Mark Ruffalo is encouraging Native American communities make their voices heard in the polls, one step at a time.
The 56-year-old actor traveled to the Navajo Nation on Saturday, Oct. 12, to participate in Walk to the Polls, a civic campaign to boost voter turnout among young Indigenous people in the 2024 presidential election.
Partnering with Protect the Sacred, Ruffalo and members of the Diné (Navajo) community walked three miles to a ballot drop box, where residents casted their votes early while honoring 100 years of Native American citizenship and commemorating the Navajo Long Walk, the Diné’s Trail of Tears in the 1860s.
Allie Redhorse Young, Diné activist and founder of the youth engagement initiative Protect the Sacred, says that the goal of the walk was to encourage “record voter turnout” among young Native American people.
“This is a way to draw attention to all of the barriers [to voting], one of them being the long distances we have to travel — 45 minutes to an hour’s drive — to register to vote, and also to cast the ballot. It’s 2024, and we haven’t found solutions for this,” Young explains. “It’s a way to reclaim our power and rebuild our power.”
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Ruffalo is not Native American but has gotten involved with various tribes through his years of environmental activism, explaining that “we were all sort of fighting for the same thing, which was Mother Earth.”
He tells PEOPLE that change happens when people exercise their voices, citing how the U.S. government has made some progress with Indigenous representation since the last election.
“We’re hopefully about to have our first Native female governor. We have Deb Haaland in the Department of the Interior, actually having a Native American speak for their own people in a cabinet of the presidency,” he says. “That comes from voting.”
With Walk to the Polls — part of the larger civic engagement campaign Ride to the Polls — Ruffalo says, “The message [to young Indigenous people] has been, ‘Hey, this system has really treated you badly and it’s completely understandable, your distrust for it, but the fact of the matter is the bad guys want you to not vote. This system hasn’t been fair to you, but it’s also the promise of America and using our vote is how we actually capture power and how we get a seat at the table.’ ”
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During the 2020 presidential election season, the Diné were grappling with the severe impact of COVID-19, which led Ruffalo to partner with Young on spreading accurate information about the virus’s danger. “They were suffering much more than anyone else in the country with the most deaths and they had the least effective and well-funded healthcare system,” Ruffalo explains.
Four years later, just two days before Indigenous Peoples Day, Young and Ruffalo joined forces again for Walk to the Polls to shed light on election challenges and put an empowering spin on how Native American youth can fight back.
“I think it’s a story about the wrong, disenfranchised, really invisible community that is making a statement that we’re still here,” Young tells PEOPLE.
She adds, “We are asking the world and specifically this country to acknowledge our existence and our contributions to this country and to American democracy. There are over 570-plus recognized tribes in the country, and a lot of people don’t know that. So do your research. This is about solidarity and these movements require all of us to show up for each other.”
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Ruffalo, who was also joined on the Walk to the Polls by actor Wilmer Valderrama and Native American actress Kara Jade Myers, expressed his happiness in celebrating a community that holds deep significance for him.
“We’re celebrating the work that we’ve done. It’s a commemoration of the long struggle, the resilience, and resistance, and beauty of this culture and value of this culture in the United States,” the actor says.
He adds, “It’s for this too, but also just for connecting to a culture that means a great deal to me and I’ve gotten so much from, and learned so much from, and have developed as a human being because of.”
Learn more about Protect the Sacred’s mission to empower future generations of Native American leaders and protect Indigenous sovereignty at IWillHarness.com.
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