Jim Crow, Indian Style

Abstract

N JUNE OF 1986, Judge Edward Rafeedie ruled official acts of discrimination ... have interfered with the rights of Indian citizens [of Big Horn County, Montana] to register and vote. Civil rights expert and ACLU attorney Laughlin McDonald later observed in the San Francisco Examiner racism against Indian people in Montana was even worse than he had expected. I thought I'd stepped into the last century, McDonald explained. Whites were doing to Indians what people in the South stopped doing to blacks twenty years ago. Big Horn County Commissioner and area rancher Ed Miller longs for the good old days when Indians remained on the reservation. Angered by Rafeedie's ruling, Miller threatened to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. Voting Rights Act is a bad thing, Miller complained. I don't see no comparison with Negroes in the South. Before Janine Windy Boy and other plaintiffs filed suit against Big Horn County, things were fine around here, Miller lamented. Now they (Indians) want to vote, he exclaimed. What next?' On June 13, 1986, United States District Judge Edward Rafeedie ordered elections in Big Horn County violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act... . and that a new system of election must be adopted. Judge Rafeedie's decision culminated a three-year process begun in Big Horn County by Crow and Northern Cheyenne voters who refused any longer to accept second class voting rights.2 The case began its way into court in August of 1983, when Jeff Renz and Laughlin McDonald, ACLU attorneys for the plaintiffs, submitted a Motion for Preliminary Injunction preventing the defendants, Big Horn County, from holding a general election on November 6, 1983. The motion called for a hearing before Federal Judge James Battin in Billings, Montana. The motion and subsequent suit against Big Horn County charged the at-large system in county commissioner and school board elections in Big Horn County diluted the Indian vote so as to disenfranchise American Indian voters. The plaintiffs in Windy Boy v. Big Horn County argued the at-large scheme denied the plaintiffs' rights to participate in elections and to elect representatives of their choice to county and school board offices. In Big Horn County, where non-Indians constitute fifty-two per cent of the population and American Indians form forty-six per cent, at-large elections violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amend-