Those pockets will officially converge on Jan. 14 and 15 when tribes from across the state and the country come together to hear from and share their concerns with presidential candidates, educate each other and come up with a game plan ahead of the 2020 election at the Native American presidential forum at UNLV.
"The Native vote in Nevada is a swing vote," LeBlanc said. "It's a critical vote that needs to be educated and mobilized, and these forums provide an opportunity for the first time in history for presidential candidates to state their positions on various issues of concern in Indian Country and to be educated about what the voters and the leadership both tribal and community."
The concern for organizers now is who will actually show up. The Democratic National Committee scheduled its January Democratic presidential debate for Jan. 14 in Iowa. But Seamans is hopeful that they will be able to convince several of the presidential hopefuls to appear via live stream, as they did during the last forum.
The forum itself, he said, will begin with a discussion between the descendants of Wovoka, a prophet from the Northern Paiute Tribe responsible for the spread of the Ghost Dance movement, and the descendants of Wounded Knee, the massacre of hundreds of Lakota men, women and children by the U.S. Army in 1890 and after which the movement was sent underground.
"We're going to pick up something our ancestors started 130 years ago by having the tribes unite for hope," Seamans said. "This time it's going to be for the 2020 election."
In addition to presidential candidate appearances, the event will feature panels on Native voting, education, the environment and economic development, among other issues.
The forum will also include Native-specific caucus training, which, Seamans said, will include an emphasis on how to advocate in a caucus situation. During the caucus, attendees typically have a chance to persuade people to back their preferred candidate during a so-called realignment period.
"Natives have, forever and ever, not dominated conversation. They usually sit back. They do a lot of listening, but they're not ones to jump into the middle of an argument and convince them to do something else. It's just not in our culture," Seamans said. "That's going to be the toughest part of the training is to be able to get them to stand up and speak their minds especially to non-Natives. That's always been difficult culture-wise."
Some of the individual tribes are planning their own outreach efforts too. Arlan Melendez, chairman of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, said that they are currently having conversations about going house to house to register their members to vote, and not just at powwows and special events. He said that their reservation can be walked in a couple of hours, compared to other tribes whose reservations are more spread out.
But for all the polling locations, voter registration drives and caucus trainings, at the end of the day, the most significant hurdle is this: Convincing Natives to exercise their right to vote to shape the future of a government that has too often ignored their needs and actively threatened their way of life.
"Most tribes, tribal members, we're not Democrat or Republican per se, but we look to the government to uphold their obligations to the tribes," said Ted Howard, chairman of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, whose reservation spans the Idaho-Nevada border. "I think from both sides we have not really seen that level of protection from the government."
Howard says it's hard to get excited about things these days. There's so much uncertainty, he says. But he's encouraged by the outreach by some of the Democratic presidential hopefuls to Native communities.
"It's not something that's happened before," Howard said. "I think we're cautiously optimistic."
(Article changed on December 26, 2019 at 17:44)
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