On Monday, electoral college delegates convened in capitols across the 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their votes for the 45th president and vice-president of the United States. Some said that the future of a global superpower, and liberalism itself, hung in the balance. Reeling from reports of Russian hackers and confounded by a president-elect viewed by many as a fascist-in-making, desperate voices from both the left and right called on the electors to vote their conscience.

Conservative defectors pleaded for delegates to select a more competent Republican like John Kasich. Liberals demanded that all electors align with the people and support Hillary Clinton, who pulled-in 2.8 million more votes than her rival. The electoral college, a system originally designed to bolster the power of slave states against the free, looked like the final fortress of progress.

When the dust settled, the electoral college fell in line with Trump and the ascendant right wing without much of a fight. In fact, in a largely unforeseen twist, by day’s end more voters had defected from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton than from Donald Trump.

Among the democratic defectors, standing against the tide with his metaphorical fist in the air, was Washington State delegate and Puyallup tribal member Robert Satiacum Jr. In a historic act of defiance, and with the forces of progress vanquished and in full retreat around him, Satiacum cast his vote for indigenous elder, activist and leader Faith Spotted Eagle. Spotted Eagle, a member of the Yankton Sioux tribe, head of the Brave Heart Society and a leader in victories against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, became the first Native American to receive a vote for president in the electoral college of the United States.

Spotted Eagle and Satiacum are members of the most oppressed and easily forgotten racial demographic in the United States

As an act of protest, Satiacum’s conscientious objection may not amount to much more than a $1,000 fine from Washington State. But cast just weeks after an indigenous-led coalition won a remarkable victory against the Dakota Access pipeline – a struggle in which Spotted Eagle emerged as a key leader – his vote shines a light on the great and enduring injustices faced by the forgotten first people of America and the hope for our collective future that these same communities represent. Satiacum’s act of political theatre clapped back at the common sense of lesser evilism. His dissent calls upon all of us to question our assumptions about who rises to power and why. Why can’t we elect a Faith Spotted Eagle for president? And, what would it mean if someday we did?

Spotted Eagle and Satiacum are members of the most oppressed and easily forgotten racial demographic in the United States. Native Americans have some of the highest rates of poverty and the greatest likelihood of being killed by police. Their people are overrepresented in prisons and underrepresented in universities. On reservations, they often live in rundown and overcrowded housing. The schools that they send their children to are severely underfunded and sometimes literally falling down. The women in their communities are 3.5 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted in their lifetime than women of other races. And 22% of their children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder – a rate equal to that suffered by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Their economic opportunities are bleak. Their pain is intergenerational. Their reality is devastating. Every day, they struggle to create a world with greater opportunity, promise and justice for their children.

Nowhere are these injustices more apparent than in Spotted Eagle’s home state of South Dakota, where four of the 15 most impoverished counties in the United States encompass Sioux reservations. Until Native Americans rose up with the support of thousands of allies at Standing Rock to fight for their land, rights and sovereignty, protecting the Missouri River and the Earth for all Americans, they were largely forgotten by the people who live on and profit mightily from lands, waters and resources stolen from their ancestors.

Standing Rock, Satiacum and Spotted Eagle remind us of a massive and fundamental injustice right below our feet. The fact that our colonial status quo does not lead us to daily outrage should give us pause and cause us to question why all of this must be so. But Standing Rock, Satiacum and Spotted Eagle are also pointing us to the path forward.

Their story is part of a remarkable and still unfolding narrative in which the most devastated among us lead an insurrection for what is right for the planet and its people. If we fail to pay attention, listen and stand with them, there’s no telling how far back we will retreat before the face of hate, for the sake of profit and in the name of lesser evils.

As bleak as the present might seem, there is still a future worth fighting for. In 10, 20, maybe even 100 years, we deserve a world where progress no longer seeks asylum in a fortress built by slaveholders. We deserve a world where a Faith Spotted Eagle, a wise woman and leader who stood with and for her people, is president of the United States.