The 2024 presidential race is one that will be decided at the margins. Democrats hope the Voting is Sacred mantra will produce a reprise of the 2020 Native American vote. Four years ago, a surge in Navajo and Hopi turnout proved the difference in Biden’s 10,000 vote victory in Arizona. In the Midwest, Menominee and Ojibwe voters proved decisive in Wisconsin, a contest ultimately decided by just 20,000 ballots. 

Yet if Voting is Sacred is a national effort aimed at the broad indigenous public, they in fact represent a kaleidoscope of lifestyles. All told, there are some 9.7 million Native Americans and Alaskans, scattered across some 573 federally recognised groups. Like John, some have built their homes in the country. Yet from Anchorage to Phoenix, 70% live in cities. Like John, meanwhile, about a quarter live on reservations or tribal trust lands, while the rest make their way independently. 

Given this spread, at any rate, native priorities are as varied as anywhere else in America, from casinos in New York to buffalo rights in Montana. Beyond that, Native Americans differ in one more vital respect: their power. A century on from the law that finally gave them citizenship, they’re now of course equal before the law. But if the Navajo can leverage their swing-state location, and tribes elsewhere have grown adept at encouraging strategic voting to achieve their goals, men like Ross John seem condemned by geography.

Native Americans, after all, are not just any other interest group. Expelled from much of their ancestral lands, tribal groups possess sovereignty and rights guaranteed by federal treaties. Yet as a dispersed people, they lack concentrated electoral power. And if Voting is Sacred is a strategy to give the indigenous vote some heft, in presidential politics at least, centuries of broken promises mean many aren’t sure politics can help.

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Ross John has lived his whole life in far southwestern New York. Amid the Alleghenies’ towering sugar maples, and the crumbling barns with their flecks of red paint, he’s one of 8,000 Seneca here, scattered across a pair of non-contiguous communities. In John’s Cattaraugus Reservation, the poverty rate is 65%. At the neighbouring Allegany Reservation, it’s 33%, but that’s still markedly higher than many nearby towns.

In nearby Salamanca, a ramshackle New York town of 6,000, just off the Southern Tier Expressway, a high-rise casino dominates the landscape. Salamanca offers legal pot, shabby gas stations for tax-free gas and cigarettes — and gambling. A dingy tourist trap with random signage in the Seneca language, it’s become a symbol of native struggles.

No wonder John threw himself into politics, serving 14 years on the tribal council. Yet despite seeing tribal sovereignty as the alpha and omega of local politics — by treaty, the Seneca is an independent nation distinct from the US — John was ultimately disappointed by his time in office. The basic problem, he explains, was the disdain of outsiders. “I wasn’t very successful at changing tribal politics,” he says. “There are just too many federal guidelines.” 

John Kane, a Mohawk who lives in Seneca territory, has similar complaints. “The Seneca pay 50% of their gaming revenue [to New York] to buy exclusivity that they don’t need,” laments the host of the Resistance Radio show. Problems started back in 2002, when the Seneca opened the first of three New York state casinos, all owned by Native Americans. To do this, Albany forced an agreement that has the Seneca pay the state one-quarter of all slot machine revenues. The Seneca, for their part, pay all operating expenses out of their share, which translates to a 50/50 split in profits with the state.

All told, the Seneca paid $1.4 billion to New York State between 2002-17. But Kane wonders what the tribe got in return. In 2002, the same year that the tribe opened their casino, the state constitution banned all gambling. In 2013, voters amended it to allow Las Vegas-style gaming. So $1.4 billion paid for an “exclusivity” that was already barred by law but is now allowed. Explaining all this, Kane sighs: “You can’t make this shit up.” In 2017, the Seneca quit their payments. To this day, the tribe and state remain locked in a legal battle. Unlike John, Kane doesn’t renounce his citizenship, but he’s nonetheless cynical about the Voting is Sacred movement. “The idea that we are a determinative voting bloc is blown out of proportion,” he says. “We just want to be left alone.”

