Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

by Stacey Abrams

For most Americans, providing a valid street address would hardly be an issue. After all, we must use that address for pizza delivery, Amazon Prime packages, and emergencies. But for the several tribes who inhabit the vast lands of North Dakota, a verifiable residential address is a luxury and, for thousands, an impossibility. Among the casualties of the law were Leslie and Clark Peltier, members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. A professor, Leslie taught at the local college, and Clark served as foreman for the maintenance department at the local housing authority. For more than a decade, they lived in their house on the reservation, a family home surrounded by gravel roads and no street signs. The absence never struck them as unusual. Native American reservations rarely have residential addresses, as the state or local governments often fail to assign them. So life on reservations has adapted to use a combination of P.O. boxes, cluster boxes, and approximated street addresses to direct emergency vehicles. In 2012, when the Peltiers went to vote, the registrar notified them of the updated residential address that would now be used for 911 calls. The Peltiers dutifully recorded the address and updated their drivers’ licenses to reflect the new information. However, when they went to vote in 2013, the poll worker told them that the new residential address meant they had to vote in a different city, off the reservation. They hadn’t moved their home or changed...