Democratic House representative in the North Dakota House of Representatives. She ran a true grassroots campaign, knocked down doors, and walked hundreds of miles getting her voice out there.

It takes a lot of work, and we didn't just fall from the sky. There are so many women who have laid that path before us, and Ruth, Deb, and Sharice are those ladies who are making trails.

Can I just add something to that?

Sure!

First of all, I'm waiting for Nicole to run for office. Second of all, I just want to shout out Congresswoman Deb Haaland for a minute because I was just on a Zoom with her yesterday about caregiving. She's not only representing the interests of Native people in Congress and her own constituents, but she's representing the interests of millions—tens of millions—of caregivers who have no voice in our politics or in our policy.

She has been championing laws, resolutions, and initiatives that lift up family caregivers and professional caregivers. She talks about her own personal experience, where she was not able to afford childcare and had to figure out how she was going to work and earn a living, support her family, and take care of her own kids as her parents got more frail.

She was a family caregiver, and those direct experiences translate into policy. I think sometimes when we think about representation from just an identity lens, we think about... that's actually quite important. It's also about the values and the experiences that get reflected, whether they have to do with race specifically or not.

There's so much brilliance, to Nicole's point, and talent that has been suppressed by a political system and process that is unjust and unequal. If we actually removed some of those obstacles and had a really reflective democracy, there would be so much creativity and brilliance unleashed to solve the very challenging problems we face as a nation.

My friend Franklin Leonard, who runs The Blacklist, always talks about the film "Hidden Figures." I don't know if you saw that film.

Oh yeah!

But what he says about it, which I thought was so wise, is the big takeaway is that if those women, given all the barriers they faced as Black women, were still able to take us to the moon, imagine if those barriers didn't exist. Would we all be flying around in jetpacks or solar-powered jetpacks?

It's just a reminder that we are all harmed by the barriers that exist to Native communities, Black communities, immigrant communities, from full and complete political participation and power in our democracy.

That reminds me—one thing that struck me about the suffragists is they were building power from not much. They didn't have much access to power. One thing, Ijen, that you said to me—I spoke to you, I think right when everything was shutting down in March—you talked about how you had to think about building power for people who don't have it. How do you create something out of nothing?

But it's not really nothing. How do you do it?

It's only nothing in the context of a system that erases and invisibilizes people. What we have to do is we have to invent and imagine new systems, new cultures, and new ways of being. I think both Nicole's work and our work in the domestic workers' movement has been about how we create new frameworks that see and value people who have been undervalued and invisibilized in our culture and our politics.

Once we start to do that and we do it collectively, it's transformative. We call it building power from the margins until the margins disappear. Our ideas start in the shadows, which they have to, because of the kinds of disenfranchisement that we've been subjected to. But those ideas, in the end, are the ideas of the future.

That's what we're seeing now with a lot of the work of people who've been trying to build power from places of very little power and access. That's the innovation, that's the future, and that's how we get to the kind of multiracial democracy that we deserve and that is actually possible in this country.

One thing in one of our previous events, the historian Martha Jones was talking about voting. She mentioned that voting is obviously a form of power, and while it might not seem like much, one vote at a time is a form of power. She talked about the tactical importance of voting, but she also talked about the symbolic importance of voting.

I wonder, Nicole, if you could talk a little bit about that symbolic importance of both having this law passed in North Dakota that made it harder for Native North Dakotans to vote, but then getting people to vote. What does that mean to people?

Well, in our communities—particularly Native American communities—we've always had pride in this land. We've always protected this land, and having the ability to vote on these lands and decide who's in power is a big deal for us.

A lot of our communities, like I said earlier, are not able to speak for themselves when it comes to decision-making. Too often, we get left out, and people don't think that we're here anymore. So, taking that step to ensure that our communities have the right to vote is monumental for our communities that are on the margins.

Having people understand that their right to vote is huge, especially in Indian country, is important. I've heard statistics at one point in 2018 where it said that the Native vote was five times more powerful than votes off reservations because we're not able to vote as easily and conveniently as people off the reservation. This is something we are educating our people about—this right to vote has been ours since 1924, but it's not always an easy task for us.

