THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The white man has seldom been kind to the Native American people and the latest assault involves Republican efforts to keep them from voting using the lack of street numbers on the reservation. And like their forebears they are fighting back.

“We know our communities based off our communities,” said Danielle Ta’Sheena Finn, a Standing Rock spokeswoman and tribal judge. “We know, ‘Hey, that’s so-and-so’s house; you go two houses down and that’s the correct place you need to be.’”

Yet under a law the Supreme Court allowed to take effect this month, North Dakotans cannot vote without a residential address. Post office boxes, which many Native Americans rely on, aren’t enough anymore.

The Republican-controlled state legislature began debating this requirement just a few months after Heidi Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat, won a Senate seat in 2012 with strong support from Native Americans. That race was decided by fewer than 3,000 votes. Ms. Heitkamp is now seeking re-election in one of the nation’s most aggressively contested elections, and she is trailing her Republican opponent, Representative Kevin Cramer, in the polls. And once again, she is looking to Native Americans for a strong vote: there are at least 30,000 of them in North Dakota.

Supporters of the address requirement say it is needed to prevent voter fraud and has nothing to do with Ms. Heitkamp. Native Americans, noting that state officials have not confirmed any pattern of fraud, see it as an attempt at voter suppression.

But in these final days before the election, their tribal governments are working feverishly to provide the necessary identification, and some Native Americans believe their anger could actually fuel higher turnout.

“I’m past the point of being upset over it,” said Lonna Jackson-Street, secretary and treasurer of the Spirit Lake Tribe. “I’m more excited about the outcome, because I think we’re going to bring in numbers that we’ve never seen before.”

If that happens, it will be because of a considerable expenditure of time and resources on the part of the tribes and advocacy groups supporting them.

Tribes have extended their office hours and worked around the clock to find efficient ways to assign addresses and issue identification. They are providing hundreds of free IDs when they would normally charge at least $5 to $10 apiece. The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians printed so many IDs that the machine overheated and started melting the cards.

State officials say it is easy for anyone without a residential address to get one. In a letter to tribal leaders last month — just after the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit let the requirement take effect, in a decision later affirmed by the Supreme Court — Secretary of State Al Jaeger’s office wrote that voters could contact their county’s 911 coordinator, describe the location of their home and have an address assigned “in an hour or less.”

In practice, it isn’t always so simple.

Voters’ experiences have varied greatly based on which county they live in. In Rolette County, where the Turtle Mountain Reservation is, they have been able to get addresses from the county and IDs from the tribe without much red tape. But at Standing Rock, in Sioux County, the 911 coordinator is the sheriff, Frank Landeis. That’s a deterrent to people who are afraid to interact with law enforcement, much less tell the sheriff where they live, and Sheriff Landeis is not easy to reach.

When Ms. Finn called him on Oct. 12, three days after the Supreme Court ruling, he was out. On Oct. 15, he said he was transporting prisoners and could not assign addresses that day. He was also unavailable when The New York Times called on Friday.

And in an episode recounted independently by Ms. Finn, Mr. Semans and Ms. Young, a tribal elder, Terry Yellow Fat, got through to Sheriff Landeis only to be assigned the address of a bar near his house. Mr. Semans worried that, in addition to playing into stereotypes about Native Americans and alcohol, this could expose Mr. Yellow Fat to fraud charges if he voted under an address he knew was incorrect.

So, with help from Four Directions and others, some tribes are creating addresses themselves — and preparing to do so until the polls close.

Geographic information experts at Claremont Graduate University in California overlaid voting precinct maps on satellite images of the reservations and assigned each precinct one address. Voters can now point to their house on the map and be assigned the precinct address plus a unique identifier: -001, -002, and so on. Tribal officials will be stationed at every reservation polling site on Election Day with a form letter on tribal letterhead, ready to assign an address and issue identification on the spot.

It would appear that the Republicans are preparing for another fight on the Greasy Grass and like the last time they are totally underestimating their opponent.