WHEN SHE WAS A TEENAGER, Jaynie Parrish MC/MPA 2011 left Window Rock, a small community on the Navajo Nation where she had grown up, and moved to Phoenix. It wasn’t an unusual trip for many members of her community—the five-hour drive southwest across the state was in fact commonplace for Native Americans like Parrish who had family or jobs there. But it was a big move, nonetheless.
“My world just completely shifted,” Parrish remembers. It was little things, like having to navigate public transportation, or finding her way around a huge new school. And big things too, like suddenly finding herself not surrounded by other Navajos but having to look for them—maybe a handful of faces among thousands of students. Eventually, she found a community and people and programs that would support them as they made their way in their new environment and that would guide them toward opportunities. And as she grasped these opportunities—college, graduate school at Harvard, work with Native leaders—she grew to understand what she’d heard from members of her community ever since she was a little girl.
“That was always a message I heard at home, ever since we were little: ‘Go to school, help your family, help your community, help your nation,’” Parrish says. “I knew I was needed.”
Today, Parrish is founder and director of Arizona Native Vote, a nonprofit helping to boost Native American democratic and civic participation. After working in politics for many years, focused on short-term goals and the feverish pace of campaign cycles, Parrish wants to concentrate on building the long-term political infrastructure to make sure that the voices of Native Americans are raised and heard.
Back to Navajo
THE CHOICE PARRISH’S PARENTS MADE was not an unusual one for the time. Many Native Americans in the 1960s were moving to larger cities either because of federal relocation programs, the military, or for better jobs. Her parents had met in Los Angeles, where they had been working. Both had attended boarding schools—vestiges of a system designed to assimilate Native Americans, and by implication eradicate their culture—and as they began their own family, they decided they would return to the Navajo Nation.
And so, until she was a teenager, that is where Parrish lived. But eventually she felt that pull. Her father and her sisters had moved to Phoenix. Parrish decided she would move there too.
There, her world became bigger, as did her understanding of what it meant to be Native. She met members of other tribes, and worked as a student guide at the Heard Museum, a leading institution dedicated to American Indian art.
“I like to say the museum gave me two things,” Parrish says. “It helped me get out of my shell, and it helped me learn to speak because it was a tour guide program and we had to go through all this training to give tours as high school students to people visiting the museum. And it’s where I got to learn about the tribes.”
“Every tribe has a similar concept, but for us it starts with how we treat one another. How do we talk to one another? How do we show up for one another, not just our families, but the community?”
Living in Phoenix also allowed her to begin realizing how different life had been on the reservation, and how much of that was shaped by federal policy—from the way the territory was carved out, to the way it retained some sovereignty, to the health care they had. (“We're all inherently lawyers,” Parrish remembers her father telling her, “because, as Native people, our lives are so intertwined with policy.”)
Parrish became the first person in her family to attend college. She was encouraged to apply and helped in the process by a counselor in high school. When she got to Arizona State University, she again felt that systems had been put in place to help Native students stay in college and find community. It was at ASU that she met a person who would become central in her life.
Part of a generation that had come of age in the 1960s, Peterson Zah had been a pioneering Native American politician, leading the Navajo Nation in the 1980s and 1990s and then joining ASU as the president’s advisor on American Indian affairs, helping the university recruit and retain students, faculty, and staff from Native populations. Parrish wrote a paper on Zah in college, unaware that he was right there helping to create an environment that would help her to flourish.
For a population that had been traumatized by forced assimilation, with institutions such as boarding schools designed to force young Native children into the predominant white culture, having a figure such as Zah at ASU allowed Native families to feel better about sending their kids there.
“He was a grandpa on campus,” Parrish says of Zah, who passed away last year. “You would come in and he would ask, ‘Who's your family? Who's your mom? Who's your dad? What's your clan?’ It would orient you even though you might be away from home. And this is what they were creating.”
After graduating, Parrish went to D.C., to intern with National Public Radio and then to work in politics, but she was pulled back to Arizona almost immediately, where Zah asked her to join his team at ASU, spending the better part of a decade building a more attractive environment for Native students and scholars.