Always remembering the symbolic meaning behind it, of just having that voice and standing your ground on this land where we always have been.

What about you, Ijen? What about the people you're working with who are—totally correct me if I'm wrong—but it seems hard to sort of build up a movement with people who are, you know, one person working in one house. Their people are sort of separated.

How do you build up this movement, and then what does participating in the political process mean to people who may be somewhat isolated?

It's always the people with the least amount of power who understand just how important power is. I’ll tell you a story: our democracy has so many hidden sheroes and heroes, and I consider Nicole one of them. Another one for me is a woman named Dorothy Bolden, who was a domestic worker in Atlanta, Georgia in the 1950s and 60s.

As the civil rights movement was building momentum, she was actually a neighbor of Martin Luther King Jr. She went and knocked on his door and said, "I want to be a part of this movement. I want in." He said, "Great, organize the domestic workers." And she did.

She formed the National Domestic Workers Union, which ended up organizing thousands of Black domestic workers throughout the South and winning pay raises and a lot of progress during that time. The only requirements to join the National Domestic Workers Union were one, you were a domestic worker; and two, you were registered to vote.

For her, the right to vote and the ability to be empowered in your job were fundamentally connected. I do think that we have lost the connection between having power in the economy and having power in our democracy.

It's actually fundamentally connected. It is not an accident that our unequal system just keeps becoming more unequal because the concentration of power and wealth is just increasing at the very top. That political power is being concentrated in the service of economic power.

So what we have to do to democratize our economy and our politics is to really remember the integration of those two things and figure out how we put more power in the hands of everyday people—in the ballot box, at the ballot box, in the workplace, in the community. That's what has to happen for real change to occur in this country.

Well, can you talk about Super Majority then? I mean, underrepresentation doesn't necessarily mean that your numbers are a minority. Women are a majority, but not—I'm not articulating this very well—but a majority in numbers may be a minority in power. What do you hope Super Majority will do? The whole point is to change that.

You know, I think we power everything as women. I mean, growing up being raised by my mom and my grandmother, I literally thought they walked on water—they did everything. They powered everything in our home and in our community, and they went to work.

As I grew older, I realized the disconnect between the fact that they do all the work and power everything, but they don't actually make all the decisions, and they don't have the power to make all the decisions. I saw how much of a disconnect there was between the role of women in everything and the actual amount of power and decision-making that we have as women.

I think Super Majority is really trying to bridge that gap. We are more than half the workforce, half the electorate—we're so many things—and we've never aggregated our power to say that the women's agenda is the agenda, that women's issues are everyone's issues.

The fact that we're the majority of everything and yet we're still treated as a special interest group is one of the most absurd narratives and cultural Jedi mind tricks I've encountered. So I just think we have this moment where I think women are on fire and awakening to that contradiction in new ways every single day.

Women like representative Haaland are just breaking the doors open for so many of us. This year, there are more Black women running for United States Congress than ever in history. And this is how we're going to do it: we're going to show up at the polls in unprecedented numbers, and we're going to keep just opening those doors and changing those systems.

Nicole, at one point, I think when we spoke in the spring, you talked about how you are part of a matriarchal society, and most of the work being done at the grassroots level is being done by women. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how that plays out in the community on the ground in your work. How do the women take charge?

Historically, at least in our Lakota culture, women were decision-makers. We were a matriarchal society; we still are. That has been brought forward over the centuries. Women are the nurturers; women are the backbone of the nation.

There’s this old saying that my ancestors used to say: men did the dangerous work, but women did the impossible. So women have always had this role—in our culture—to make decisions.

In more contemporary times, it is women who are leading the way because we see the need. We have that nurturing heart, intuition, and strength to carry these movements. I’m not saying there are no men involved, but mostly it is women who are taking charge here. I really don't know why that is; maybe it's because our communities have adopted a westernized form of government where women are still subjugated in some sense.

