Make Voting A Tradition: NACDI

NACDI’s central pillars focus on community engagement, community organizing, community development, and Indigenous arts. The pillars work in concert to provide the community members along the American Indian Cultural Corridor a means to engage with the larger Twin Cities landscape. Our community successes have been through engaging and shaping public policy, providing food access and education through our farmer’s market, and utilizing arts as a method for reflecting what is important to us in our culture. 

American Indians voice in the voting process has been marginalized via systematic methods targeting how to keep them out of the democratic election process. This has been conducted through voter ID methods and complicated voter registration processes.  Additionally, ease of access to voting sites and ease of access to voter registration methods has also been a public policy roadblock to American Indians, especially those in the Little Earth of United Tribes housing complex and East Philips neighborhoods of South Minneapolis. 

NACDI aims to counteract these public policies through voter education and providing individuals an opportunity to gain a stake in saying how they want public policy to be dictated in their neighborhoods.