It was then that Parrish began her association with the Kennedy School. Zah knew Joe Kalt, the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy, Emeritus, at HKS and the founder of the Project on Indigenous Governance and Development, formerly the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, and Megan Hill, the program’s senior director. With their encouragement, Parrish applied for a fellowship at HKS, and then to the Mid-Career Master in Public Policy Program the following year. (She still remembers the scream she let out when she learned she’d been admitted.)
This was a time for Parrish to widen her horizons, both academically and personally. She knew she would eventually want to return to help rebuild her nation, but she didn’t know how. Marshall Ganz, the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society and a legendary figure in the field of organizing, helped her build a theoretical framework around work she felt she had already been doing for years. And the international makeup of the class, and the camaraderie, allowed her to form deep friendships.
“The other thing that it did for me was it was the first time I ever got my passport. My cohort was 60% to 70% international. This opened up my world even more,” she says. “I loved my classmates from all over the world. And still to this day I am in touch with several of them.”
A Bigger Change
AFTER GRADUATING, Parrish was hired by Rock the Vote, a nonprofit trying to push registration and civic engagement among young people. That was followed by community organizing with tribes in southern California, working on a congressional campaign in Montana, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, teaching American Indian and gender studies at the University of North Dakota, and engagement with EMILYs List in D.C. The work was demanding, interesting, stressful, unpredictable. Then, finding herself in a small apartment in Washington during the pandemic, with a pivotal election unfolding, she realized she had to return home to Arizona and work with her community.
After that election, where Native American turnout played an important role in Democratic Party victories, she realized that the efficiency of registering people and then making sure they got to the polls was not enough. What mattered most was being there for Native communities, understanding their needs and not simply showing up at the door with a clipboard. That is what led her to start her own organization, Arizona Native Vote, an organization not built around collecting votes, during a campaign cycle, for one political party, but rather dedicated to creating a community of organizers and leaders.
“We show up, we're there all year round,” Parrish says. “We're in the communities. We're not just doing voter registration and education. About a good 30% to 40% of our people's time is actually spent helping in the community, doing things that are unrelated to electoral votes.”
“We show up for them when it’s ceremony time. We do home visits regularly to stay in touch, just to check in, bring food, have coffee, go to the community meetings regularly just to be present.”
“About a good 30% to 40% of our people’s time is actually spent helping in the community, actually doing things that are unrelated to electoral votes.”
A crucial pillar of this work features matriarchal figures—women who had been doing this sort of community work long before Parrish formed her organization.
“All we did was formulate the way to support them,” she says. “That's a foundational concept of who we are as people. Every tribe has a similar concept, but for us it starts with how we treat one another. How do we talk to one another? How do we show up for one another, not just our families, but the community? And that's what's gotten lost or that's what we've had to rebuild from all those generations of policies that have tried to break it up and take it away.”
Parrish is now working to help these communities—Navajo, Hopi, and Apache communities in the Southwest—make the connection between their lives and politics.
“This is what I'm doing now. This is my role, my part in my community, my part through Arizona Native Vote with our team. We're using voting as our theory of change, and civic engagement to make sure we don't have any more of these horrible policies that were trying to take us out,” Parrish says. “Whether that was termination, assimilation—all of these federal Indian policies that were meant to break us up and take us out, and that weren't built for us.”
She is working with young people, teaching them how to organize, or be field directors for a campaign, learning important lessons regardless of the particular field they decide to eventually work in.
“Maybe you're going to go fight for our water rights, maybe you're going to go be that environmental lawyer, but you're going to have these skills with you. And that's what I would like because I was always the only Native person on any of these campaigns,” Parrish says. But beyond campaigns, Parrish hopes for “the bigger change so that we have the connection of candidates and policies that are finally coming together in the way that we want. And that comes with votes. It comes with civic engagement.”
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Photographs by Jason Biggs and courtesy of Jaynie Parrish