Ron Evans, the Grand Chief of Manitoba, will meet soon with First Nations leaders in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Alberta to discuss reforming the way aboriginal people elect their officials, according to Jen Skerritt of the Winnipeg Free Press:

Evans said current rules under the Indian Act cause problems since chief and councils are elected for two-year terms, which he said is too short for the leadership to see any project through to completion. He said frequent elections limit progress, and unstable leadership can scare off potential investors and business development.

The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs last year began consulting the 37 Manitoba bands that follow electoral rules laid out under the Indian Act, and Evans said there’s been overwhelming support for new reforms.

The movement has the support of aboriginal chiefs in Atlantic Canada and also the federal government.

Gwen Florio

On Sundays, Buffalo Post features a column by Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, who is the editor and publisher of Native Sun News. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard with the Class of 1990. His weekly column won the H. L. Mencken Award in 1985. His book Children Left Behind was awarded the Bronze Medal by Independent Book Publishers. He was the first Native American ever inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2007. He can be reached at editor@nsweekly.com

By Tim Giago

The ads are becoming more frequent and more vicious.

Kristi Noem, the Republican candidate for the lone House of Representatives seat in South Dakota, is the recipient of out-of-state advertisements that are using a scorched earth policy of attacking the incumbent Congress woman, Democratic Stephanie Herseth Sandlin.

The most effective way to combat horrible ads is for Herseth Sandlin to respond with ads that show her accomplishments, and she has many.

Her current ad showing how she has worked with military veterans in so many positive ways is a classic example. As the song goes, “You have to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.”

Herseth Sandlin is a Representative who has taken the time to learn about the Indian Nations in her state. She and current South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD) are probably two of the most knowledgeable members of Congress when it comes to Native American concerns and issues.

I have sat in and listened as both of these members of Congress answered questions, some quite hostile, about Indian issues, and they not only answered the questions, but turned the questions into a time to educate the questioner.

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Every Saturday, Buffalo Post features stories from Native Sun News, published in Rapid City, S.D.

By Randall Howell
Native Sun News Correspondent

HOT SPRINGS –– Early voting for the general election is underway at Pine Ridge and Hot Springs for Shannon County residents.

In fact, Fall River County Auditor Sue Ganje traveled to Pine Ridge village on Tuesday, Sept. 28, to set up equipment and prepare the reservation’s polling place – the office of the county’s Lakota Language Program at the old Indian Health Services hospital, just off Highway 18 west of the “Four Way.”

Ganje, who serves Shannon County as a contracted auditor, said that polls would be open for 22 days “right up to the day before” the general election itself on Tuesday, Nov. 2.

“We’ll be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. five days a week, except for Oct.11 – a holiday,” said Ganje, who told Native Sun News that the early voting program got the nod from Shannon County Commissioners during the Friday, Sept. 24, meeting. Oct. 11 is Native American Day in South Dakota.

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Every Saturday, Buffalo Post features stories from Native Sun News, published in Rapid City, S.D.

By Randall Howell
Native Sun News Correspondent

PINE RIDGE –– A candidate for the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s Pine Ridge District representative continues to await a response to a complaint he has filed with the tribe’s Election Commission.

Bruce Whalen, a first-time candidate for tribal council representative in Pine Ridge District, said he filed his complaint early last week.

The complaint was filed by Whalen in connection with his inability to get a copy of the commission’s meeting minutes wherein it reportedly altered the candidate filing frame because several “chose by their own free will” to go off-reservation to get the drug tests – decisions that several candidates said would delay paperwork establishing
viable candidacy.

“They are changing the rules … changing horses in mid-stream, changing the rules in the middle of the game,” Whalen told Native Sun News. “Not only did they change the rules, but also they won’t provide me with the minutes of the meeting where it happened.”

Meanwhile, Whalen has charged the commission and the Tribal Council with violating its own open-meeting rules and then meeting to extend the filing deadline to accommodate candidates who went off-reservation for those drug tests. Several candidates reportedly complained that because they did so they could not meet the filing time frame.

Hence, the Election Commission apparently adjusted the time frame to meet the filing needs of those candidates, contends Whalen.

