A record-breaking number of Native Americans are running for state and local office

Angel Charley first recognized the profound impact that state government had on Native people, like herself, doing advocacy work in New Mexico on the crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women.

It is a frequent area of concern at the Roundhouse in Santa Fe, the state’s capitol building, because New Mexico—which has the fifth-largest population of Native Americans in the country—has the highest number of Indigenous people who have disappeared or were killed.

Charley, who served as president of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, had been pushing lawmakers to adopt a state law that mirrored the protections in the federal Indian Child Welfare Act, which she feared the Supreme Court might strike down. (In 2023, the high court left the federal law that prioritizes adoption placements of Native children with Native families intact.)

That experience, Charley said, showed her “how state government should be accountable and responsive to the issues that are happening in Native communities.” So, when the state senator who represented her area opted to run in a different district, leaving an opening in Charley’s home district, where more than a third of residents are Native American, it gave her an opportunity.

“There are several pueblos and Navajo communities within the district, and it had never had a Native representative before,” said Charley, who is also the executive director of Illuminative, an organization that works to uplift the voices and representation of Native people throughout the country. “There were just enough voters in there where we could potentially have a Native candidate run, and I was waiting for others, watching and waiting, and I started to get these phone calls.”

“It took several of those phone calls” before Charley made the decision to run for the open seat, she said. Charley faced a former lawmaker in the Democratic primary. “It was a quick race, but it was really intense. I won the primary, and I’m unopposed in the general, so Senate District 30 will now have the first Native or woman representative in history.”

Charley is one of a growing number of Native candidates seeking state and local offices, advocates say. Advance Native Political Leadership, a group that works to increase Native American representation at those levels of government, says there are 184 Native candidates running across the country this year, up from 100 when it first started counting in 2016. About 80% of this year’s candidates are women.

“This year is the highest number of Native candidates running for office ever in U.S. history,” said Jordan James Harvill, the national program director for Advance.

Those numbers have been growing steadily since the founding of Advance in 2016, James Harvill said. Four Native leaders from different tribes and different parts of the country created the group to gather information about Native voters, train potential candidates and coordinate national strategy. One of the group’s founders is Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe who is now Minnesota’s lieutenant governor. Flanagan could become the country’s first Native American governor, if Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is elected vice president this November.

The need for more Native representation is still apparent, James Harville said. Currently, Native candidates hold about 0.07% of all elected offices in the country, despite making up at least 3.4% of the total U.S. population. Montana is the only state in the country where the percentage of Native officials in the state legislature at least matches their share of the population.

A Growing Movement

The group’s founding came just as “two catalyzing moments” helped mobilize Native voters and activists, James Harvill said.

First, the Black Lives Matter movement drew attention to racial injustice after the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in 2016.

Second, protests began around the same time over the Dakota Access Pipeline through the reservation of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota. Other Native tribes and individuals supported the demonstrations, which quickly brought celebrities and national media attention. The protesters clashed with police and National Guard troops.

“At Standing Rock, thousands of people, particularly young people, came to this place and stood on the front lines to fight the pipeline,” James Harvill said. “The lasting legacy of that wasn’t the pipeline fight. It was an organizing network that got created out of Standing Rock. All of those people went home and asked themselves the question: How do I help my community?”

“They ended up running for office. They started organizations. They became deeper activists and built up grassroots community organizations,” he said.

That work led to two Native women being sent to the U.S. House in the 2018 election for the first time—Deb Haaland of New Mexico and Sharice Davids of Kansas. Their success inspired many other Native Americans to run for office, James Harvill said. (Haaland is now the Interior Secretary for the Biden administration.)

The movement continued to grow during the Trump administration, when many issues important to Native Americans became national political controversies. 

Among those issues was the Indian Child Welfare Act—the federal law that helped inspire New Mexico’s Charley to run for office. The Republican attorneys general of Indiana, Louisiana and Texas challenged the act. James Harvill said the case threatened to undermine many tenets of federal Indian law and treaty rights, before the high court dismissed it.

The Supreme Court also heard several cases on Native American treaty rights, including the question of whether prosecutors from the state of Oklahoma could prosecute Native residents on tribal land that had never been ceded to the state. The high court sided with the tribes in several decisions.

Then, President Donald Trump reduced the size of the Bears Ears National Monument in southern Utah—which President Barack Obama created in his final days in office—by 85%, angering many tribes in the area.

The Republican president also stopped the annual White House Tribal Nations Conference that Obama created, and weakened protections for land and wildlife that many tribes had supported.

More recently, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, has clashed repeatedly with tribes over casino revenue, tobacco sales, license plates, taxes and the Supreme Court’s decision on criminal jurisdiction. In South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem has been banned from the lands of all nine indigenous tribes in her state. The Republican governor said Mexican drug cartels were operating on Native American reservations.

“This is not a movement we had seen previously,” James Harvill said. “There’s a bracing, and [Native candidates] are seeing running for office as a chance to fight back.”

Widespread Interest

The growing interest among Native candidates, though, is not limited to places with large reservations. Nationally, about 70% of Native people live in urban areas, compared to about 30% in rural or tribal lands.

“The largest surges are not happening in the Oklahomas,” James Harvill said. “There are people running in every state right now. Every state is far underrepresented. Most [Native] people who are currently elected to office, almost all of them have a story about being the very first in their seat ever.”

In Lawrence, Kansas, for example, state Rep. Christina Haswood, who is Diné (or Navajo), first won election to the House in 2020. She is the only Native American currently serving in the Kansas Legislature. But this year she is pursuing a seat in the state Senate.

In Arizona, Brian Garcia, an attorney whose parents are from El Salvador and the Pascua Yauqui Tribe in Mexico, is running for state representative in the Scottsdale and Tempe area. He previously served as a board member and president of the Tempe Union High School District at the time when COVID-19 first started spreading in the U.S.

Serving in the state legislature would give him a chance to address public education, at a time when he says the state’s school voucher program has limited resources to public schools. “The folks who are most impacted by that are Native students who don’t get as much support as we need,” he said.

Garcia is also worried about voting rights, an issue that he has worked on as an attorney.

“We see attacks on democracy every single day in elections,” he said. “When it comes to Native voters, we know that Native voters turn out when there are issues and folks on the ballot who represent Native values. It’s important to recognize tribal sovereignty and the right to self-determination.”

If he wins, Garcia will be the first Native person to represent the area in the state House.

In New Mexico, Charley is also concerned with funding for schools as well as infrastructure improvements that are needed for rural and tribal communities in her district.

There are 23 tribes in New Mexico, so there’s a Native American caucus in the legislature and a Cabinet-level Indian Affairs department. That has led to a “strong, united front on behalf of tribal communities in New Mexico,” said Charley, who is Laguna, Navajo and Zuni.

“As an advocate and an organizer on the outside, I’ve spent the majority of my life calling for accountability,” she said. “I believe we have to be on the outside, marching in the streets, protesting and speaking truth to power. But we have to be on the inside as well.”

“We have to have folks on the inside of these systems to do the hard work, to work on behalf of the community, to be aligned in their values,” Charley said. “It just became time to be one of the people on the inside willing to champion that change.”

Charley said she took the words of Flanagan, the Minnesota lieutenant governor and a prominent Native rights advocate, to heart. “She says: Do the next good thing,” Charley said. “Whether someone wants to run for office or just be in their community, it’s the best advice: Do the next good thing.”