But it is the women who have been leading a lot of these movements, at least in my region.

Nicole, can you say the quote one more time?

Men do the dangerous work, but women do the impossible.

Okay, you need to make a t-shirt! Yes, of that quote, and have all the money raised go to your organization.

That's a great idea! I still say we do a lot of dangerous work too, though! So, impossible and dangerous—that could be the tagline!

Nicole, you've put in so many miles driving around. North Dakota is a big state and the reservations are spread out all over the place. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing as you're going from place to place?

Oh man, I pray a lot! So in 2018, I was one of two field organizers on the ground for North Dakota Native Vote myself in Prairie Seminole, but we were covering a huge state, and all of our reservations are widely spread out across rural regions. I would sometimes take people with me—like my daughter. My daughter is a natural-born organizer; she's 15 years old now, and she would come and help with the work we were doing.

I love audiobooks and stories, especially our oral histories. They kept me going. But just being in that energy and being a part of the change and the movement happening in North Dakota makes my heart full. It makes me so proud to be a part of this work and leading from behind.

I'm not one for the spotlight, and I always get a little shy about things, but I really have that love for my people. I want to be that resource and give them the things they need so we can all rise together. Are people receptive?

I mean, do either of you ever run into people who say, "Well, the system is not welcoming to us, and why should I participate in a system that doesn't want me to be participating?"

Yes, that does happen a lot, especially in our communities. People ask, "Why should I vote? My vote doesn't matter. Why should I be counted in the census? Why should I get involved?" But I always tell them, any place where decisions are being made, you are welcome there; you need to be there. You belong there. These are public processes, and we need to be a part of it.

Otherwise, we'll be left behind, and so we have to give our communities that education and empowerment to move forward. I think that's one of the reasons why our organizations are so important here.

I think more than any other election in history, this is the election where what's on the ballot is not the candidates. What's on the ballot is whether it's actually worth it to vote. Of course, it is worth it. But I think that in the middle of a pandemic, with so much misinformation and disinformation and voter suppression, there is a very concerted effort to suppress the vote.

We have a real uphill battle to remind people that democracies don't work if we don't participate. There's just no chance that it will work without us. Everything they care about, everything they're worried about, that keeps them from prioritizing voting—like caring for their children or going to work where they're underpaid or not having health care—that's all on the ballot.

We have to remind people and encourage them, help them navigate the complex environment created by our current context.

Well, that leads to a question from our audience: "What gives you the most hope in this current moment? Do you hope that we will continue making progress?"

This is going to sound kind of weird, but the thing that actually gives me hope is that people who are trying to suppress the vote and rig the system, keep people out of our democracy—they have to try to change the rules because they know that the majority of the people in this country want freedom, justice, inclusion, and equity.

In this country, in the end, the majoritarian values are towards empathy, compassion, and inclusion. They have to change the rules to suppress us, and so it reminds us that we have the power. We need to make this the country of our dreams, and that gives me a lot of hope.

Like, listen, you know you're not alone in your frustration. We are a majority, and if we do our jobs right, we can shape the future fundamentally, and I know so many organizers, so many domestic workers, so many women of color who are doing the hard work that Nicole is doing because they believe that too. That is an inspiration to me.

Even just in the primaries we've seen so far, where there's been a lot of voter suppression, people are standing in line for hours upon hours to realize their right to vote— in the middle of a pandemic—and that is inspiring to me. That is what's going to protect, preserve, and improve our democracy.

What about you, Nicole? Is there anything that gives you hope?

Well, you know, I have to… As an organizer, I always fall back on our axioms for organizers: we organize like hell for the living. I have to have that type of mentality. But deep down, I’m just a mom who wants a better world for my kids.

In our culture, we plan ahead for seven generations, and we want to create a better place for future generations. That's what gives me a lot of hope. Being in the company of so many powerful women—I have mentors that I look up to—and they are right there in the throes with us, doing the same type of work, trying to build equity and power for our communities. That gives me a lot of hope—knowing that so many people are doing this work and I'm not alone in it.

