Arts & Culture

Tribal IDs: voting for Native people no longer "easy as pie"

The North 103.3 | By Lisa Johnson

Published November 1, 2018 at 12:34 PM CDT

The U.S. Supreme Court okayed North Dakota's new voter identification law last month. That means tribal ID cards that are legally recognized in almost every other context - including the June primaries - are no longer valid because most Native Americans on North Dakota reservations have a post office box, not a street address, listed on them.

Native Americans in this country couldn't even vote until 1948, and Roxane Gould, a professor with UMD's Ruth A. Myers Center for Indigenous Educationsays this latest effort to suppress Native votes is part of a continuum.

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Lisa Johnson

Lisa Johnson started her broadcast career anchoring the television news at her high school and spinning country music at KWWK/KOLM Radio in Rochester, Minnesota. She was a reporter and news anchor at KTHI in Fargo, ND (not to mention the host of a children's program called "Lisa's Lane") and a radio reporter and anchor in Moorhead, Bismarck, Wahpeton and Fergus Falls.Since 1991, she has hosted Northland Morning on KUMD. One of the best parts of her job includes "paying it forward" by mentoring upcoming journalists and broadcasters on the student news team that helps produce Northland Morning. She also loves introducing the different people she meets in her job to one another, helping to forge new "community connections" and partnerships.Lisa has amassed a book collection weighing over two tons, and she enjoys reading, photography, volunteering with Animal Allies Humane Society and fantasizing about farmland. She goes to bed at 8pm, long before her daughter, two cats, or three dogs.

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