Not everyone is so jaded. Unlike Kane, Tracie Garfield embraces Voting is Sacred. The Fort Peck Tribe member lives in Montana, where 6% of voting-age citizens are Native American. In 2006 and 2012, the native vote helped the Senate Democrat, Jon Tester, to narrow victories. For 2024, the communications director for her state’s Western Native Voice campaign has been running voter registration drives right across Montana. 

This time round, though, Garfield sees lots of voter fatigue. “I don’t see a lot of excitement.” What she senses in Montana is a national issue. Only 66% of voting-age Native Americans are even registered, a problem with deep roots. Native Americans were denied the right to cast their ballots until 1924, when Congress finally passed the Indian Citizenship Act. Even then, several Western states held out until the Fifties. 

As Garfield puts it: “We have to start from scratch, since most Natives are only in the second generation of voting.” That dovetails with other challenges. In Big Sky Country, a trip to the polling station can be a 100-mile round trip. And even once they arrive at the county seat, Garfield warns that would-be voters sometimes feel intimidated being the only native in town. 

Though the situation isn’t hopeless. One solution, Garfield suggests, is to turn voting into a tradition, like community bingo or a family dinner, something she believes will help Native Americans become enthused by politics. “As a tribal people,” she says, “we respect our elders. If we get families to vote together then that is our goal.”  

Yet more than the tangle of history, or the lure of custom, you get the sense that native electoral enthusiasm can ultimately be understood as a function of political heft. If, after all, John and the Seneca are understandably pessimistic in New York, a Democratic stronghold that anyway cleansed most of its indigenous population in the early 19th century, tribes further west have far more sway. 

Montana, with its 6% tribal bloc, is one thing. But that’s nothing compared to Oklahoma, where Native Americans comprise 13.4% of the population, and where low turnout generally bolsters their collective influence still further. “I am optimistic,” says Ben Barnes, Chief of the Shawnee in the Sooner State. “Native Americans can really make a dent. If we turnout, we can make a difference.” 

More to the point, numerical muscle seems to translate to real-world excitement. In conjunction with the United Indian Nations of Oklahoma group, Barnes has promoted a new turnout initiative. Known as Warrior Up to Vote, it’s already registered hundreds of new native voters right across the state.

And if that speaks, yet again, to the wildly diverse opportunities for Native Americans across the country, something similar might be said of what indigenous voters actually want. Liberals often imagine that the Native American vote is staunchly Democratic. But a 2021 report shows that indigenous voters lean Left by just 11%. That’s echoed by schisms elsewhere. As Garfield emphasises, Montana alone has 12 recognised tribes, each with distinct priorities. The Crow, for instance, exploit their coal and oil reserves, while neighbouring Blackfeet push environmental protections for their “buffalo brothers”.

Demographic discrepancies also affect how Native Americans make their voices heard. In swing states such as Wisconsin, the Ojibwe can appeal to national politicians when state and local authorities ignore them. In 2020, the Ojibwe, who were hit hard by Covid, voted for Biden to keep reservation health restrictions intact. Presidential candidates sometimes even come to them: in September, Donald Trump promised to formally recognise the Lumbee, a tribe in the crucial battleground of North Carolina. 

Interest from the big guns is harder to muster in Oklahoma, a one-party state where Trump has little to gain by playing nice. Yet the demographic power of natives in the Sooner State still matters — it’s just that leaders like Barnes need to be more subtle about exploiting their influence.

One tactic involves educating legislators on native concerns, especially that all-important issue of tribal sovereignty. “I find that in Oklahoma not every legislator or senator understands,” Barnes explains. “We have to vote for a Republican or Democrat that understands Indians are sovereign.” Another option is simply backing native candidates: Markwayne Mullin, Oklahoma’s junior senator, is both a fervent Trump supporter and a Cherokee.

“Don’t vote R, don’t vote D, vote I for Indian,” is how Barnes evocatively describes this approach — and certainly it’s one that’s bearing fruit. On Capitol Hill in Washington, the head of the House Appropriations Committee is Tom Cole, a conservative Oklahoma congressman. More importantly, he’s also an enrolled member of the Chickasaw nation, one with an intimate knowledge of Native American affairs. “How great is it,” Barnes says, “that we don’t have to explain why funding is necessary?” 

