I have been to innumerable Washington, DC, receptions, but I will always remember one in 2017. I was in the middle of a benign conversation with a lobbyist when he asked the dreaded question, “What do you do?”

I told him I worked at a Native American advocacy organization and focused on issues of agriculture and retiring Native mascots. 

“Mascots, like the Redskins?” he replied. “Aren’t there bigger issues you can work on?” 

I told him I do work on other things. I was also coordinating efforts around the Bears Ears National Monument, a public land designation protecting Native cultural resources and lands in Utah that the Trump administration was close to removing. “But fighting for things like Bears Ears doesn’t matter if lawmakers, their staff, and their lobbyists don’t see Native people as humans,” I told him. “If they see us as cartoons on the sides of helmets and ball caps, they’ll never see me as an equal in the congressional hearing room.” 

He gave me a weird look. “It should be seen as an honor,” he said, then he walked off. He believed equating an entire race of people, my people, to an animal or a sports token was a compliment. I wanted to be seen as a person, and he wanted a way out of the conversation. 

On July 23, American sports took a step toward treating my people as human. Major League Baseball and the Cleveland team announced it would stop using the team name — the Indians — and replace it with the Guardians. While a video, narrated by Tom Hanks, made no amends or mention of its previous mascot, the Cleveland team noted that “Cleveland was always the best part of our name.” 

But it wasn’t so long ago that changing the team’s name felt far out of reach. As a former policy analyst for the National Congress of American Indians, I worked for years on trying to eliminate mascots — and of all the policy fights and advocacy battles in Indian Country, Native mascots was the hardest issue I ever worked on. This is because it centers on how people see other people. It is about perception. People don’t like being told that their perception is filtered through racism. 

We had tried just about everything to get the National Football League to change the name of the Washington team, and they would not budge. Tribal leaders met with the team and NFL management numerous times. We organized social media campaigns. Activists even put together a culture jam and created an entire online presence for the “Washington Redhawks,” an intentional misdirection to get the team to state that they wouldn’t change their racist name. But rallies and pieces on Comedy Central could only get us so far. Washington owner Dan Snyder told us and the press that “we will never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.” (The team did eventually retire their name during the heat of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020; they have yet to name the replacement mascot.) 

Back in 2017, however, tackling the NFL seemed impossible, so I turned to Major League Baseball. MLB had introduced the “block C” logo for the Cleveland Indians and wore it during games, but you could still buy merchandise featuring their longtime mascot, Chief Wahoo, up until the end of the 2018 season. 

For the unfamiliar, Chief Wahoo is a caricature of a Native American man. His nose is big and cartoonish, his skin is ruby red. He looks less like the Native American men I know and more like what an 1800s vaudeville cartoonist would draw. Chief Wahoo is a representation of what colonialism wanted Native people to be — a grinning clown in the image of Little Black Sambo, something of the past, not real people. 

Every time the Cleveland Indians played the Detroit Tigers, nearly 5 million Native Americans were put on a level playing field with an animal. If Native people are equal to animals, how will we be seen as equal to our fellow human beings in the courts, in Congress, and on the streets? Why would a non-Native person care about the intricacies of Indian law and tribal sovereignty, when they see a Cowboy beat a Redskin on a football field while their family eats Thanksgiving dinner? Why would a student see their Native classmate as fully human when 1,879 schools in America still use Native mascots? 

When the team stopped using Wahoo, we were told at the National Congress of American Indians that the name would come next, but they wouldn’t say when. Everyone in Indian Country has been told to wait many times before. We’ve waited for treaty rights to be upheld, for decisions in endless court battles, to be recognized as the sovereign nations we are. This didn’t seem any different. 

Fans, and others like the DC lobbyist, have argued that naming teams and mascots after Native people is an honor. These “honors” came from the late 19th century, a bleak era in Native American history. Around the same time the first professional baseball leagues started up after the Civil War, the devastating Allotment Era and Reservation Era forced Native people off their traditional lands and into poverty or boarding schools. Native American populations were at their lowest numbers — 248,000 in 1890. With Native people seen as a vanishing race, “honoring” these soon-to-be-forgotten people seemed like the decent thing for America, including sports teams, to do. 

While the true origin of the name the Cleveland Indians is unclear, the story most often told is that of a naming contest held by the team, then known as Naps after player Nap Lajoie. An eager young fan wanted to honor former Cleveland star Louis Sockalexis (Penobscot), the first Native American to play professionally and former member of the team, for his contributions to Cleveland baseball. The team accepted this entry in 1915 and the name stuck for the next 106 years. 