Are you working to also kind of raise up people, like your daughter or younger people, to build up more leaders in the community too?

Yes. Our slogan at North Dakota Native Vote is “Inspiring Indigenous Action.” My daughter is one of many empowered young women on the rise. There are more of us coming.

What about you, Ijen? At the domestic workers organization, you're also sort of training up leaders too, isn’t that part of what you do?

Yeah, absolutely. We have thousands of domestic worker leaders all over the country who are trying to pass bills in state legislatures and trying to win PPE for caregivers in cities.

It's been a really interesting time to see so much leadership grow amid so many attacks on women of color, immigrants, and so many people who don't have power. To see the incredible resilience and determination has been the thing that's really carried me through the pandemic. So much leadership exists among women, women of color, and working-class people who really just want to be able to live with dignity.

Everybody's fighting right now. It's a multi-generational movement that's building, and I think it has to be. One of the beautiful things I've learned from Native leaders has been the intergenerational connection.

In dominant American culture, we're so siloed by generations that there are breaks within our movements across generations. It means we end up making the same mistakes over and over again. Mistakes are inevitable; we're going to make mistakes. I just want to make new ones, but I want our kids to make new ones, right?

To be able to build off of hard-learned lessons from one generation to the next is crucial. The pandemic raises a lot of issues. I think in 1918, with the flu, it actually in some ways helped the suffragists because all the men were at World War I, you know, fighting.

The women had to step up and sort of prove that they could be the nurses, that they could do all these things, and they sort of earned some credit that way. I wonder how much effect the pandemic will have. I mean, there will be a kaleidoscope of effects, obviously, but how do you think it's going to affect political representation?

Who wants to take that?

One thing is that I feel this is one reason why I feel hopeful. The pandemic has revealed so many inequities and fragilities that we have needed to address for a long time.

The fact that we are now really honoring our essential workers, who've been invisible—working in low-wage jobs as farm workers, home care workers, grocery workers, warehouse workers, delivery workers—all these low-wage service workers who have powered our economy. Suddenly recognizing that they are essential, and that many are in many ways the cultural heroes of the moment—that is an opening for us to realize change.

It reminds us that the working class in this country is service-based, it's multiracial, it's a lot of women and people who've been working in the shadows for far too long, who deserve more than our applause, frankly.

I think that reminding us that this country is majority working class and that those people vote—all of that is on the ballot.

I think it means we are in such an unprecedented crisis—a health crisis, an economic crisis, and a crisis in our democracy—that hopefully, people will start to find meaning in a new way through the connections between the three things in a way that, if organizers like me and Nicole do our jobs right, will create a whole new set of possibilities in terms of policy solutions.

Nicole, how do you think the pandemic has affected your work?

Our communities are already hard to reach, and so we've had to be really innovative in how we reach people. That means being more present online, putting dollars into ads so that people can see—like with the primary that happened here in June, some people didn't realize there was a primary happening.

I know that we need to have that unique reach to get to our communities. While other organizations provide relief—like food kits—we partner with those organizations our information so that they can have a way to contact us or see that we have a landing page where they can get their information.

We’ve been more accessible in many ways, using traditional means of media: newspaper ads, texting, and mailers. It's been interesting to see how people respond to the more traditional means of organizing.

We have a question from the audience: what would you say to people who have said they're not going to vote at all in this year's election because they feel pessimistic about the process and results?

I do—you want to go, Ijen?

No, go ahead, Nicole.

I would say if you don't vote, then whoever you’re considering voting for loses another vote. You need to be there to have and use your voice, especially with our people and Native people. We have that historical history of not voting, and so I think it's time for us to make voting a tradition.

That’s something we need to do.

I would say that cynicism is the enemy of progress. You can’t have expectations for yourself and your life to improve, or your kids' lives to improve, if you sit it out. You've got to make a move, and really, if ever there was an election where that was so clear, it’s that our country is in deep crisis.

