During a presidential election year, people across the nation work tirelessly to improve voter turnout rates, especially among younger generations. Women and gender studies senior Anna Wigal (Yup’ik) is one of those people.
Wigal has always been passionate about voting. However, low voter turnout in her Native region, the southwestern area of Alaska, drove her to devote her summer internship to improving voter literacy and engagement.
“Seeing the voter turnout rates in the region is staggering. It was around 20%. People in my parents’ generation, my grandparents’ generation, voting was between 90% to 100%,” she said. “There’s a lot of apathy to voting in my age group. There is a lot of doubt about the difference our vote makes. There’s a lot of disillusionment.”
At Calista Corp., one of 13 Alaska Native regional corporations established under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, Wigal and fellow intern Genieve Beans, worked to increase voting literacy through social media outreach. Their goal was to find ways to teach young Indigenous people about the importance of voting. “We wanted to come up with a way to connect with people our age,” Wigal said. “We utilized Instagram features I had seen on nonprofit and business accounts to encourage user participation.
Wigal and Beans developed a nonpartisan social media campaign for Calista that included a step-by-step guide to help people determine whether they were registered to vote on Alaska’s Division of Elections website and find their polling locations. “In my region, you have villages that are designated as permanent absentee ballot communities. The infrastructure isn’t the same there as it is here in the city,” Wigal explained. “It is understandable why many might hesitate to vote.”
Their video campaign strived to make challenging aspects of voting more approachable. “It’s so much of a hassle, and there’s no one to direct you. The videos that we made wanted to make voting seem easier,” she said.
For Wigal, the internship was also personal. Originally from the Village of Crooked Creek, this was her first time in the region and her first time residing outside Oklahoma. The experience helped her realize the privileges that come with living in a metropolitan area. “The things that are easily accessible to me are not that way across the country,” she said. “Coming from an urban setting really put the infrastructure issues my community faces into perspective.”
Wigal hopes to continue working on issues that affect Indigenous people after graduation from The University of Tulsa’s Kendall College of Arts & Sciences. She has goals of attending law school, focusing on federal policy and issues of violence against Native women. In the meantime, she wants everyone to know: “Voting does matter!”