On Election Night, CNN broadcast a table showing the results of an exit poll that broke the national electorate down into racial demographics. It read: White — 65 percent, Latino — 13 percent, Black — 12 percent, Something else — 6 percent, Asian — 3 percent. Almost immediately, that second-to-last category, "Something Else," provoked an online uproar among the digital denizens of Indian Country.
We were outraged that CNN had, rather clumsily, grouped the First Peoples of this land in with — well, literally everyone else. "In an election largely driven by race, the media still fails to accurately cover voters of color," Cherokee activist Rebecca Nagle tweeted alongside a photo of the segment. "For Native Americans, we're not even named."
[A]round the country, Native people seem to vote at relatively high rates. Although candidates may have been able to plead ignorance about this in the past, wonks like University of Michigan professor Stephanie Fryberg are providing detailed survey-backed research. The Indigenous Futures Project — based on a survey of 6,400 Native people representing 401 tribes — found, for example, that 77 percent of respondents said they voted in the last election (though, to be clear, a poll isn't a perfect proxy for the real world, because people can lie, forget or otherwise misrepresent their actions).
Read the full article at NBC News.
