Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Lyon County Clerk Nikki Bryan sits in her office in the administration building in Yerington, Nevada, Nov. 2, 2022. She will retire this year after more than two decades on the job. “It’s going to be hard to replace all that knowledge, and that camaraderie that we‘ve always had," says Ms. Bryan, referring to the big turnover of election clerks this year.

Nikki Bryan loves her job. Or rather, she used to.

After more than two decades as the top official overseeing elections for Nevada’s Lyon County, the third most populous county in the state, Ms. Bryan has announced that Tuesday’s election will be her last.

Many of the things she cherished about the work, like being able to serve her community “under the radar,” have evaporated over the past two years. She and her staff are under scrutiny like never before. And she’s gotten a steady stream of accusatory calls and emails, mostly from Republicans and mostly about fraud – which Ms. Bryan finds particularly exasperating, given that former President Donald Trump won Lyon County in 2020 by more than 40 points. 

“I love this county and I want to see elections done right,” says Ms. Bryan, a lifelong Republican herself, from her office in Yerington, as three voters cast early ballots on electronic machines in a nearby hallway. “But I can’t fix the anger. I’ve tried.” 

In 2020, thousands of veteran local officials like Ms. Bryan served as critical democratic safeguards, overcoming historic challenges – including a pandemic and a president refusing to admit defeat – to administer what experts hailed as a remarkably safe and secure election. But heading into Tuesday’s vote, that bulwark seems more precarious than ever.

With GOP candidates up and down the ballot echoing Mr. Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen, only a bare majority of registered voters say they “trust elections to be conducted fairly and counted accurately.” And more and more election workers, pushed to a breaking point by harassment and distrust, have been throwing in the towel.

In Nevada, seven of the state’s 17 counties have seen registrars or clerks leave office since 2020, with many resigning midterm. Another two, Ms. Bryan and her Carson City colleague Aubrey Rowlatt, will depart after this election. 

“You’re just working so many long hours, and then you’re being called idiots. ... I had some man say he would sit outside my window and watch me,” says Ms. Rowlatt, who made the decision to leave after only one term.

Experts say this exodus of workers, and the loss of collective years of experience, is putting additional strain on a system that was already underfunded, understaffed, and outdated. Moreover, in some cases they are being replaced by their biggest critics – officials who insist the previous election was fraudulent and who are already instituting controversial changes. After appointing a new clerk, Nevada’s Nye County decided to hand-count all its ballots, before the state Supreme Court last week partially ruled in favor of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Carson City Clerk Aubrey Rowlatt stands outside her office in Carson City, Nevada, Nov. 2, 2022. Despite initially intending to run for several terms, she now plans to leave at the end of her first term. "We're not attention-seeking," says Ms. Rowlatt. "That's not what we signed up for."

“There is a lot of strain on our election system, and it’s coming from a lot of different directions,” says Derek Tisler, counsel for the Brennan Center’s Elections & Government Program. “All those issues, either long-standing or recent, are layering on top of each other and adding to the already really complicated task of running a federal election where we expect to have high turnout.”

Behind the burnout

National analysts agree – and numerous audits have proved – that the U.S. system has many checks in place to prevent large-scale fraud. But local clerks say the system could still be improved to help balance their daunting workloads. “I can take the nasty calls and the nasty emails,” says Ms. Rowlatt, but “it’s the burnout.”

Many clerks like Ms. Rowlatt and Ms. Bryan have other duties such as issuing marriage or business licenses. Ms. Rowlatt motions to a stack of papers on her desk that are on her to-do list, a “dissolution of marriage” headline visible on the top sheet. In addition to her clerk duties, Ms. Bryan is also the county treasurer. These clerks suggest divvying up the vast roles of clerks or registrars by investing in more county officials, as well as investing in security to make the current officials feel safer.

In 2020, the pandemic prompted substantial election changes in many places. Nevada’s Legislature, like many others, passed a law allowing the state to mail ballots to all active voters; in 2021 it voted to continue this procedure. At the same time, jurisdictions must continue to staff a certain number of in-person polling places, which both Ms. Bryan and Ms. Rowlatt say is like “running two different elections” at the same time. 

The changes around mail-in voting passed the Legislature along strict party lines, with Democrats supporting and Republicans opposed. And many Republican candidates have continued to criticize mail-in voting, citing unsubstantiated theories and fueling distrust among their voters. 

Election workers in Ms. Bryan’s office say voters have torn up mail-in ballots in front of their faces, and then requested new paper ballots to vote with in person because they don’t trust electronic voting machines. 

“We printed the exact same ballot,” shrugs Anita Talbot, who has worked in election administration for six years, but says the past two have been unlike anything she’s ever experienced.

One of the most frustrating aspects of all of this, say many election workers, is that the criticisms and conspiracies make for no-win situations. Republican voters tell them that they don’t trust mail-in paper ballots, but they also believe Dominion voting machines are hackable. (The claims were so widespread on right-wing media that Dominion is suing Fox News, Newsmax, and others for $1.7 billion.) They want officials to hand-count ballots, a painstaking process, but they also become suspicious when it takes longer to know the results. Only 10 states currently allow early ballots to be processed and counted before Election Day.

Ms. Bryan did a back-of-the-envelope calculation for her county: It would take 37 straight days of 24-hour shifts to hand-count all their ballots.

“They don’t like the machines, but they don’t like the paper ballots, so what do you want to do? Sit in one big room and raise your hand?” says Ms. Bryan. 

Hand counts are in, Dominion technology out

In Nevada’s Lander County, election officials have replaced Dominion voting machines with another brand of voting technology. In Nye County, a rural area west of Las Vegas, Republican secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant persuaded the five-member Republican County Commission in March to “ditch” their Dominion machines in favor of hand-counting all ballots. 

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Nye County Clerk Mark Kampf sits in his new office in Pahrump, Nevada, Nov. 3, 2022. He was appointed to the position after the longtime incumbent quit amid local officials' request that she conduct a hand count of ballots this year. "I know that I'm doing everything in my ability to produce a free and fair election," says Mr. Kampf.

Then-Clerk Sandra Merlino pushed back, warning that hand counts were prone to “a lot of error.” But the commission was undeterred, and Ms. Merlino resigned after more than two decades in the post. In her place, it appointed Mark Kampf as interim clerk. (Currently the Republican candidate for the position, Mr. Kampf is expected to win easily in a county that Mr. Trump won by more than 40 points.)