But that feel-good telling is disingenuous. Sockalexis was booed and his heritage was made fun of from his first day in the league. Fans mocked his culture, greeting him with war whoops and by imitating dances. He earned his spot on the team based on his merits, but was only seen as the butt of a joke. When the team name was later tied solely to Sockalexis’s race, it was not to honor his individual accomplishments as a player. It was to continue the mockery that met Sockalexis on day one. 

Since the 1960s, Native activists have been fighting for the retirement of “Indian” mascots. They have told team owners and the general public that reducing us to cartoons demeans us, that seeing us as mascots humiliates us, that it hurts the self-esteem of our young ones. Nothing changed. 

But in the past year, the Washington Football Team (name still TBD) and now the Cleveland team have toppled like dominoes. A change this big could have only happened during a time when the country has shifted toward a reckoning with racism. The George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 led to people buying anti-racist books in droves, to corporations adopting diversity initiatives for the first time, to serious conversations about race on TV shows and at dinner tables. Polls in the summer of 2020 showed that 67 percent of Americans acknowledged that racism is a big problem in society. 

Still, people have a hard time understanding racism when it is not tied to violence or economics. Racism tied to perception is the hardest to unpack.

Everyone likes to think that their perceptions are fair and unbiased. It’s tough enough for people to admit that they have privilege in a racist system. It’s even harder to convince people that the blinders from that racist system have taught them to see others as less than human. 

The discussion becomes not about what we see — we all see a red cartoon character in a baseball cap — it is about how we see. I see Wahoo as a caricature of who society wants me to be — stuck in the past and almost extinct — ignoring who I really am: an educated Native American woman, proud of the people I come from, living in 2021. The lobbyist at the reception saw Wahoo as an honor to a dying race of people who have bigger problems than changing his perception.

But changing perception matters. Changing perception puts pressure on institutions to do better. If Americans had always seen Native people as humans, we would have never had to fight these mascot battles. We could have actually focused all of our attention on rebuilding our communities.

Maria Givens is an enrolled member of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe (Schitsu’umsh) in northern Idaho. She has a master’s degree in environmental issues from the University of Colorado and has worked for the National Congress of American Indians and in the US Senate. She is passionate about tribal food sovereignty and shares pictures of Native food on her Instagram. 

This Sunday, Democratic candidates Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders will duke it out on the debate stage, likely over the differences in their health care plans, economic strategies, and the proper response to Covid-19. 

But there is one thing we won’t hear about — the 5 million people whose ancestors called this land home before there was a president of the United States. We won’t hear about the 574 federally recognized tribal nations and their citizens. Nor will we hear about the plague of missing and murdered indigenous women. When candidates list out other minorities, like Black or Latino voters, my people won’t be mentioned. 

As a Schitsu’umsh woman, I know why no one is talking about us. Most people think Native Americans only existed in the 1800s on the back of a horse trotting across the prairie. The image of Native people is frozen there forever. More than any other race, ethnicity, or nationality in America, we suffer from invisibility. No one knows we still exist. 

And yet in the heat of the 2020 race, the Native vote matters. With 5.1 million Native Americans in the US, Native people are a critical voting bloc in swing states, rural states, and pretty much any state west of the Mississippi — and they tend to lean Democrat. The Native American population, according to the 2010 census, totals more than Iowa (3.1 million) and New Hampshire (1.3 million) combined. 

Native Americans are often left out of the election conversation, though, because many of us are rural. Accessing tribal communities in the remote mesas of Arizona or hills of North Carolina is too far of a stretch for these campaigns. Rural tribal areas often lack internet access and paved roads.

For a campaign to reach these remote places, it would take a canvasser days to contact just a handful of prospective voters. It would resemble more of a backpacking trip through the Grand Canyon or the Smoky Mountains than the typical door-knocking event in the suburbs with coffee and doughnuts. Having worked as a field organizer on a congressional campaign before, I can hear the voice of the field director in my head: “It’s not worth the effort.” 

But campaigns don’t reach out to urban Native voters, either. Sixty-seven percent of all Native Americans live in urban areas. The 1950s policy of relocation incentivized Native people living on reservations to move to places like Denver, Minneapolis, Seattle, or San Jose, like my mother’s family did. Urban Natives, like me, have jobs, friends, and social lives in the city while maintaining connections to their tribal communities back home. And I have never once seen a political campaign directing outreach to urban Native voters. 