We are in need of leaders who reflect our values and will solve the tremendous, era-shifting challenges of our time. Somebody had a really good metaphor about termites: you might think your one little vote doesn't matter because it's like a little termite, but actually, termites can take down the entire foundation of a house collectively. And each of us is one of those termites, so we each need to do our part in order for that foundation to remain strong.

Not that we're trying to bring down any foundations, but we are trying to reinvent and rebuild.

I would say that even though it might feel small, it's actually fundamental. Two, we just can't be cynical. That's not a choice, and in fact, that's a privilege because there are so many people who can't afford to not care.

Now I think Super Majority had a study recently about low propensity voters—why do people not vote, and is there something that could get them to vote?

Yeah, so there are many reasons. One is that most employers don't give election day off. If you're a low-wage worker working paycheck to paycheck—two-thirds of all minimum wage workers are women, and those are not jobs where you can be like, "Hey boss, I'm going to be late." That's one reason.

Another is childcare. Figuring out childcare is essential, especially if you're going to have to stand in line for four or five hours.

In 2018, I was at the polls in Georgia, and there were people in line for nine and ten hours. What are people going to do with their kids? So there's a lot of different reasons why people don't vote, and that’s why we actually need to do the work to invest in people and really talk to people about why it’s worth it—even if it's really hard. That it really matters.

And sometimes people need more support. We should be setting up childcare, ride shares, because a lot of people don’t have transportation—right? That kind of thing. So, we’re trying to shift from low propensity voters (which, you know, has a deficiency-based lens) to high-potential voters.

Nicole, what about people on the reservations? What are some barriers actually getting in their way of voting?

The voter identification law I mentioned earlier is still active. This law is still on the books, so that's a barrier. People need to verify their address and find ways to verify their address. Sometimes that's not always an accurate address they’re assigned.

But more recently, with the primary we had here in North Dakota, it was an all vote-by-mail primary. We believe at North Dakota Native Vote that the election should be free, accessible, and fair. It wasn’t—this is not happening in North Dakota.

In one case, in my home reservation, since it was an all vote-by-mail primary, you have to find a way to obtain an absentee ballot. The Secretary of State remedied that by sending out letters telling people they could download the ballot online—that’s if you have internet access, and that’s if you have the ability to print a ballot.

Casting your ballot is also an issue in North Dakota. If you wanted to cast your absentee ballot, you either had to pay out of pocket (in some cases, it could be up to two dollars, which is a lot of money for people on a fixed income) or, in my case—on my reservation—had to drive 40 miles one way, through some towns, to drop it in a free ballot box.

Those are some of the things we’ve identified. Also, if you want to track your ballot, you can in North Dakota, but the Secretary of State or the county auditor—that counts your ballot—if it is ruled as an invalid ballot, you are not notified. So the state can cancel out your ballot if you cast it, and there’s something like signatures that don’t match.

There are a lot of complexities with our electoral system in North Dakota that make it almost impossible for some people in very rural communities to vote. There are so many little rules too; you might not know when you’re breaking the rule, like if your signature is a little off or whatever.

What about the people you encounter that you work with?

Yes, I mean, and I think in certain states, you’re now seeing people get dropped from the roles—people who’ve been registered for a very long time suddenly purged from the roles—in places like Georgia.

I think it's really important just for everyone out there to double-check that you're registered now, just confirm that. And then make sure that you're aware of timelines around vote-by-mail, early voting, and things like that.

Super Majority is a great resource for that if you have questions about that process—we're helping people figure all that stuff out.

One thing that struck me about when I was writing about the suffragists was, you know, they had to convince men to share power with them ultimately. Do you feel like you have to convince people to share power with you? I mean, are we talking about a fixed pie of power? Are we adding to the pie by including more people in the political process?

It's an interesting question. I do think that the defining characteristic of our existing political system—designed by and for men—is a culture of zero-sum politics, right? If you have power, it means I have less.

I actually don't think that is how it works, and I don't think that women—I don't want to stereotype; women are not a monolith—but from what I see in terms of how women's leadership works, it's less of a scarcity model and a zero-sum model and more of an abundance model around how do we design for maximum inclusion?