Mr. Kampf, a retired executive who had served as the county’s interim treasurer, began the unprecedented hand count last week along with about 60 volunteers, with some groups taking three hours to count 50 ballots after getting mismatched tallies.

But Nevada’s Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavaske ordered his office to stop the hand count last week after the Supreme Court of Nevada partially ruled in favor of an ACLU lawsuit, arguing that “the ability of observers to hear the read-aloud selections on ballots” violates state law. Mr. Kampf says they will count silently when they are allowed to resume.

In the waiting room of Mr. Kampf’s office in Pahrump, a sprawling desert town dotted with road signs warning of various animal crossings, copies of the Pahrump Valley Times with the headline “Ballot hand count stopped” are available for $1. A ballot drop box stands in the middle of the room, with two padlocks on the top.

Mr. Kampf’s desk is a flurry of papers, and he apologizes for the mess, noting he hasn’t had much time to unpack since he assumed the role three months ago. 

He’s hopeful they’ll be able to restart the hand counting as soon as possible, noting that for this election he plans to use electronic tabulators as well, since “there is no way I would jeopardize the election results using an unproven process.” But, he adds, he feels “very confident” that hand-counting ballots can work – with Nye leading the way for other jurisdictions to follow. While it may require more time and personnel, that’s ultimately a “function of resources.”

One resource that has been plentiful this year is volunteers. Mr. Kampf says he has already trained over 100 volunteers in the hand-counting process. And after reaching out to local Democratic groups, Mr. Kampf says he has an “appropriate proportion” of Democrats and Republicans covering shifts. 

“As clerk, my job is to produce as transparent a process as possible,” he says. “I met way too many people in this county who were frustrated [with the system]. ... They weren’t sure whether they were going to vote at all. And that was very disturbing to me.”

“This is not why I signed up”

Mr. Kampf is on the record denying the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, though he declined to repeat those claims in an interview, saying that as clerk, his job is to look ahead. 

But Nye isn’t the only Nevada county to appoint a new top elections official who’s discredited the 2020 election results. Jim Hindle, vice chair of the Nevada GOP, who led an effort to send illegitimate “alternate electors” from Nevada in December 2020, was elected clerk of Storey County this summer after the incumbent clerk-treasurer resigned. Mr. Hindle, who declined to comment for this article “because of all the misinformation going on,” is running unopposed for a full term.  

Some Nevada clerks worry that these new officials are already having an indirect effect on their own work. There has long been a sense of camaraderie among Nevada’s election officials, says Ms. Bryan – with clerks trading advice on various aspects of the job. But when Mr. Kampf and Mr. Hindle joined the Clerks Association, it caused some to think twice about sending questions to their email chain out of fear that it might be repurposed and used against them. Ms. Rowlatt says she’s seen participation in the group’s bimonthly calls drop off. 

Ms. Bryan worries that whoever replaces her next year won’t be able to lean on other, more experienced clerks. “When I was new, I counted on the older people a lot,” she says. “That goes away when all the older people say, ‘This is not why I signed up.’”

“I believe that most people who have a position like mine take it to heart and do the best they can,” she adds. “I know everyone who has this job in Nevada, and there isn’t one of them that I wouldn’t trust.”

She then clarifies: She is talking about the slate of Nevada’s clerks as it stood at the beginning of this year. Not as it stands today. 

On a cool October morning, the sun shines down on a clearing in the piney woods of southeast Texas. Here, Tania Blackburn, after spending her childhood bouncing from foster home to foster home, is starting to build a life for herself.

The sun shone on Aurene Martin too when, driving to Capitol Hill, she found out she had a chance to adopt another son.

And sunlight pierced the hospital window the day Robyn Bradshaw became a grandmother. 

In the world of child welfare, sunny days can be hard to find – something these three Native American women know all too well.

Finding homes for children whose parents are unable or unwilling to raise them is a heart-wrenching process, even when it goes smoothly. An overworked and under-resourced system only adds to the emotional strain, as courts, caseworkers, and families grapple with the question at the core of every child welfare case: What is the best interest of the child?

In cases concerning Native American children, that question is especially complicated.

For over 40 years, many of those cases have been subject to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). Born from a tragic history, the law established minimum standards for removing an “Indian child” from their families and placing them in other homes.

For decades the convention in America’s child welfare system had been that vulnerable children were best served by removing them from “unfit” families and placing them in “closed” adoptions, with no contact between the child and birth parents. ICWA required states do almost the exact opposite: prioritize keeping children with their parents when possible, and if not, placing them with relatives or members of their tribe.

The law has faced many legal challenges, but none quite like the one the U.S. Supreme Court will hear on Wednesday. The argument will likely continue the justices’ term-long discussion of the role of race in American society and law. The decision – expected next summer – is difficult to predict, but its consequences could extend far beyond ICWA. The case pits loving families against each other. It casts a federal and state power struggle against a backdrop of centuries of injustice. And it puts to the highest court in the land one of the toughest questions a judge can hear: With a vulnerable child in need of a family, what is in their best interests?

“Everyone wants children to be taken care of, and to be in safe places,” says Kevin Washburn, former assistant secretary of Indian Affairs at the Department of Interior and a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.

“There was a time when Native children were often adopted by very good, well-intentioned non-Indian families, and yet for the children in those families they often felt lost,” he adds.

What ICWA has provided, he continues, is a recognition “that courts should strive, when possible, to place children [somewhere] that’s culturally appropriate, so that they don’t have that sense of loss and lack of belonging.”

Kevin McGill/AP/File

Tehassi Hill, tribal chairman of the Oneida Nation, stands outside a federal appeals court Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in New Orleans, following arguments on the Indian Child Welfare Act, which gives Native families preference in adopting Native children. A Texas-based federal judge ruled the 1978 law unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments Wednesday in four cases that may determine whether ICWA has a future.

“He had already lost a family”

Eight years ago, Jennifer and Chad Brackeen heard God calling on them to become adoptive parents.

But when they thought they were about to answer that call – adopting a boy, identified in court documents as A.L.M., who they had been fostering for a year – the Navajo Nation intervened. 

The boy’s birth parents had terminated their parental rights. A.L.M. is eligible, through his mother, to be enrolled in the tribe, so his case fell under ICWA. The tribe found a Navajo family in Colorado willing to adopt him, and a judge denied the Brackeens’ petition. Soon after, they got a text message saying A.L.M. would be taken in two days.

