‘New dawn’ on Rosebud: Tribal electric utility voters triumph

For the first time in the 70-year history of the power company, Sicangu Oyate members, pictured at the 2019 standing-room-only election meeting, gained the majority of seats on the board of directors. Credit COURTESY / Rosebud Cordier

VALENTINE, Nebraska – Sept. 14, 2019 marked the first time that tribal members gained the majority of seats on the board of directors in the 70-year history of the power company supplying the Sicangu Nation’s electricity.
“Unprecedented! Historic!” exclaimed tribal enrollee Rosebud Cordier, a leader of the grassroots citizen action group Oyate For Fairness & Equal Representation (OFFER), which formed a decade ago with tribal government support to encourage reservation residents’ voter participation at the power company’s annual board meeting.
In the wake of an OFFER rally, the Cherry-Todd Electric Cooperative experienced a standing-room-only crowd for its 70th Annual Meeting and Election, held at the Rosebud Casino located between Valentine and Mission on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in Todd County.
When the ballots were counted, tribal enrollees claimed five of the eight positions on the board.
“I strongly believe this win came about from the continued efforts of the grassroots group OFFER, with the support of many, many concerned tribal members who packed the bingo hall today!” Cordier said in a thank-you note to voters who turned out.
Todd County is one of three that constitute districts in the power company’s service area. The county is completely under reservation jurisdiction. With another 30 percent of the company’s Melette County district also under the tribal government’s control, some 80 percent of eligible voters are tribally enrolled.
Cherry County, adjacent to the reservation’s southern border in Nebraska, constitutes the remaining district in the provider’s service area.
“We fought hard to get in the tribal members,” said OFFER Coordinator Ronald Neiss, noting that voters elected the two tribal incumbents running and two new tribal enrollees to the eight-member board, where they joined one other tribal board member whose post was not up for election.
With five enrollees on the board, a history of voter suppression of tribal members under majority non-member boards can now be terminated, Neiss said. “The days of practicing business-as-usual are over. We had very little control of the board. I always equated it to apartheid. Now it’s not,” he told the Native Sun News Today.
“It’s a new dawn on the Rosebud. That’s how I look at it,” he said.
In the vote count, Todd County district tribal enrollee and board chair Shawn Bordeaux retained his position, and Noah “Sandy” Tucker won reelection to his seat in the district.
Tribal enrollee Wayne Frederick won over another enrollee, Tamaleon Wilcox, and over incumbent Dave Assman for the third Todd County district seat.
In the run for one at-large board position, tribal enrollee Glen Yellow Eagle garnered more votes than tribal challenger Robert Becker.
They join tribal enrollee Whitney Meek, who is one of two Melette County district board members.
“We now have five out of the eight seats … and they said it couldn’t be done!” Neiss exclaimed.
The triumph followed on the publication in 2018 of news feature stories in The Nation and Le Monde about Sicangu tribal citizens’ long struggle to claim a larger role in the decisions affecting their electricity bills.
Cherry-Todd Electric Cooperative and some 900 other electric cooperatives like it are utilities that originated through community organizing and were then established by the 1936 Rural Electrification Act to provide service where private corporations failed to invest.
The coops are the providers for the majority of the area of the United States. Their structure affords the customers the opportunity to vote for the board of directors.
OFFER participants recognized the need to encourage fellow tribal members to take advantage of the system, when they discovered that non-tribal customers received two or more ballots to every one for tribal members at election time.
Due to OFFER’s oversight and insistence, that situation is gradually improving, according to Neiss. “We coordinate and promote tribal voter empowerment,” he said.
“It is good to see that because of OFFER’s efforts over the years, tribal members are now allowed to participate in the vote counting during the annual meetings,” Cordier added.
The tribal government has supported OFFER by providing pre-election candidate forums with food entertainment and prizes, as well as buses to transport voters to the annual meetings.
The tribal government also is fighting a legal battle to establish its authority over the utility.
As a result of more tribal participation on the board of directors, penalties for late payment of electricity bills have been reduced, and “more courtesy is shown to tribal members,” Neiss said.
“Things are changing, which they wouldn’t have, if they didn’t have an open-minded board,” he said. Still, many a bridge remains to be crossed on the road to equity, he noted.
Some years back, when an annual meeting in the afternoon attracted a record tribal crowd, the board changed the next meeting time to the morning, forcing customers to board buses at 6 a.m. on the weekend to attend. Neiss considers that a voter suppression measure and he wants it eliminated.
Another he mentioned was the proposal of by-law amendments to voters in this election. The board advertised its proposals without advising OFFER in advance and did not publish OFFER’s proposals at the same time. It posted OFFER’s proposals only after the group protested and accompanied the publication by an explanation of board opposition to but one, he said.
At the annual meeting, enrollee Phyllis White Shield asked the board to table the vote on the amendments to a later date to allow for study and consideration. A show of hands in favor of her request convinced the board to agree.
Neiss said he and another participant asked the vote counter for the tally, and the majority in favor was so overwhelming that the answer was: “Not even remotely close.”