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This comprehensive plan has borne fruit: Cole is now sponsoring a landmark bill to investigate the horrors of Indian Boarding Schools. Not that Barnes and other Native Americans are exclusively putting their hopes on one side of the House. Cole also liaises closely on tribal concerns with Sharice Davids, a liberal Ho-Chunk congresswoman from Kansas. Barnes, for his part, is full of praise for this political odd couple. “How refreshing is that?” 

Despite these regional successes, and notwithstanding the gaggle of federal treaties impinging on indigenous groups, Barnes still argues that elections in “the tribal races” are most important for voters like him. It’s a point echoed elsewhere. For Cynthia LaMere, the former vice-chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and member of the Yankton-Sioux, elections at the community level, in the reservation or tribal trust, are just more “tangible”. Considering the bewildering range of native concerns, that’s surely unsurprising, especially when the lowest rung of electoral politics is the arena where schools are run and casinos managed.

But where does that leave people like Ross John, flailing between an aggressive and sceptical state government on the one hand — and indifferent Congressional legislators on the other? For Stephen Knott, that strikes at the heart of the issue. As the emeritus professor at the US Naval War College says, Newt Gingrich “nationalised” every congressional race in the land way back in 1994. But if the media now obsesses endlessly about the antics on Capitol Hill, 536 federal officeholders still pale compared to the 500,000 elected officials nationwide. “It is a schizophrenic arrangement,” John admits of his native Seneca. “And we have to live with it.”

“People are thoughtless all the time,” writes Alexandra Hudson in her new book, The Soul of Civility, while arguing that the best way to depolarise our society is to recognise that good people can have bad ideas. This idea is classically Christian, but also fundamentally American: even after the Civil War, a central tenet of Reconstruction was that those who fought for the Confederacy should be given grace for having chosen the wrong side. But that’s a principle it’s easier to hold to in the wake of victory than in the fog of war — or, as this past week’s events have reminded us, War Discourse.

The response from certain corners of the progressive Left to the stories coming out of Israel has been extraordinary. The silhouette of a paragliding Hamas militant has been adopted by groups ranging from Black Lives Matter to the Democratic Socialists of America — a graphic successor to that Che Guevara block print that used to hang on every dorm room wall. A crowd on the steps of the Sydney Opera House in Australia chanted “gas the Jews”. A cheer went up in Times Square at the news that 700 Israelis had been killed. And among the academic and media classes, a series of statements ran the gamut from half-hearted condemnations of the terrorist attacks to triumphant and bloodthirsty snarling.

“What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers,” wrote Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue. “Today should be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide,” tweeted Rivkah Brown of Novara Media. The language varied, but the sentiment was the same: this is good, actually, and seeing it should fill you with the same cathartic glee as any underdog story. Don’t you see? This isn’t terrorism; it is justice.

Who has time to care about civility when the world is burning down? Three nights ago, I was part of an audience on East 46th Street listening to Hudson explain the relationship between civility and “the norms of the practice of war” — norms which, of course, Hamas has explicitly chosen to subvert in its targeting and killing of civilians. The next day, on the phone, I asked her what civility looks like in an age of extreme polarisation.

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“Human nature hasn’t changed,” she said. (Her references include many ancient texts.) “But the ubiquity of our interconnectedness… that is different, that is new, and it presents new challenges to civility. It can coarsen us and desensitise us to the suffering of others when we’re imbibing it all the time.”

The war in Israel, and the one in Ukraine: it’s not hard to see how our distance from these events, combined with the immediacy of so much coverage and conversation about them, lends itself to the most grotesque kind of rubbernecking. It’s war as spectator sport; people haggle over the reports of Hamas beheading babies with the same energy as a group of armchair referees debating an off-side call.

Some people, anyway. The term “luxury beliefs” was coined to describe how privileged progressives like to traffic in this sort of unhinged extremist rhetoric. Partly, it’s a hazard of their utter insulation from ever having to experience the practical impact of the policies they advocate. Violence and chaos have a way of breaking through the barriers that separate the ivory tower-dwellers from the masses they condescend; one imagines the occupants of Versailles looked out their windows at the guillotine being constructed in the public square and, not understanding what lay in store, pronouncing the structure adorable.