I think that, yeah, I guess I would just say that that's part of the problem—that culture of if you have more, it means I have less, because this is a country that is so abundant in so many ways.

There's so much creativity and innovation that is just all directed towards more profits, more convenience, more efficiency— as opposed to greater equity and opportunity. So we just have to figure out how we kind of reprioritize here and think about how to deploy all of that creativity and innovation towards helping us realize the abundance in this country in such a way that allows everyone to be safe, whole, and dignified in their lives.

What can people do who are not domestic workers or who are not Native in North Dakota to help? Maybe not to share power, but to build the amount of power that's out there?

Do you want to take that?

Yeah! So I think that, I mean, I keep thinking about Emergent Strategy. I don't know if you've ever read the book, but she talks about how oak trees are on a complex system underground. Storms can pass through areas, and the oak trees will still be standing because they connect their roots underground.

We need to find people where they're at and help them find their voice or help them get to the polls. We need to have those resources available.

In our communities, you know, we were just talking about how power isn't shared. It's based on a deficit model. We need to go forward together and find people where they're at, give them the resources they need.

Organizations like North Dakota Native Vote—that's what we do. We let the people speak for themselves. We empower them by giving them the resources.

So what other people can do is talk to others about things that are important to you. If people you know have questions about the people on the ballot, answer those questions. Let them know that these things are important and that their voice is important. Those are things that we value as an organization—having those conversations and building power from the roots upward.

Yeah! I agree with that. I would just add that, you know, I don’t think this is the kind of time in our history where you want to look back and wonder if you did enough.

I think that your kids and your grandkids are going to ask you, “Where were you? What did you do?” We're in such deep, deep crisis that it's an all-hands-on-deck situation.

It doesn’t mean you have to be like me or Nicole and drive ten million bajillion miles around. I think there’s a way to find your lane based on what feels authentic and true to you, but it’s about action and proactivity—whatever it means to you to do more than you thought you could to be part of the solution and help us get out of this crisis.

Imagine that you all achieved everything you wanted to achieve. Everyone could vote with little friction; there was representation of all sorts of people who make America a beautiful country. What would that look like to you? What is this city on the hill? What does it look like?

That would look like me not having a job anymore!

No, I'm kidding, which would be great. I could go do something else!

To be honest, I thought about this and it would look like us no longer being underfunded, under-resourced, and just no longer being subjugated. We would look like a suburb. Our communities would have the things we need.

People would be at the table. We’d have equal voices, and we would have the ability to make changes. If we had people who were actually doing it for the people like some of the women who we do now have in congress, the world would be such a better place!

Yeah, we would have a totally reflective democracy. We would have bold, bold policy that would reset our social safety net, our economy, and our democracy for this next era in history.

We'd have universal access to childcare, long-term care, paid leave, and health care. We’d have the fundamentals covered. It would mean we’re liberated from being in survival mode so we could ask the questions about how we can contribute, how we can support, how we can nurture the people that we love, and feel we’re making a meaningful contribution to this country without having to struggle so hard around the fundamentals.

There would be a lot more space for creativity, dynamism, art, and music. There would be a big cultural renaissance that came out of that—that we would be finding all these new ways of experiencing joy and learning from each other.

That sounds pretty great!

Well, thank you so much, Nicole and Ijen. It's really been a wonderful conversation. I feel like I've learned a lot and gotten a bit of a window into the hard but essential work that you are doing. I hope that our audience did too.

Is there anything last things you'd like to say or any places you'd like to point people to in terms of your organizations? I'm sure you're all Googleable, but you can follow me on Twitter at @ijenpoo. I co-host a podcast called "Sunstorm," which is all about how we continue to shine through the storms of our time and our politics. It's co-hosted with Alicia Garza, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter.

I just really hope everybody’s ready to do the work. Let's go!

Thank you!

Yeah, you can follow North Dakota Native Vote on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or check us out on our webpage ndnativevote.org. Great!

Well, thank you so much, and have a lovely weekend.

We'll see you.

Bye!

Thank you!