It’s unclear why it took so long for a tribe to intervene, but the Brackeens appealed. After the Navajo family withdrew, they won. They are seeking to adopt A.L.M.’s half sister, with the support of the young girl’s mother, but the Navajo Nation wants the girl placed with her great-aunt or an unrelated Navajo couple. The couple didn’t respond to interview requests, but Ms. Brackeen described the adoption process on her personal blog. 

“He already had strong attachment to us and to our family,” she wrote in a January 2018 post. “He had already lost a family in his short life, and we didn’t believe it was in his best interest to lose another.”

They officially adopted A.L.M. in 2018, “but the passion we have to amend this law remains,” she continued. “It is destroying the hearts of children across the country every day.”

They have a particular grievance with ICWA’s “placement preferences.” Those provisions require that an “Indian child” – a child enrolled, or eligible to be enrolled, in a federally recognized tribe – be placed with a member of their extended family, other members of their tribe, or other Native families.

The justices are not being asked to resolve any particular custody dispute in Brackeen v. Haaland, but instead evaluate those provisions as well as other facets of ICWA. The Brackeens and other plaintiffs are arguing that ICWA, particularly through its placement preferences, unconstitutionally discriminates against non-Native families.

There are many other questions, several of which stem from what is perhaps ICWA’s biggest strength and, here, its greatest weakness: the fact it applies not on tribal land, but in state courts. Does Congress have the power to enact a law like that? Does it violate the 10th Amendment by allowing the federal government to intrude in state-only matters, in this case the welfare of children in states?

With Native Americans increasingly choosing to live off reservations – about 87% do, according to the 2020 census – this issue was somewhat inevitable. The federal government has unilateral authority to work with federally recognized tribes, and states have broad authority over child protection and welfare.

With ICWA, Congress did “impose federal law on state court processes” says Mr. Washburn, who is now dean of the University of Iowa College of Law. But it did so “for a legitimate purpose, for good reason.” 

“Literally stealing Indian children”

Congress passed ICWA in 1978 after years of research, investigations, and public hearings. That process itself was the result of more than a century of Native children being taken from their families.

Starting in the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of Native children were taken from their families and placed in boarding schools, with the partial goal of assimilating them into white culture, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. As boarding schools wound down in the 1960s, state child welfare services and federally funded private adoption programs began removing Native children in large numbers from their homes.

Matthew Brown/AP

Ruby Left Hand Bull Sanchez (left) points to a photo of the boarding school she was forced to attend, as her daughter Candice Left Hand Bull Vigil looks on at Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in Mission, South Dakota, Oct. 15, 2022. From the 19th century to the 1960s, Native children were taken from their families and forced to attend boarding schools with the aim of assimilating them into white culture.

By the early 1970s, about 1 in every 4 Native children were in foster or adoptive care or boarding schools, according to congressional testimony – often because social workers viewed impoverished Native homes as neglectful homes. 

The federal government “has chosen to allow these agencies to strike at the heart of Indian communities by literally stealing Indian children,” said James Abourezk, a senator from South Dakota, at a hearing in 1974.

The result was a trailblazing piece of child welfare policy that prioritized keeping children with parents if possible and if not, with relatives or other tribal members.

“It makes people have to go through a fair process,” says David Simmons, government affairs director at the National Indian Child Welfare Association.

That does mean that ICWA cases can take longer to resolve, leaving children in temporary placements – and forming attachments – longer than anyone would like. But Mr. Simmons thinks it’s worth it.

“The child welfare system is broken in this country, and has been for a long time,” he adds. ICWA “pushes those systems to work more effectively, and also consider not just the immediate needs of children but their long-term needs too.”

“What really ought to matter ... are children”

Tania Blackburn knows all about the broken child welfare system.

As a child in Oklahoma, she lived in nine or 10 putatively Native foster homes over the course of 11 years. ICWA failed her, she says.

Before she entered foster care, her birth mother grounded her in Delaware and Creek culture. They would go to powwows and ceremonial dances, make regalia, and visit family members.

“Once I was put into the foster care system it was completely different, or it was nonexistent,” she says.

“I have missed out on all those seasons and dancing, and growing up with my cousins and kinfolk,” she adds. “I could return, and they wouldn’t know who I was.”

She lives more than 400 miles away now, in a trailer on a dirt road outside a small town in southeast Texas. She’s building a house in a clearing with her husband, and she’s never been happier. Her daughters are here, and her brother, who was in foster care with her, will be moving here soon. They’ve bought three baby goats they want to raise for milk.

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

Tania Blackburn with her baby goat, Charlotte, is building a life with her family near Beaumont, Texas. She says after a childhood in putatively Native foster homes in Oklahoma, she was cut off from her culture. Today, she dances, does beadwork, and goes to powows, but says her cousins and kinfolk would not recognize her.

She still dances and goes to powwows. She beads as well – a recent work sits next to a Bible on her living room table. But it’s not the same. “Even with ICWA,” she says, she feels she lost something. After years of struggle, including substance misuse, she thinks she’s here not because of ICWA, but in spite of it.

“What really ought to matter, more than legacy or tribes, are children,” she says. “We’ve got to find good people and ... not to limit their options [for] love and support.”

“America can live on without tribes, but America cannot live on with broken people; it cannot survive without good, stable families,” she adds.

It’s a common argument among ICWA critics, including many, like Ms. Blackburn, with personal experiences. The law, they argue, allows tribes to systematically harm and traumatize Native children by removing them from – or depriving them of – loving non-Native homes.

“Many tribes are just entirely cavalier with the child’s psychological sense of permanency,” says Mark Fiddler, an adoption and family law attorney in Minneapolis.

He was once so enamored with ICWA that he formed a special practice dedicated to it. But the more cases he worked on, he says, the more his views changed. Now, he thinks ICWA has become the crude tool of family separation it was originally intended to prevent. Today, he represents the Brackeens and other families in the lower courts.

“The paramount value [for tribes] is cultural preservation,” he says. “I get that, but at what cost?”

Mr. Fiddler says he gets “that” because he is Native himself, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Though he grew up in Minneapolis, he was raised in his Native culture, visiting the reservation and learning about its history and traditions.

He’s a pariah there now, he’s said, because of his opposition to ICWA.