But it’s also what happens when you succumb to the Manichean worldview that every conflict, every issue, boils down to a simple question of who is the more oppressed party. Whichever guy has more privilege, more power: this is your villain. In trying to topple him from his unearned position of influence, his victim can do no wrong. Hamas, composed as it is of Muslim people of colour, is merely punching (and raping, and kidnapping) up.

While the attacks on Israel have given rise to a particularly stomach-turning iteration of this rhetoric, we have seen it before. In 2020, as the US protests against police violence spiralled out of control, members of the laptop class could reliably be found posting that Martin Luther King Jr quote about riots being “the voice of the unheard” — always from the safety of their homes, in nice neighbourhoods, in coastal cities, where things were conspicuously not on fire. The people looting, rioting, and wreaking havoc were members of an oppressed class, and hence above reproach.

But the most absurd example of how true-life horrors become grist for the mill of perverse progressive fantasy popped up downstream of the “decolonisation” discourse. Every now and then, someone announces on the internet that they would begrudgingly allow themselves to be murdered if Native Americans decided to violently re-exert ownership over their ancestral lands. The authenticity of such sentiments is obviously belied by the fact that these same people could, if they wanted to, voluntarily renounce their power instead of waiting for some noble savage to take it by force. If you truly believed yourself to be a colonist, illegitimately squatting on someone else’s property, why would you waste time tweeting about it? Wouldn’t you just leave?

But surely it’s hardly worth pointing this out. The offensiveness of such a line of speculation is exceeded only by its impossibility; we could just leave its proponents alone to play in their ghoulish little sandbox, with their terrible little toys. And yet this, too, would be uncivil.

“Civility doesn’t require forgetting, it doesn’t require sweeping grievances under the rug,” says Hudson. “It requires confronting people with their mistakes, misjudgements, misdeeds. To do anything else is to see them as a child, as lesser.”

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If civility demands that we hold people to account for the hatred they spew, it also rejects the notion that a person of an “oppressed” identity category should get a free pass to spew hatred. The bar for human decency, surely, does not shift depending on the colour of your skin or the arrangement of your genitals — and to insist on this, on one standard for all people, creates a clear path forward, which may be the best thing about civility as an ethos. It works on the assumption that, as bleak as things are now, there will be an “after” in which we forgive, even if we don’t forget.

A day after her “celebration” post, Rivkah Brown deleted it, and wrote the following: “I responded too quickly and in a moment of heightened emotion. Witnessing Palestinians defy decades of oppression hardened me to the suffering of Israeli civilians, including my friends and family, and I regret that. I’m sorry.”

Of course the human instinct, as demonstrated in the replies to her post, is to not accept the apology. The hazard of finding oneself on the moral high ground is that it becomes difficult not to revel in being up there, and not to kick at least a little dirt down onto the person grovelling below you. “Self-sacrifice is not our natural way of thinking or taking action,” Hudson writes in The Soul of Civility. “The Book of Proverbs from the Hebrew Bible goes so far as to charge us to ‘bind [these teachings] around our neck,’ as we are prone to forget them.”

As I left Hudson’s event on Tuesday night, I found the street closed off. Instead of cars, the pavement was occupied by hundreds of people holding signs and banners and flags: the remnants of what had been a massive rally in support of Israel. I would later learn that some people present were captured on camera wishing for the annihilation of Palestine; no one side, as it turns out, has a monopoly on hatred.

As I weaved through the crowd, Leonard Cohen’s “You Want it Darker” was playing through my headphones, a fitting meditation on war, death, and the cruelty we inflict on each other in the name of a just cause.

They’re lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggle with some demons
They were middle-class and tame
I didn’t know I had permission
To murder and to maim

The chorus to this song is a Hebrew word, a line from the Torah. It’s what Abraham says, in response to God’s request that he sacrifice his son; it is also what we might say to each other, eventually, when civility or decency or whatever deity you believe in asks us to confront and forgive each other’s failings in this moment, the better to thrive in the moments we have left.

Hineni, hineni. I’m ready, I’m ready.