In early February, on a warm, sunny day, Marie Crabb left campaign literature for her neighbors in the Lone Star neighborhood on the south side of San Antonio. She wore a black cloth mask and a casual outfit with grey sneakers. At one point, she stopped to notice a person in a motorized wheelchair driving over a rocky, dirt path where a sidewalk should be.
“That man right there doesn’t even have the security of being able to drive on a sidewalk that’s going to protect him and his motorized wheelchair,” Crabb said. “He’s driving over dirt and rocks.”
Crabb is running for a spot on San Antonio’s city council representing District 5, and if elected on May 1, her campaign says she would be the first Indigenous woman on the council in the city’s history. Crabb identifies as Mescalero Apache, a federally recognized tribal nation based in south-central New Mexico and her run for office tracks with national trends of increased Indigenous political representation nationwide: 114 Indigenous people across the country ran for office in 2020, 67 of which were women. She has been active in San Antonio’s Indigenous community for years, even more so after becoming president of the Native American Students’ Association at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, where she graduated with a criminal justice degree in 2008.