What he wants is more Native foster homes, and more Native adoptive parents. What he wants is for tribes and governments to tackle systemic problems that feed the child welfare system, like substance misuse and joblessness. Instead, he believes ICWA has set itself up to fail: requiring solutions where there aren’t the necessary resources.

“That’s what nobody really wants to talk about,” he says.

“All these kids crash into the system, they bond and attach, and then we just mess them up again,” he adds. “It makes ICWA kind of unmatched in its brutality.”

“It was so healing”

People like Sandy White Hawk wished ICWA had become law earlier.

In the 1950s, a white missionary couple adopted her at 18 months. They raised her in a small Wisconsin town. She knew she was Native – her mother would tell her, in “an exceptionally negative way” – but she didn’t know what it meant. She just knew she was different from everyone around her.

“Initially you may think, so what? I’m being cared for,” she adds. But “there’s an emotional isolation that develops.”

“All the things that nobody ever says [to you], things like, ‘Oh, you laugh just like your Aunt Gladys,’ ” she continues, “it just adds up over time to be a really deep grief and loss, with an emotional isolation.”

At age 35, Ms. White Hawk, a Sicangu Lakota, returned to her birthplace: the Rosebud Reservation. She remembers feeling her “lungs open up.”

“It felt like I was breathing in a way I hadn’t breathed before,” she says. “The land itself seemed to wake my spirit up.”

Reuniting with her family, she finally had the feeling of looking at people and seeing herself.

“Just seeing them and having that affirmed began to give me right away a sense of belonging,” she says. “It was so healing.”

Unlike then, today family and community placements are now the priority in any child welfare proceeding, and closed adoptions are exceedingly rare. And supporters of ICWA say the “revolutionary” law deserves credit for helping bring that about.

“ICWA really was a path-marking statute in that [family placement] regard,” says Dan Lewerenz, a contract attorney with the Native American Rights Fund and a member of the Iowa tribe of Kansas-Nebraska. “Today almost every state recognizes that that’s a best practice.”

Data shows that American Indian and Alaska Native children are still disproportionately represented in foster care, but experts and advocates say the situation is night and day compared to the 1960s and ’70s. Native children age out of foster care less often than other children and they are placed with relatives more often than other children, according to data analyzed by Casey Family Programs.

“Have we had trouble in the courts? Yes. Has it led to a reduction? Yes,” says Abby Abinanti, chief judge of the Yurok Tribal Court in Northern California.

“We feel it has been successful in that regard – maybe not as much as we want, but it’s a start,” she adds.

As a state court judge – the first Native woman to reach that position in California – Judge Abinanti heard many ICWA cases. They’re all hard, she says, even when they go smoothly.

David Crane/Los Angeles Daily News/AP/File

On Nov. 9, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about the constitutionality of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which prioritizes placing Native foster and adoptive children with Native relatives or families. In 2016, supporters of the foster family of a little girl named Lexi rallied in Santa Clarita, California, after Lexi was removed under a court order that mandated her placement with Native relatives in Utah.

And they often do go smoothly. Between 2015 and 2021, there were placement preference appeals in just 13 of 254 ICWA cases, according to data compiled by Kate Fort, director of the Indian Law Clinic at Michigan State University.

When the law isn’t followed, trauma and even more heartbreak can emerge.

P.S., as she’s known in court records, had a long, complicated birth. Robyn Bradshaw, her grandmother, was in the room for it all. She was in the Hennepin County, Minnesota, hospital as P.S. recovered. And she was there for the first three years of her granddaughter’s life, helping raise her in her home.

But when P.S.’s parents were arrested, county officials told Ms. Bradshaw that an old felony conviction disqualified her from becoming her foster parent. They never told her she had a right to clear her record. P.S. was put in emergency custody and, later, into a foster placement with the Clifford family.

Six years of litigation followed, as the Cliffords fought to adopt the girl they fostered for almost two years. Ms. Bradshaw, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, went to every court hearing.

“I remember sitting in court and feeling like I was burning up inside,” she said in a statement. “I knew P.S. belongs with me. ... I felt like I was dying from a broken heart.”

In 2020, she adopted P.S. The Cliffords are co-plaintiffs in the Brackeen case.

Ms. Bradshaw has filed an amicus brief opposing them. This all could have been avoided, she writes. 

Had Hennepin County officials followed ICWA and child welfare practices, “P.S. would have remained with Ms. Bradshaw, her caregiver since birth,” the brief states, quoting the Minnesota court’s opinion in her custody case. “Instead, [P.S.] has been traumatized by our system due to numerous failed placements. ... And the Cliffords have lost a child whom they love and consider their own.”

Should American law be “colorblind”?

The case before the Supreme Court is a complicated one: When the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals heard the case, its final decision stretched for 325 pages with six separate opinions.

The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices are likely to support ICWA. Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of the court’s most conservative members, has the most experience with tribal law and a record of ruling in tribes’ favor.

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, meanwhile, appeared very skeptical in the high court’s last ICWA case, Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, in 2013. Two others, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, are adoptive parents themselves. 

Beyond the views of the justices, the volume of questions means there are all manner of ways the court could potentially rule.

The placement preference provisions are perhaps the most compelling to the average person, but the justices could resolve the case through other questions. The conflict ICWA raises between federal and state governments on child welfare proceedings is one possibility. The scope of the Indian commerce clause – a provision of the Constitution that gives Congress sole authority to work with federally recognized tribes – could be another.

The hottest question in the case, however, ties into issues the justices have been vigorously debating already this term – specifically, race and the idea that American law should be “colorblind.”

In one case this term, Alabama is arguing that being required to draw multiple majority-Black voting districts is unconstitutional because it requires the state to perform “race-based sorting.” In another case, students at two universities are arguing that affirmative action programs violate the equal protection rights of certain races.

The Brackeen case makes similar arguments.

ICWA “discriminates against Indian children on the basis of their ancestry ... and it deprives them of the ‘best interests of the child’ test that applies to every other kind of child in state court proceedings around the country,” said Matthew McGill, a lawyer at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who is representing the Brackeens, on a call with reporters last week.

It also discriminates against prospective parents of those children, “by putting non-Indian parents at the back of the line, and putting in front of them by law literally every Indian family from every single one of 573 Indian tribes,” he added.

There is an important difference here compared to, say, affirmative action, however. In making this argument, Mr. McGill and his colleagues are arguing that being “Indian” for ICWA purposes is a racial classification. The Supreme Court has never said that in a majority opinion – though a few justices made the argument in the Adoptive Couple case – instead maintaining, for centuries, that being “Indian” is a political classification rooted in tribes’ status as sovereign nations recognized by Congress.