The tribe’s top election commissioner – Francis Pumpkin Seed – conducted the ballot positioning session for the tribe late Wednesday but did not supply minutes of the time-frame-change meeting, though Whalen was present.
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Tuesday’s chat with South Dakota Secretary of State Chris Nelson – hosted Kevin Woster of the Rapid City, S.D., Journal – begins at 9 a.m. on the Mount Blogmore site.

As the Journal‘s Andrea J. Cook reported earlier, voters in Shannon County, S.D. – which encompasses most of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation – cannot cast an early ballot without traveling to Hot Springs in Fall River County or applying by mail for an absentee ballot.

All early voting in South Dakota is done by absentee ballot, her story explains. Nelson told Cook he’s sure voters in Shannon County won’t be disenfranchised. The live chat will give people an opportunity to quiz Nelson further on that question.

Gwen Florio

County commission candidates won’t be on the primary election ballot in Fremont County, Wyo., this August.

That’s because of a ruling earlier this week by U.S. District Judge Alan Johnson of Cheyenne. He found that the practice in Fremont County – one-third of which comprises the Wind River Indian Reservation – of holding at-large elections for commissioners diluted the American Indian vote.

That’s a violation of the Voting Rights Act, Johnson found, and ordered a new district voting system. As the Casper, Wyo., Star Tribune reports here:

County Clerk Julie A. Freese said Thursday there’s no way the county could follow Johnson’s order – which calls for him to approve a district voting plan on Aug. 13 – and have commissioners on the ballot just a few days later.

Freese said her office won’t accept commissioner candidate filings until districts are established. State law specifies that commission candidates may file with the county clerk from May 13-28.

“The state statute is out the window at this point,” Freese said. “We’d be dealing with the ruling, and we’d be dealing with whatever we might come up with for a plan as required in the ruling.”

The judge ordered a new plan by June 30, and says the American Civil Liberties Union must respond to that plan before Aug. 13. The ACLU represents the five American Indians who challenged the county’s at-large system.

The Wind River Reservation is home to the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes.

Gwen Florio

Here’s the entire story from the Associated Press about today’s ruling in a case in Martin, S.D., a town that lies between the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian reservations:

MARTIN, S.D. (AP) – A federal appeals court has sided with the South Dakota city of Martin in a lawsuit alleging that its city council districts diminished the voting rights of Native Americans.

The American Civil Liberties Union said in its lawsuit that the district boundaries spread out the Indian vote and kept the voters from electing an Indian to the city council, even though Indians represented one-third of the city’s population.

The case has been back and forth between federal court in South Dakota and three-judge panels of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since 2002. In a ruling Wednesday, the full 8th Circuit Court in a 7-4 vote affirmed a federal judge’s ruling five years ago to dismiss the lawsuit.

Ben Neary of the Associated Press has the following report from Wyoming. Also, see last year’s ACLU report, “Voting Rights in Indian Country,” here:

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Three years after presiding over a trial on an American Indian voting rights case, a federal judge in Wyoming has yet to rule on it. Now, the American Civil Liberties Union is taking the extraordinary step of asking a federal appeals court to force him to decide.

The ACLU represents five members of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes. They claim at-large elections for county commissioners in Fremont County violate federal law by diluting the Native American vote.

U.S. District Judge Alan B. Johnson of Cheyenne presided over the trial in the case in February 2007. Despite repeated letters from the ACLU since then asking him to rule in the case, he has yet to do so.

The ACLU late last month asked the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver to order Johnson to rule. The appeals court on Wednesday gave Fremont County 30 days to file a response and “invited” Johnson himself to address the ACLU’s request.

Johnson’s office said he has no comment.

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American Indians continue to face discriminatory policies and actions that deny them their constitutional right to vote, according to this report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The report gives a historic overview of discrimination against Indian people that limits their participation in local, state and national elections. And it focuses on the ACLU’s legal challenges on behalf of Indians to unlawful election practices in five western states: Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming.

“Every American deserves an equal voice in the political process,” says Laughlin McDonald, Director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project and one of the principal authors of the report. “The effects of discrimination against Indians continue and so must the fight for the fundamental right to vote. Compliance with the Voting Rights Act is not optional.”

Gwen Florio