For Elayne Gregg, voting on the Tohono O’odham Nation evokes memories of her grandmother. She remembers sitting at the long wooden table in her family’s kitchen and spending time with her grandmother to review her ballot, demonstrating the generational nature of grassroots Indigenous voter engagement.

“It was so hard for her to understand what she was reading,” Gregg said, so she’d break it down for her grandmother by reading through the ballot to help her better understand it.

Gregg always thinks about the time she spent helping her grandmother vote as she works to civically engage her community on the Tohono O’odham Nation. She helps with grassroots Indigenous voter engagement, including voter registration, get-out-the-vote events, and educational presentations about the election.

As early voting heats up across the country, get-out-the-vote events and rallies are popping up all across Arizona to connect with as many voters as possible before Election Day.

Often, national-led get-out-the-vote events and rallies are geared toward urban areas or work with Tribal governments, hoping to connect with Native voters and spur grassroots Indigenous voter engagement in Tribal Nations.

But voters who live in rural parts of their Tribal Nation are often forgotten by those efforts. Connecting with those voters is left up to grassroots organizations who are on the ground in Indigenous communities, organizations like Indivisible Tohono.

Indivisible Tohono (IT), founded in 2017, works on grassroots Indigenous voter engagement. It engages the Tohono O’odham people by sharing information and resources about policies and candidates that will directly impact their community.

Arizona is a crucial state this election, and Indigenous people make up 6% of its overall population. About 300,000 of the state’s voting-age residents are Natives.

Even though a large number of Indigenous people now live in urban areas, there is still a high population of Indigenous people who live on their Tribal Nations, making them an important voting demographic.

Historically, Indigenous communities have voted for Democratic candidates, and in the 2020 election, the voting precinct maps provide a visualization of how Arizona’s 22 Tribal Nations voted. A majority of the precincts located on Tribal land leaned blue.

Read the full article about grassroots Indigenous voter engagement by Shondiin Silversmith at Tucson Sentinel.