Without outreach, it’s hard for campaigns to understand not only the diverse needs of Native Americans, but also where they stand with voters. If the federal government isn’t reporting data on tribal communities, a swanky Washington, DC, polling firm definitely is not. Polling in Indian country for the 2020 election simply is not happening. This means that campaigns don’t see how they are trending with critical Native voters, reinforcing the perpetual cycle of ignoring the Native vote. 

Understanding the Native vote at this point in the 2020 race means looking at upcoming primary states with large Native constituencies. If candidates were serious about Native Americans, they would court voters in Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, Wisconsin, and New York as the race continues this spring. Alaska Natives account for 15 percent of the population in the state and have supported both Democrats and Republicans in the past, swinging statewide elections. Just ask Lisa Murkowski, the moderate Republican senator from Alaska, who owes her write-in electoral victory in 2010 in part to the state’s Native population. 

Meanwhile, Donald Trump shocked everyone in 2016 by winning Wisconsin by 22,748 votes. What the pundits were not talking about is that the Native American population in Wisconsin totals more than 31,000. If any Democrat aims to win Wisconsin in the general election, mobilizing the Native vote in this swing state is necessary. 

While Native American issues are complex and vary by region, tribe, community, and culture, there are key points many Native voters agree on — supporting tribal sovereignty and self-determination is the foundation of any tribal policy platform. Tribal nations are governments and want to operate as the sovereign nations they are and always have been. They want the federal government to hold up their end of the bargain on treaties, and that means paying for health care, education, and food. After all, tribal nations have kept up their end of the bargain and haven’t taken back all the land in America. 

Native voters are also everyday Americans who have bills to pay and kids to feed. Our issues are rural issues, brown people issues, women’s issues, and heritage issues. We care about rural economic development, agricultural tariffs, and keeping our brown boys out of prison. Native voters exercise their ancestral hunting rights and their Second Amendment rights to feed their families deer, elk, and moose. We practice our freedom of religion in places now called national parks or public lands. A Native American platform does not easily split down party lines and can vary drastically based on region and culture. 

The only candidate to take on tribal policy in a serious way, other than Julián Castro, was Elizabeth Warren. Native people across the country had issues with Warren’s DNA test and her claims of Cherokee ancestry when she was not recognized by the Cherokee Nation as a citizen. However, having worked in tribal policy in Washington for three years, in the Senate and for the National Congress of American Indians, I can confidently tell you that Warren’s platform on tribal issues was the most comprehensive, pro-tribal sovereignty platform any candidate for president has ever produced. It was basically like candy for tribal policy nerds.   

But now that she is out of the race, the remaining Democratic candidates stand about where you’d expect on the issues that matter to Native American voters. Both campaigns are rhetorically very supportive of tribal self-governance, self-determination, and upholding the nation-to-nation relationship between the federal government and tribal nations. This is expected for any Democrat in 2020.

The Biden campaign released a statement last week that expressed his intent to build on the tribal policy progress of the Obama administration. Jamal Brown, the national press secretary for the Biden campaign, told Vox the campaign has contacted Native voters at events and the candidate has recorded video messages for tribal events like the Four Directions Forum in Las Vegas prior to the Nevada caucuses. It remains to be seen if the former vice president’s outreach strategy will ramp up as the campaign continues. 

The Sanders campaign does not have a comprehensive written policy statement for tribal nations aside from a short page on his website, but Sanders has made in-person efforts to address Native communities. And it has worked — he won North Dakota, where tribal nations make up a large part of the state’s Democratic Party. Similar to Biden, Sanders includes tribal nations in his major priorities like the Green New Deal. He has also supported the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act and a 10-20-30 funding allocation to aid low-income communities. However, Sanders’s tribal policy is far from the revolution he promises in other arenas. (The Sanders campaign did not respond to Vox’s request to explain its policies in time for publication.)

On Sunday, Biden and Sanders will stand on a less crowded debate stage in an attempt to reach voters who have not yet made up their minds. Will they speak to undecided Native American voters? Probably not.

Maria Givens is an enrolled member of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe (Schitsu’umsh) in northern Idaho and resides on Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Ute homelands in Boulder, Colorado. She has a master’s degree in environmental issues from the University of Colorado and has worked for the National Congress of American Indians and in the US Senate. She is passionate about tribal food sovereignty and shares pictures of Native food on her Instagram.