Chatting Up A Storm - Claudia Cragg

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks with about her new book, . Schroedel is professor emerita of political science at Claremont Graduate University and in this work she weaves together historical and contemporary voting rights conflicts as they related particularly to Native Peoples. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, South Dakota encouraged voters to use absentee ballots in the June 3 presidential primary election. Although the state received almost 89,000 absentee ballots in the primaries — five times the number of absentee ballots cast in the June 2016 primaries — and voting increased across the state, voter turnout on the Pine Ridge Reservation remained low, at approximately 10%. As Schroedel explains in her book, barriers to Indigenous voting are nothing new. Absentee ballots may only make them worse. Though the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act granted citizenship to all Indigenous people born within the United States, voting can still be difficult for tribal communities. During South Dakota’s 2020 primary