Gabriella Cázares-Kelly brimmed with pride and joy as she watched her nieces — via Zoom — perform basket dancing, a traditional Tohono O’odham social dance, during her swearing-in ceremony on Wednesday.
It was an emotional evening for Cázares-Kelly as her friends, family and supporters celebrated the hard work that went into her campaign, culminating in her historic win.
Cázares-Kelly will take office Monday and says she is the first Native American elected to a Pima County office.
She wiped away tears as Michael Enis sang the Pisin Mo’o (or Pisinimo in English) song, of the Tohono O’odham district where she was raised.
She held back tears, sometimes unsuccessfully, while friends and supporters told her how proud they are of her.
She also teared up as she thanked her supporters, friends, family and her people for voting her into office and believing in her throughout her campaign.
“All of you are my community now,” she said. “What we share together is the love of community and the belief that we can bring about positive change.”
It was apparent throughout the celebration and throughout Cázares-Kelly’s campaign, her win was a collective victory not only for the Tohono O’odham but for several communities that have historically been underrepresented and have faced barriers as they try to participate in the democratic process.
“We are going to continue to love our community and provide much more access and visibility because we’re still here and we’re doing big things,” she said.
“A sense of duty”
When Cázares-Kelly heard F. Ann Rodriguez was retiring, she wondered who would replace her as county recorder.
She remembers thinking she would have to teach the new person about voting barriers she encounters when registering voters in the Tohono O’odham Nation.
She then realized she didn’t have to hope the next person in the office cared about these issues if she ran for the position herself.
“It was really more of a sense of duty to me than it was like an idea of opportunity,” she said. “To me I really was seeing these systemic barriers that were keeping people from participating and then at the same time this finger pointing of like, ‘you’re not participating.’”
She says those barriers need to be addressed and prioritized in order for more people to vote.
“I feel confident that I can do things differently, but I don’t know that anybody else would be willing to or would prioritize or care about these issues,” she said.
Social-media posts with photos on Cázares-Kelly’s campaign pages include image descriptions to help the visually impaired. Her inauguration, and events throughout her campaign, included ASL interpreters and the ability to use captions for those who may be hard of hearing or deaf.
Her campaign also focused on several communities that face voting barriers and accessibility issues: rural communities, tribal communities, disabled voters, formerly incarcerated people.
“All of those things are important to me because I come from communities that are targeted and who are experiencing those issues,” she said. “And so that representation to me is my friends and my cousins and former colleagues and my former students. That is part of my community and my every day.”
Cázares-Kelly will display the Pascua Yaqui Tribal and Tohono O’odham Nation flags in the recorder’s office to acknowledge the sovereignty of the two tribal nations in Pima County.
“I’m excited to see these long overdue conversations happen between sovereign entities and the larger public about how to attain and provide voter information to the public and to see it being used more accessibly,” said April Ignacio, Cázares-Kelly’s lifelong friend.
“Indigenous woman coming through”
As Cázares-Kelly started campaigning, people told her she would have to be less Native in order to not alienate white voters, she says.
She froze when she heard this advice. She felt vulnerable because running a campaign means asking everyone for their support, their vote, their donations.
Her interest in running for the Recorder’s Office came from her work registering Tohono O’odham voters and realizing the barriers they faced. She couldn’t separate the two.
In campaign training she attended in Phoenix, Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, got on stage and told the audience to ignore anyone telling them to be less themselves.
That was the message Cázares-Kelly needed to hear to move forward confidently and unapologetically Native throughout her campaign, she said.
“I did not ask for people to vote for me because I’m Native American,” she said. “I asked for people to vote for me because I’m educated, I’m experienced, I’m passionate, I’m creative, all of the other things that make for good leaders, I have all of those qualities.”
Cázares-Kelly has a bachelor of arts degree in secondary English education and a master’s in educational leadership. She has worked in tribal institutions for 14 years, in higher education and at the high school level, most recently as a college and career readiness counselor.
She is president of the Progressive Democrats of Southern Arizona, vice president of the Arizona Democratic Party’s Native American Caucus and a Legislative District 9 Precinct Committee member.
The fact that she’s Native American is the “cherry on top,” she said.
During a lobbying trip in D.C. in October 2019, months before she would announce her run for recorder, Cázares-Kelly and nine other Indivisible Tohono members were taking a break from lobbying and hopped on to electric scooters.
A video of Cázares-Kelly went viral, as she struggled to control the scooter and warned people in front of her, “Indigenous woman coming through!”
It was something she had been saying as a joke throughout the trip, as people sometimes stared at them in their traditional Native clothes.
That warning became a mantra for the Cázares-Kelly campaign.
An Indigenous woman was running for a countywide seat whether people were ready or not.
She wondered if using the video for her campaign would alienate people, until she heard Allison’s advice.
“I don’t want to win this under false pretenses,” she said she realized. “I want to win this by being myself and being proud of who I am and where I come from and the work that I have done in the past.”
Her Grandmother dressed up to vote
Cázares-Kelly grew up in a home down a dirt road about 100 miles west of Tucson.
“It’s very beautiful,” she said of Pisinemo. “It’s a lot of dirt roads and you can see mountains and cactus.”
There, she read beneath a big tree in front of her childhood home and helped her late grandmother Catherine Josemaria with tasks around the house next door to hers.
“I was my grandma’s little helper,” she says. “Every single time I got off the school bus that is where I would go immediately.”
She didn’t quite understand the importance at the time, but young Cázares-Kelly watched as her grandmother discussed politics in O’odham with visitors.
She would drive her grandmother to vote, an occasion her grandmother dressed up for. When they got home from the polling location, her grandmother would add her “I voted” sticker to a wooden panel on a wall behind her bed where she collected them.
