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Big Vote On Campus
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Contributor | RBH |
Last Edited | RBH Apr 20, 2008 01:11pm |
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Category | News |
News Date | Monday, February 25, 2008 07:10:00 PM UTC0:0 |
Description | In 2004, Kevin Killer watched as his fellow Oglala Sioux Tribe members were turned away at the voting booth in South Dakota when poll volunteers misconstrued new voter identification procedures and rejected tribal identification cards. A Denver native, Killer was volunteering for Democrat Stephanie Herseth's bid for the House of Representatives in a special election, on the Pine Ridge Reservation where his father had grown up. But it was watching that systematic disenfranchisement that really politicized him.
"I couldn't believe it was still going on in 2004, especially to my own people," Killer says. "They don't have money to give to campaigns. All they have is their vote to give, and for them to get turned away, why should they have faith in the system?"
Killer, now 28, decided to take time off from school at the University of Colorado in Denver to be a field organizer for Tom Daschle's senatorial campaign, working in Native American outreach on Pine Ridge. He brought other youth from the reservation on board with the campaign, going door to door to educate and mobilize voters in their community.
"Since we were much younger than the people we were talking to, we held them responsible," Killer says. "We said, if we're this young and we're voting, then you should be voting. It's all of our futures."
Though Daschle narrowly lost re-election, turnout on the reservation increased by 50 percent in 2004, in large part because of the door-to-door work of Killer and his peers. Working on the campaign on Pine Ridge convinced Killer that he should transfer to Oglala Lakota College, the local tribal college, where he could continue mobilizing the young adults who make up more than half the reservation's population. The college includes 1,500 students on 10 small commuter campuses spread over a reservation about the size of Connecticut, and its students experience daily the reservation's troubles, including a 75 percent unemployment rate. Killer needed to work a |
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