It was a miserable, rainy election day in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

But for volunteers gathered under a tent outside a polling station in the Bay Mills Indian Community, that wasn’t the biggest obstacle to getting voters to vote.

“Some of the comments I heard were, ‘Well, why should I vote? That’s what white people do,'” said Joshua Hudson, director of the Native Organizers Alliance.

“As Anishinaabe, we decide things through the council and it’s group decision-making, and voting is group decision-making. So it’s traditional, it’s not because on paper it’s not.”

The 35-year-old and other volunteers from Bay Mills, an Ojibwe community of 1,800 just west of Sault Ste. Marie, spent the day driving voters to polling stations and handing out free coffee and T-shirts.

“Indigenous voters are not affected as much by different campaigns,” Hudson said, adding that his group also targets “data invisibility,” ensuring that the voting records used by parties to plan their campaigns identify indigenous voters.

“There’s a veil of invisibility. We’re harder to see. We’re harder to reach. But we are very active, politically engaged voters.”

Hudson says one of the great victories of recent years was the appointment of the first Native American to the federal cabinet.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a New Mexico Pueblo, removed the slur “squaw” from some 500 place names and also traveled the country speaking to former students of Native boarding schools, which led to an apology from President Joe Biden last month.

“It shows the political momentum of Indian Country,” Hudson said.

Volunteer Christian Perron says there was little debate around this presidential election in Bay Mills, where people seemed rather “entrenched” in their positions.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever met one, but certainly not in this cycle have I met an undecided voter. I’m not even sure they exist,” he said .

Daanis Teeple said some of the Bay Mills voters she spoke with were demotivated by an infamous 2020 CNN report listing racial voting groups in America as: “white, black, Hispanic and ‘something else.’

“And so, seeing that way, we are distorted to the point that someone might not want to or feel comfortable,” the 24-year-old said.

Teeple says one of the voters she was able to vote for was her grandmother, who was involved in the Native American movement in the 1960s and 1970s, which saw a resurgence of Native culture across the United States.

“She was thrilled that we came to vote together,” she said.

“She was there when the natives did not have the right to practice their culture. I think it’s a bit of the same mission.”