Back in the nineteen-nineties, people on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in western South Dakota, were bragging about a local girl named Tatewin Means. She lived in Rapid City but had many reservation connections through her mother, Peggy Phelps, and her father, Russell Means, the American Indian Movement (AIM) leader. Tatewin’s Pine Ridge fans cheered for her successes, especially when, in 1996, at sixteen, she won the Miss South Dakota Teen USA pageant.

I remembered that excitement earlier this year when Tatewin, now with an environmental-engineering degree from Stanford and a law degree from the University of Minnesota, and with five years’ experience as the attorney general for the Oglala Sioux Tribe, ran for the South Dakota Democratic Party’s nomination for state attorney general. She made a campaign ad that she narrated in Lakota (with English subtitles). I had never seen an ad done in a Native American language, and it brought tears to my eyes.

I knew AIM guys of her father’s generation; they were brave and uncaught men, often afflicted with poor judgment, sometimes outright criminals. Russell Means says (in his autobiography, “Where White Men Fear to Tread”) that he was a failure as a father to Tatewin and others of his children. He also describes how he and two cronies smuggled guns into a Rapid City courtroom where he was on trial for abetting a murder; if found guilty he planned to kill the judge, prosecutors, and jury. Fortunately, he was acquitted. Now his daughter, born four years after that event, wanted to be the highest law officer in the state. Russell Means and my Oglala friends who supported AIM are now all dead. They and their ancestors recognized courage when they saw it, and I am sure they all would be proud of her.

Further Reading New Yorker writers on the 2018 midterm elections.

Mark Trahant, the editor of the online news site Indian Country Today, has declared 2018 a record year in terms of the numbers of indigenous candidates running for public office. Dozens of Native Americans, from Alaska to Tennessee, are in races at the state level. Paulette Jordan, a Coeur d’Alene and a Democrat, is running for governor of Idaho, while Peggy Flanagan, an Ojibwe and a Democrat, has a chance to be the next lieutenant governor of Minnesota. On the national level, there are ten Native Americans running for Congress, three of them women. One of the women, Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, holds what appears to be a solid lead in her district, which includes part of blue-leaning Albuquerque. (She’s also a Democrat.) There have been Native American congressmen and senators in the past—Charles Curtis, a Kaw-Osage from Kansas, went from the U.S. Senate to serve as the Vice-President under Herbert Hoover—but there has never been a Native American woman in Congress. Another New Mexican, Yvette Herrell, who’s a Republican and a Cherokee, looks strong in the race in her district, along the southern border, so it’s possible that the state will elect two Native American congresswomen in 2018.

Tatewin Means lost her attorney-general primary, but soon afterward she was offered the job of executive director of the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation, on Pine Ridge. A past deputy director of this organization, Sharice Davids, a Ho-Chunk from Kansas, has gone on from that job to become the third Native American female candidate for Congress this year. Davids, a Democrat, who was a White House fellow during the Obama Administration, is also a lesbian, which will increase the specificity of her “firsts” if she wins. From 2013 to 2014, she had a brief career as a professional mixed-martial-arts fighter; her record was one win and one loss. Davids’s district, in and near Kansas City, Kansas, went for Clinton by one percentage point in 2016, and she seems to be pulling ahead against the Republican incumbent, Kevin Yoder. Recently, a local Republican precinct committeeman called Davids a “radical socialist kickboxing lesbian Indian” who “will be sent back packing to the reservation.” He received a lot of criticism and resigned.

Interestingly, if Davids wins she will not be the only Native American representative to have had a past in professional fighting. At the moment, the only Native Americans in Congress are both Republicans from Oklahoma: Tom Cole, a Chickasaw, and Markwayne Mullin, a Cherokee, who has attacked Elizabeth Warren over her claim of Native ancestry, following the Trump line. Mullin was a pro fighter in 2006 and 2007 (won three, lost none).

The federal government gave citizenship to all Native Americans in 1924, but some states refused to go along. New Mexico did not grant them the right to vote until 1962. (Some Iroquois, for their part, refused to accept U.S. citizenship, being content with membership in their tribe.) Lack of equal status never discouraged Native Americans from serving in the military. They have fought in every war the United States has been in, and enlisted in disproportionately high numbers. Both Deb Haaland’s mother and Sharice Davids’s mother are career military (Navy, Army), and Haaland’s (non-Indian) father was a marine who won a Silver Star and is buried in Arlington. If you want to see a truly American event, go to the annual Veterans Powwow on Pine Ridge. The flag never looks better than when it’s done in beadwork or in a Sioux star quilt. For young Indian men and women, a stint in the military has traditionally been a common choice after high school.

Reading a list of Native American candidates’ tribal affiliations in 2018 pulls you back into a poem of American names: the Tlingit and Inupiaq and Iñupiat and Yup’ik and Gwich’in candidates running for state legislature in Alaska; and the Lummi and Colville and Tulalip candidates in Washington; and the Blackfeet and Crow and Confederated Salish & Kootenai and Chippewa Cree candidates in Montana; and the Comanche and Navajo and Acoma Pueblo and Sandia Pueblo and Jemez Pueblo and Isleta Pueblo candidates in New Mexico; and the Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara and the Turtle Mountain Chippewa in North Dakota; and onward, across the map, ending, for the sake of poetry, with Joseph Blanchard, an Oklahoma statehouse candidate from that unforgettably named tribe, the Absentee Shawnee.

As the world globalizes, people everywhere wonder who they are now and how that fits with their history. “Citizen of the world” is kind of a nothing category, after all. Native Americans have been dealing with changes brought from around the world for half a millennium. And the hits keep coming: Donald Trump never tires of attacking tribes for their success at operating casinos, and this year the state of North Dakota, knowing that most people who live on reservations get their mail at post-office boxes, passed a law saying that everybody must have a street address in order to vote. A message tribes like to repeat is “We’re still here.” Maybe Native Americans are running for office in such numbers because what they’ve learned is needed by the rest of us now.