Indigenous and Female Political Behavior
Both the reading by Morgan and the reading by Van Cott are concerned with the political behavior of specific, typically politically marginalized, groups.
Van Cott discusses indigenous political behavior. This is not a topic that is of enormous political salience in the US political field. The extent to which the political concerns of the indigenous people of the US is taken into consideration is usually regarding ecological issues like the recent pipeline standoffs. The indigenous populations of Latin America, however have gone so far as to create their own political parties and this, to my knowledge, is not a phenomenon in the United States. Is this lack of indigenous salience in US politics because of a lack of attention paid to Native Americans by American politicians, political isolation by Native Americans, or a combination/third thing?
While it appears that Van Cott’s piece was more concerned with educating and providing context surrounding political involvement of indigenous peoples, Morgan’s piece seeks to explain female voting patterns. In some of the theories that she chooses, she seems to have a somewhat demeaning attitude toward women with “traditional” voting behavior and by traditional, it appears, she means more conservative. When discussing the effects of adult socialization she presents a causation between not having children or being single/divorced for women and voting more liberally. To propose this as a cause may be misguided. It is entirely possible that the causation go the other way, that more liberal women chose not to have children or remain single, or this could simply be a correlation with a separate causation. All of this is not to say that what Morgan proposes does not have truth, but that when she presents it there is at least a perceivable bias.
One interesting thought that came to mind while reading these pieces was how rapidly, in comparison with the United States, that these issues came up after the inception of democracy. This may be explained simply by the fact that these issue have come to the forefront globally, but it took 144 years to even allow women to vote much less consider them as a group with individual political identities.
Interesting take on the Morgan reading. In terms of the question of indigenous representation: in Latin America this kind of representation is necessary because of the large amounts of the population are native with their own languages and culture. This did happen with Native Americans in the US in the 20th century, there were big attempts of representation and more land ownership but were no where near as successful as Latin America. That’s because Native Americans are .9% of the US population where Bolivia’s indigenous peoples make up 62% of the population. And to the point of women, it may be incorrect causation that Morgan perceives , although it is easily thought and intuitive that “traditional” family oriented women are more conservative than women who are against traditional values.