“If they prevail on that argument, the effect on Indian law would be incalculable,” says Mr. Lewerenz, a University of North Dakota School of Law professor.

Practically every statute that provides programs, services, and benefits to Native people “has tribal membership, membership in a federally recognized tribe, as the touchstone,” he adds. “They are basically trying to burn down all of Indian law with this argument.”

While this is the same court that made several historic rulings last term, Mr. Washburn, the former assistant secretary of Indian Affairs, would be surprised if the court transformed tribal law in that way.

It’s rare that Indian law cases are politically or ideologically polarizing, and the case provides a few paths toward a more restrained decision. The court could give state courts more leeway to not follow ICWA, or it could strike down just the preference for “other Indian families.”

“There are possible ways for this case to come out where ICWA loses but all of Indian law doesn’t get lost,” says Mr. Washburn.

Tribes are nonetheless making preparations for a post-ICWA world.

This would resemble something like the diffuse abortion access landscape that has emerged since the court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer. Tribes would lean on partnerships and shared resources with state and local agencies and organizations, as well as build out their own child welfare infrastructure and ensure that ICWA-style state laws are enforced.

Regardless of how the high court rules, tribes have a number of ways of ensuring their children are cared for in state systems, said Ms. Fort, director of the Indian Law Clinic at Michigan State University, on a call with reporters in October.

“One of the greatest success stories of ICWA is the partnerships that have developed between tribes and states, and I think those partnerships will continue even if ICWA falls,” she added. 

“The important part is that they’re connected”

For almost her entire life, Aurene Martin has seen ICWA work.

Not only has she adopted two sons through ICWA, she worked on ICWA cases in the mid-’90s as an attorney for the Oneida tribe in Wisconsin.

Bryan Dozier/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Aurene Martin stands with her son, Josh, at their home in Alexandria, Virginia, on Oct. 24, 2022. Ms. Martin, who adopted two boys, says she’s seen the Indian Child Welfare Act at work her entire life, from the children her grandmother fostered to her own sons’ lives.

When Ms. Martin was growing up, her grandmother on the Menominee reservation, about an hour’s drive from Green Bay, would foster Native children. Some were girls around her age and they would all play together. 

“It was just like they were kids in our family,” she says. But “they always wanted to go back to their parents. They loved their parents.”

Today, Ms. Martin is focused, not on the case, but on raising her two adopted sons in their home in the Washington, D.C., suburbs.

She’s listening to her younger son’s whistles echo through the house. She’s trying to encourage her older son to pursue art without nagging. It’s all the challenges and rewards of parenting, she says, with a heavy dose of added complexity.

“You struggle with impostor syndrome, maybe,” Ms. Martin says.

For adopted children “at some level, you always have that sense of loss at your very core, and there’s nothing I can do to make up for that,” she adds.

But Ms. Martin is doing everything she can. The boys know they’re adopted, and, as they’re entering the moody teenage years (13 and 14), “they’re shockingly not curious about the details,” she laughs.

They’re from different tribes, Oneida and Menominee, but Ms. Martin has roots in both communities. They make frequent trips to the reservations, including four times in the past year.

“The important part is that they’re connected to their family, that they’re connected to the community.”

Editor’s note: This story has been edited to clarify a quote from Ms. Bradshaw’s amicus brief.

In the crowded capital city of Dakar, jutting into the Atlantic Ocean, Senegal’s summer rains came in torrents. Rushing water became waist-high in some places; pedestrians hired horse-drawn carts to carry them across streets. Three people died in the deluge. 

Elsewhere this year, the toll was worse. Record floods in Nigeria displaced some 1.4 million people and killed hundreds. And in Pakistan, relief efforts are still underway after the deadliest floods in the country’s history. Whole communities were displaced and crop planting disrupted by deluges that, according to a recent media briefing by the country’s climate change minister, Sherry Rehman, have affected 1 in 7 Pakistanis.

Meanwhile, the Horn of Africa is facing the worst drought in decades – with millions facing severe food insecurity, according to aid workers – amid exceptionally dry weather for much of the world. 

All of this is giving increasing urgency to a long known, but often ignored, aspect to the problem of global warming: Climate change is deeply unfair, with those countries that have contributed least to the problem feeling the most devastating consequences. Frustration with this reality is growing on the streets of cities like Dakar and Islamabad, and that is translating into rising pressure to address the issue in international climate negotiations, such as the COP27 gathering that started this weekend in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

“It’s the underdeveloped countries that suffer the most,” says Nafi Fall, a college student marching down a wide boulevard in Dakar’s Medina neighborhood a week ago, part of a protest meant to call attention to the disastrous effects of climate change in Africa. “We need to think of the future.”

Much of the unfairness is apparent in the cause and effect of climate change. The entire continent of Africa, for instance, is responsible for only 3% to 4% of the world’s heat-trapping carbon emissions, while the United States is responsible for about 20% of these emissions since 1850 – a percentage well above other nations. (The U.S. has lowered its carbon emissions over past decades – by about 8% between 1990 and 2020, according to the Environmental Protection Agency – but the impact of atmospheric carbon is cumulative. To calculate the impact any country has had on climate change, one must consider the total amount of its emissions over the past century.)

“While we’re all experiencing the climate crisis, it is falling disproportionately on the poorest and most marginalized people, who contributed the least to the problem,” says Rachel Cleetus, policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And it’s the richer nations, like the United States, the nations of the European Union, who bear much of the responsibility.”

Peter Dejong/AP

Guests enter the convention center hosting COP27, this year's U.N. Conference of the Parties on climate change, Nov. 4, 2022, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. The summit started Sunday, Nov. 6. Discussions aim to spur global efforts to reduce carbon emissions, based on the Paris climate-agreement goal of limiting human-caused global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

This disproportionate burden is becoming even clearer because of an evolving field called rapid attribution science, which can quickly tie specific weather events to climate change. Pakistan’s floods, for instance, were likely caused by climate change, with 75% more water falling during those intense monsoon weeks than would have been the case had the world not warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius since the preindustrial era, some scientists have estimated using these new methods. Climate change also made the region’s heat wave this past summer 30% more likely, scientists estimate.

