Serving in the Wyoming legislature has been the honor of a lifetime. I ran for office in 2016. At the time, I had taken my eight-year-old daughter to watch the Senate debate, and she innocently asked if women were allowed to be senators. When she looked into the chamber, she saw that 29 of the 30 senators were men. I pointed out the one female senator who had just announced that she was not seeking reelection. My daughter’s innocent question stuck with me as I thought about the possibility of having no women serving in the Wyoming senate. Her question played a part in influencing me to run.
When I took office in January 2017, I was also incredibly proud and humbled to be the first American Indian woman to be elected to the Wyoming legislature.
I did not come from an affluent or political family. My parents were both Navajo, and they grew up on the Navajo Reservation in cabins with no electricity or running water. Navajo was their first language. Their families sent them to the Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City, Utah, in the mid-1950s. This school was part of a national effort to assimilate Indian children. When they graduated, my dad found work in Wyoming. When he visited Jackson Hole, he fell in love with it. My parents moved there in 1956 and raised our family, with me being the youngest of four siblings.
Growing up, I did not think much about the fact that I was Navajo. It wasn’t until I started elementary school—and kids teased me for being Indian—that I realized I was different and I didn’t understand why. Many years later as a college student at the University of Wyoming, I took a federal Indian law class. I began to understand the eras of federal Indian law and policy, which shaped my life as a Navajo girl growing up in Wyoming. I was living in two worlds. Since then, I have been blessed to have had amazing professional experiences and opportunities that deepened my knowledge of federal Indian law and policy, culminating in a career as an attorney where these issues are an important part of my practice.
When I first took elected office, leadership assigned me to serve on the Select Committee on Tribal Relations. I held this position for my entire eight years in the Senate, six of which I served as the committee co-chairman. I am tremendously proud of the work we accomplished.
We enacted the Indian Education for All Act to better educate Wyoming kids about Native American history and the contributions of modern-day Indian people. We passed a state version of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to protect archaeological human remains found on state and private lands. We passed bills to ensure that tribal members from Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation could participate in various state programs. We looked at K–12 education and undertook a multiyear effort to address absenteeism and truancy. As the work continued, so did the intensity of the issues we tackled, such as the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons. Further, we codified into state law the Indian Child Welfare Act, one of the most challenging experiences I’ve had during my years of service.
This last year, our committee kept its foot on the gas, confronting issues such as the affordability and accessibility of higher education for native students and a particularly complicated sales tax collection issue.
This work has been so meaningful, and it is what I will miss the most about public service. However, I am excited to be returning full-time to the practice of law. I will always be grateful to have had this opportunity to serve Wyoming. As the inspirational quote says, “You have no idea what you are capable of until you try.”
