Seeing, Listening, and Fighting: Native American Women in Congress

• In Event: The Substantive Representation of Women

Abstract

In January 2019, Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids became the first Native American women to serve in the United States Congress. In her 2018 midterm election victory speech, Representative Haaland shared that she “…never imagined a world where I would be represented by someone who looks like me.” Through content analysis of campaign and government websites, press releases, public policy positions, and speeches, this paper examines how Representative Haaland and Representative Davids live out the concepts of descriptive, substantive, and surrogate representation.
Representation is a critical issue within gender and politics research. With descriptive representation, those elected to office “stand for” those who share a politically relevant aspect of their identity, while with substantive representation, elected officials “act for” those “like them” (Pitkin 1967). Another crucial aspect of representation occurs with surrogate representation, which occurs when elected officials see themselves as representing people outside of their electoral constituency (Mansbridge 2003; 2011). While preliminary data analyses reveal that both representatives have prioritized issues affecting Native Americans during their first year in office, their electoral considerations are quite different. In 2018, Representative Haaland won in an open seat with 59 percent of the vote, in a district with a Cook Partisan Voter index of D+7 (NM-1), while Davids won against a Republican incumbent with 53.6 percent of the vote, in a district with a Cook Partisan Voter index of R+4 (KS-3).
The significance of Representatives Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo, and Representative Davids, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, to Native Americans goes beyond these key questions of descriptive, substantive, and surrogate representation. As Sarah Sunshine Manning wrote in the Washington Post, their historic wins “…are indicative of a movement among indigenous people today to decolonize…and reconnect to the strength of who we once were: nations with strong women, with gender equity, and with women as valued leaders in the community” (2018). A qualitative analysis of Haaland and Davids as political leaders elected to national office will expand the discussion of the power of the state: who it looks like, who it benefits, who it hears. As Representative Haaland noted on the night of her electoral victory, “I want to tell everyone in this room, people who have been under attack who deserve never to be erased: I see you, I’m listening.”

Author

• Angela High-Pippert, University of St. Thomas