“People in Pakistan ... have paid” for Western luxuries

“People in developed countries must realize that people in Pakistan, the poorest of the poor, have paid for the quality of life and luxuries [Western societies] enjoy due to advanced industrialization in their societies,” said Pakistani Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal in a recent press briefing.

In the wake of the flooding, the United Nations appointed Pakistani Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif to be vice chairman of this month’s international conference. 

The Conference of Parties, or COP, is an annual U.N. gathering of diplomats in which countries agree on global benchmarks and strategies for addressing climate change. Mr. Sharif is expected to make the case, along with the other 133 nations of the so-called G-77, that world leaders should do more to provide for “loss and damage” connected to climate change – in particular, by setting up a new international finance mechanism that would help compensate countries for climate disasters.  

There is some debate over whether that approach is realistic, and whether a fight over it might derail the conference before it starts. But even if wealthy countries agreed to the concept, it would not necessarily mean quick payments to vulnerable countries. For years, wealthy nations have fallen short on pledges that exist already for $100 billion a year in climate finance to help poorer, more vulnerable nations. 

Zahid Hussain/AP

Homes are surrounded by floodwaters in Jaffarabad, a district of Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan province, Sept. 1, 2022. Scientists see a strong link between Earth's warming temperatures and these unusually severe floods, which have affected an estimated 1 in 7 residents of Pakistan.

Still, advocacy around this question of loss and damage – and the importance of building greater fairness in the climate realm – has gained steam.

“The issue has evolved significantly over the years, and I would say the last few months and last couple of weeks,” says Preety Bhandari, senior adviser in the global climate program and finance center for the World Resources Institute. “It is in that context of justice – and also in the context of solidarity.” 

A shift from U.S. and others?  

For years, the United States has opposed the concept, with officials saying that there are already funding mechanisms to funnel money to help countries adapt to climate change and repair from disasters. Some diplomats also worried that admitting fault or liability for any climate disasters could open the door to a never-ending barrage of lawsuits. 

But in recent days John Kerry, U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, has signaled more sympathy for the idea. 

“I think it’s important that the developed world recognizes that a lot of countries are now being very negatively impacted as a consequence of the continued practice of how the developed world chooses to propel its vehicles, heat its homes, light its businesses, produce food. Much of the world is obviously frustrated,” Mr. Kerry told Time magazine in an Oct. 26 interview. “We have to find a way for more capital to flow into developing countries.”   

Other advanced nations seem to be shifting position as well. Last month, Denmark became the developing world’s first central government to make a dedicated pledge of loss-and-damage compensation for climate-vulnerable countries, promising some $13 million. 

But fairness, those involved with climate policy say, is complicated – and it goes beyond compensation.

“A lot of people look at fairness as a blame consideration,” says Rahul Tongia, a senior fellow at the Center for Social and Economic Progress in New Delhi. “I think a much better framing is who can do how much, and even who should do how much, to address the problem.”

There is a finite volume of carbon emissions that the world, collectively, can release into the atmosphere to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, he points out, often called the “carbon budget.”   

Susan Walsh/AP

John Kerry, U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, speaks during a briefing at the State Department in Washington, Nov. 2, 2022. Mr. Kerry has recently signaled greater openness on the part of the U.S. to consider financial support for developing countries facing "loss and damage" due to climate change.

Who should be able to emit how much of what remains in that budget? The international community for years has focused on a policy of “ratcheting” up emission reductions, and recently there has been a movement to condemn new fossil fuel development. But is it fair – or practical – to ask poorer nations to not develop the same energy resources that wealthier ones have used to build prosperity?

The question of fossil fuels in Senegal

Senegal, for instance, is home to some wind and solar farms, but is also pushing for a role in the fossil fuel industry, with recently discovered offshore gas and oil wells set to come online next year. Experts say those developments could help Senegal’s economy grow as much as 8.1% in 2023.

For years, wealthier countries opposed this approach. At last year’s COP summit in Glasgow, Scotland, 39 countries signed a statement reading, in part, that they would “end new direct public support for the international unabated fossil fuel energy sector by the end of 2022, except in limited and clearly defined circumstances that are consistent with a 1.5°C warming limit and the goals of the Paris Agreement.” 

But this position shifted when Russia invaded Ukraine and Europe itself faced gas shortages. Earlier this year, the chancellor of Germany – one of the signatory countries on that statement – traveled to Dakar to talk about helping Senegal further exploit its gas fields.

Still, in Senegal the broad support for fossil fuel development is not shared by everyone. Participants in the fishing industry have expressed concern that the offshore rigs will further displace their catch. 

Khady Camara, president of the environmental group Vacances Vertes, which organized the recent climate march, expressed skepticism of oil and gas projects without ruling them out completely.

“We can wait before exploiting it,” says Ms. Camara. “Africa is very rich; Senegal is very rich: We have sun, water, wind; we don’t have a bad [amount of] energy resources to exploit before thinking of exploiting oil.”

That still leaves the larger question of whether nations can find common ground on climate fairness. While some say they are wary of expecting too much from any one U.N. conference, others say the energy crisis and the widespread impact of extreme climate events may pave the way for more head-on grappling with fairness.

“The climate crisis is so deeply unfair,” says Dr. Cleetus. “On so many levels, it’s veered off into this space of continued unfairness. Now the question is, can we try to set some things right?”

Nick Roll reported from Dakar, Senegal; Hasan Ali from Islamabad; and Stephanie Hanes from Northampton, Massachusetts.

Tears streaming down her cheeks, Viviane Ramos joined hands with other protesters and began feverishly murmuring prayers outside a military building in Rio de Janeiro’s center.

“Lord, pray for us, pray for our nation,” Ms. Ramos, an evangelical Christian, called toward the skies on Nov. 2 as rain pelted her face and drenched the Brazilian flag draped over her shoulders. “Save this country.”

Along with thousands of others clad in yellow, she was there to protest the result of the Oct. 30 election, which leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known universally as Lula, won by a razor-thin margin. Underscoring a lack of trust in established politics and democratic institutions that has grown over the past four years among a large segment of the population, protesters are demanding that the military step in to keep far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in power.

“We won’t accept the results,” says Ms. Ramos, an administrative assistant. “I can’t prove it, but I know the vote wasn’t fair.” She worries a swing to the left would threaten family values, paving the way for legal drugs and abortion. “These are not my values. We can’t let our nation be destroyed.”