Her grandmother, born in 1918, wasn’t allowed to vote until 1948 and still faced several barriers before being able to vote once the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. She spoke O’odham, and very little Spanish and even less English, but she didn’t have a right to a translator until 1975.
“It is not all equal yet,” Cázares-Kelly said. “We’re still working against that. We’re working against a lot of that historical, those systemic historical barriers that have existed and continue to exist that are keeping us all from participating.”
For Cázares-Kelly, that fight started when she was an educator and decided to help college students register to vote. She thought it would take a couple days but found herself doing the work for weeks and having to call the Recorder’s Office to get students’ questions answered because information for them wasn’t always easily accessible, she said.
But Cázares-Kelly also reminds people that she was political from the moment she was born because of who she is.
“When people ask me how long I have been politically involved, or involved in politics, I grew up on a reservation and I’m Native American,” she said. “My entire existence is political.”
Infiltrating political spaces
Indivisible Tohono, which Cázares-Kelly co-founded in Pima County, is one of several Indivisible groups nationwide born in resistance to President Trump’s policies.
In the Tohono O’odham Nation, his 2016 win created a visible fear as talks of a border wall became part of the mainstream political conversation, Cázares-Kelly says.
If the federal government were to build a wall along the reservation’s boundary with Mexico, it would separate Tohono O’odham residents in Arizona from those in Sonora, cutting through their traditional homeland.
Indivisible Tohono members started hosting educational forums and teaching people how to reach out to their senators and representatives. They also started showing up to political spaces, to highlight some of the barriers their rural communities face.
Through that work, members of the group often found themselves in spaces, like local government and committee meetings, where they didn’t feel welcome, Cázares-Kelly said. People would often tell her they’d never met a Native American before.
On Wednesday night, Ignacio read a passage from the book “Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto” by Vine Deloria Jr.
“Years ago churches, anthropologists, and bureaucrats all discovered that it was a good idea to have Indians attend a meeting on Indian problems. It looked better. … As for the Indians, while they were invited to the conferences they were only there to agree with the proceedings or to enhance the white man’s reputation as the one who knew what was best for the tribes,” she read.
It was the book that Cázares-Kelly’s husband, Ryan Kelly, held as she placed her left hand on the cover, lifted her right hand and was sworn into office Wednesday evening, their two children standing behind her.
Indivisible Tohono is fond of Deloria’s legacy, Ignacio said.
“We wanted to make sure that we acknowledge him and his work and the relationship he had with Tucson, the relationship he had with O’odham land,” she said. “So it was just a no-brainer that we would utilize the Indian Manifesto.”
Deloria was a political-science professor at the University of Arizona from 1978 to 1990 and later also taught at the UA College of Law. He was instrumental in establishing at the UA the first master’s degree program in American Indian studies in the United States. He died in 2005.
Cázares-Kelly largely credits the support of her colleagues at Indivisible Tohono for her win.
Ignacio, co-founder of Indivisible Tohono, said her friend’s achievement is inspiring because it’s centered on community.
“I think for the first time we feel seen through this win,” she says. “Largely in part because it was centered around Native issues and rural issues and we won. It’s such a big deal for us.”
Why cities are celebrating Indigenous Peoples' Day instead of Columbus Day
Why cities are celebrating Indigenous Peoples' Day instead of Columbus Day
Christopher Columbus
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Christopher Columbus was a master navigator and admiral whose four transatlantic voyages opened the way for European exploration, exploitation and colonization of the Americas. There is no evidence that he ever landed on the mainland of North America, and 500 years before he arrived, a band of Vikings led by Leif Erikson set foot in North America. Here, a statue of Christopher Columbus stands on a plaza in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Enslavement and disease
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Protesters point to the impact of the slave trade and the ravages of disease brought by Europeans to the indigenous peoples of North and South America. Some academics estimate that about 20 million native people died in the years after the European invasion of the New World.
Columbus' colony
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In October 1492, Columbus made landfall on what is now the Bahamas and later reached another island that he named Hispaniola. He assumed he had reached the East Indies. The island today is divided into Haiti to the west and the Dominican Republic to the east. Columbus established the first American colony at La Isabela, on the north coast of Hispaniola, in 1494. Spaniards forced men in the villages to work in gold mines and colonial plantations, which kept the Taíno people from planting the crops that fed them. Many were felled by smallpox, measles and other European diseases for which they had no immunity, Smithsonian magazine reports.
Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead
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Several major U.S. cities now celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day, including Los Angeles, Seattle and Austin, Texas, and four states also have made the day official. Cincinnati recently became the first major city in Ohio to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day, instead of Columbus Day. New York (pictured) and some other major cities still hold Columbus Day parades.
Canada
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Canada celebrates the culture of its native people with National Indigenous Peoples Day, held in June every year. Canadians recognize and celebrate the unique heritage, diverse cultures and contributions of First Nations, Inuit and Métis people. In this photo Native Americans mark the day in 2015 in Winnipeg.
International day
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The United Nations’ International Day of the World’s Indigenous People is observed on Aug. 9 each year to promote and protect the rights of the world’s indigenous population. Pictured here is the celebration of the day in Mexico City in 2016.
U.S. tribes
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There are more than 500 federally recognized tribes within the United States. The word "Indian" was an invention of Columbus, who thought he had landed in the East Indies. Native Americans in Portland, Ore., are pictured here celebrating at an annual powwow in 2014.
Millions already were here
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Before Columbus’ ships landed in the Bahamas, nomadic ancestors of modern Native Americans trekked over a land bridge from Asia to what is now Alaska, more than 12,000 years ago. By the time European explorers arrived in the 15th century, scholars estimate that more than 50 million people were living in the Americas, according to History.com.