Rodolfo Buhrer/Reuters

Members of the Paraná State Military Police and Federal Highway Police stand on a road in Curitiba, Brazil, Nov. 1, 2022, as supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro block a highway. Protesters, mainly truck drivers, demonstrated over Mr. Bolsonaro's defeat in the presidential runoff election last weekend.

Following the announcement of Lula’s victory, a relatively small but powerful cohort of truck drivers and protesters set up hundreds of roadblocks – with little resistance from highway police – disrupting the transport of food, medicine, and fuel across Brazil. On Nov. 2, supporters of Mr. Bolsonaro took to the streets in dozens of cities, drawing a turnout of more than 100,000 people nationwide.

The demonstrations have been largely peaceful, quieting fears of a violent backlash from Mr. Bolsonaro’s more radicalized base. But, the demands of demonstrators have unnerved many here, where memories are still fresh of a brutal military dictatorship that governed between 1964 and 1985. Widespread mistrust in the electoral process, largely stoked by Mr. Bolsonaro himself, has posed tough questions about the integrity of Latin America’s largest democracy, and whether Lula will be able to overcome the challenges – or exacerbate them.

“Lula will clash with this radicalized segment at every turn over the next four years,” says Paulo Henrique Cassimiro, a political science professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. “The extreme right is not going to disappear just because Bolsonaro lost.”

“Own idea of democracy”

Following defeat Oct. 30, Mr. Bolsonaro remained silent for 45 hours, heightening worries that he would contest the result. When he finally spoke Tuesday evening, he didn’t claim fraud – but he didn’t recognize his loss. Instead, he begrudgingly agreed to a transfer of power while declaring protests are the fruit of “indignation and feelings of injustice in the electoral process.”

Many of Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters took his vague language as encouragement, not a concession. “He didn’t recognize the result; he showed he is on the side of the people,” says Hudyson Perrut, a young evangelical pastor. “If Lula wasn’t a thief and had won legitimately, we wouldn’t be here.”

Demonstrators have rallied around a deep disdain for Lula, who has struggled to shake his own tainted past to win back the trust of millions of Brazilians. The former unionist oversaw a golden era of growth from 2003 to 2010, when sky-high commodity prices funded generous social programs that pulled millions out of poverty.

Adriano Machado/Reuters

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro arrives to give a press statement at the Alvorada Palace in Brasília, Brazil, Nov. 1, 2022. He did not congratulate his opponent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on his electoral victory, but his team did agree to transfer power.

But Lula’s legacy was tarnished when a corruption scandal embroiled his leftist Workers’ Party (PT) and landed him in prison in 2018. Even though a judge scrapped his conviction, freeing him to run for a third term, many Brazilians can’t forgive and forget.

For Valéria das Graças, a child psychologist, the leftist’s past isn’t easy to overlook. “We can’t have a convict as president,” she shouts as firecrackers rip through the sky, leaving a yellow trace of smoke. “He belongs in jail. We want the armed forces to take over.”

Mr. Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has long attacked democratic institutions, referred to Brazil’s military dictatorship nostalgically, and suggested that the Supreme Court be dismantled. He has peddled baseless claims about fraud in Brazil’s electronic voting machines, saying they are rigged to favor the left.

He convinced Simone Alho. “We don’t trust the result. We don’t trust the electoral process,” says Ms. Alho, a banker wearing bright green-and-yellow eyeliner. 

These unfounded assertions of fraud, echoed and amplified on social media and messaging apps, have succeeded in mobilizing Mr. Bolsonaro’s base, bringing them from online to physically on the streets, says Letícia Cesarino, a professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina who researches far-right groups on the messaging app Telegram.

While most observers agree that a military coup is unlikely, the demands of protesters underscore the challenges ahead. Brazil’s brutal 21-year dictatorship was defined by censorship, torture, and repression. Since the transition to democracy, steps have been taken to keep the military firmly separate from politics, something observers say Mr. Bolsonaro took pains to chip away at during his time in office by handing out thousands of top government jobs to current and former military officers. In an unprecedented move, he asked the military to monitor and audit the elections. 

“There is a segment of the population that wants to essentially redraw the Constitution,” says Dr. Cesarino. “They clearly have their own idea of democracy. ... That’s really worrying.”

Democratic “danger zone”?

Mr. Bolsonaro’s defeat doesn’t signify an end to the far-right’s reach in politics. Allies elected to congressional, senatorial, and gubernatorial posts have cemented the far-right as a powerful political force. When Lula is sworn in on Jan. 1, he will have to negotiate with a potentially hostile Congress bent on pushing Brazil further to the right.

Alliances with political opponents, which take time, energy, and political concessions to build, will be the only way to govern, observers say.

Andre Penner/AP

Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva embraces his wife in São Paulo, Brazil, after defeating incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in a presidential runoff on Oct. 30, 2022. The race was tight, and the incoming leader faces the challenge of bridging a deeply divided Brazil.

Lula will also have to win over evangelical Christians, a growing force now representing a third of the population. It’s considered a base loyal to Mr. Bolsonaro, who gained their trust by warning of a “leftist attack” on values, like bringing transgender bathrooms into public schools.

During the election, many misinformation campaigns centered around religion, including false claims that Lula planned to shut down churches. Lula has tried to reassure religious Brazilians that he represents no threat. Just weeks before the runoff vote, Lula issued a statement insisting he “does not have a pact” with the devil, after Mr. Bolsonaro’s campaign tried to link him to satanism, a move unthinkable in most modern elections around the globe.

Lula’s PT was once the party of choice for many of the poor, Black Brazilians that today fill evangelical pews. As the left shifted its attention to divisive issues like abortion and gay rights over the past decade, pastors began to urge their congregations to reject leftist candidates. During his campaign, Lula mostly stayed silent on divisive topics, and tried to build bridges with religious leaders. Since his victory, he has won the endorsement of powerful evangelicals like Silas Malafaia, who once cast him as the enemy, possibly opening up a path to earn the trust of more evangelical congregants.

And economics could ultimately trump religious fervor. Lula’s election comes at a crucial time for Brazil, when a punishing economic crisis has sent food and fuel prices surging. About 33 million people are now going hungry, reversing decades of social and economic progress.

“These voters are not just evangelicals – he doesn’t just have to talk to them about values,” says Dr. Cassimiro. “He can reach them on other issues too, especially by improving life for the poor.”

But more extreme segments of the far-right are likely to continue to move toward the fringes, fed in large part by the proliferation of disinformation on social media. Crackdowns on “fake news” during the election backfired, as Supreme Court judges and electoral authorities have come under attack for going too far in their efforts to curb the spread of misinformation. Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters say these institutions are censoring them, sowing further doubts in independent institutions key to a healthy democracy.

By Friday, most blockades around the country were cleared after Mr. Bolsonaro appealed to his supporters to lift the roadblocks to avoid economic turmoil. But, on messaging apps, his supporters are busy planning more protests, including demonstrations in front of military establishments that took place over the weekend. Their actions signal that voters unhappy with Lula’s victory aren’t ready to accept his win just yet, even as Mr. Bolsonaro stands down. 

“Bolsonaro’s defeat is like a sigh of relief for democracy,” says Dr. Cassimiro. “But that doesn’t mean it’s out of the danger zone.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect developments in the news.

ALEXEI DANICHEV/SPUTNIK/AP

Professional athletes take part in a sailing competition in the Gulf of Finland near St. Petersburg, Russia, in August. An unprompted story about sailing from a stranger gave our essayist the motivation to revisit her rejected novel.

I am standing in line at the used bookstore. I am leaving town the next morning and have crammed an afternoon of errands into the next hour. In my mind I am already checking off this errand, striding out the door on the way to the bank, dry cleaner, and grocery store for airplane snacks for the kids.

I am shuffling my feet loudly while the guy ahead of me takes his sweet time selecting a pastry from the display case, which really, I decide, is just for display. People order only coffee while they browse books. Also, I think, eager to feel mean, because of this man I will never get out of here in time to finish my errands.

I’m irritated. Not really at any of this. I’ve gone from feeling brokenhearted to feeling angry. My recently completed novel – a manuscript I spent years writing and the past two years tearing apart and reconstructing – will never see the light of day. My literary agent has emailed to say that while the novel is now the best version of itself, she cannot submit it to publishers. My novel, she says, does not arrest; it does not stun; it does not reveal what it is to be human and alive on this planet.

In her rejection of the novel, she has described the mandate of literature. I cannot fault her for that. But today my deep sadness has veered hard into anger. And now, here is this man who’s straight out of central casting with his suspenders stretched over his belly and plaid shirt in the middle of summer. Santa Claus-like tufts of gray hair spring from his straw cowboy hat. He chooses pie, the deep dish. When he looks away, the woman behind the counter rolls her eyes at me by way of apology.

“A. La. Mode,” he announces dramatically.

My book, the one I requested over the phone, sits on the counter with my name misspelled on a yellow sticky note. I want to reach around him, snatch the book, and fly.

As if he reads my mind, he drums on his belly and turns to me. “My buddy,” he says. “It was his dream to sail around the world.” 

I look around. Is he talking to me? 

“It’s been done before, sure,” he says. “But,” he shrugs, “it was his dream.” I try to relax my face into something respectful. I try to stand still, to stop fidgeting. I want to care about his story. Suddenly, I am sure that I should.

“So my buddy, he’s going to do it. He’s really going to do it. Sail around the world.” He stops and guffaws. 

“He almost dies, mind you. Plenty times. There was this one time around the Horn of Africa ...”

A line has formed behind me. Why has Santa Claus singled me out? He is telling me how his friend, the sailor, was shipwrecked. His boat survived, though his marriage did not. His ex-wife went on to form her own publishing company. 

There is a long pause. The woman behind the cash register is looking hard at me. Now I’m the one she’s impatient with for holding up the line.

The man has been speaking to me in three-quarter profile. He turns to face me full-on. He pauses. Then: “It takes a long time to publish a book.”

And just like that, he turns – the wedge of pie and dollop of ice cream held high – and walks away.

I am stunned. I pay for my book and leave. I do not glance back for him at the display of books by local writers. It takes a long time to publish a book. Was that the message? Or was it the foolhardy plan to sail around the world, risking everything? How could anyone emerge unscathed from such a hazardous journey? How much easier to retreat to terra firma, safe and unchanged.

Years passed. I wrote another book. And still, I could not let go of my other novel. Once again, I tore it apart. Over the course of another year, I took its characters around the world with me. My sailboat, a kitchen chair. Our perilous, storm-tossed sea, the inner lives of human beings struggling to live rich and meaningful lives. And now, that novel has again left my hands, sent out to find a home and readers, while I wait. 

Sometimes, I hear my angel: “It takes a long time.”

I sail on.

Reuters

Students march in protest at Bu-Ali Sina University in Hamedan, Iran, Oct. 26.

Amazingly, the protests in Iran, now the longest-running against one-man rule by a cleric, have been largely leaderless. Demonstrators have united around anger (over dress codes), slogans (“Woman, Life, Freedom”), and shared agony over poverty and inflation. The leaderless quality, however, points to a largely unspoken theme: a desire for equality.

If anyone in Iran is capable of making that point, it would be the spiritual leader of Iran’s largest religious minority, Sunni Muslims, who have long suffered under a Shiite-dominated regime. On Nov. 4, the most prominent Sunni cleric, Mowlavi Abdolhamid Esmailzehi, called for an immediate referendum to “change policies based on the wishes of the people.”

It was the highest-level challenge yet to the regime – and its peculiar doctrine that the Iranian people need “guardianship” by a Shiite imam – since the protests began.

A popular figure in Iran for his decades of peaceful efforts to bring about equal rights, Mr. Abdolhamid may have been pushed to take a leadership role by what is considered the largest massacre during the current protests. On Sept. 30, as many as 90 peaceful demonstrators were killed by security forces after Sunni prayers in the city of Zahedan, home to Mr. Abdolhamid.

“You cannot push back a nation that has been protesting on the streets for the past 50 days by killing, imprisoning, and beating them,” he said.

Those who wrote the Islamic Republic’s constitution – which enshrines absolute rule for Shiite leaders and the Shiite faith – were another generation, he said. “Today, there is a new generation ...  it’s a different world.” This new world, he says, would not disrespect and humiliate women over not wearing a head scarf.

For his comments, Mr. Abdolhamid was warned by the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps not to agitate the youth or it “may cost you dearly.”

He may now make a tactical retreat into his mosque and teaching institutions. But in his leadership, he made the point to the protesters – who range from merchants to students to oil workers – that there is not a natural basis for inequality in Iran. Leaderless protests prove the point.