Native American Candidates Hope to Broaden Reach in Washington State

The numbers ebb and flow, but Indigenous influence remains entrenched in the politics of Washington state.

Julie Johnson, Lona Wilbur and Patricia Whitefoot will cast three of Washington state’s electoral votes for presidential candidate Kamala Harris in November.

Debra Lekanoff, Chris Stearnsand Claudia Kauffmanare working in the state Legislature to pass bipartisan laws that protect access to health care, improve behavioral health crisis response and access to treatment, ensure students have the food they need so they can concentrate on learning, protect worker pay and worker rights, promote development of clean energy, and ease the tax burden on disabled veterans and active-duty military personnel.

And in the state capital of Olympia, port commissioners Bob Iyalland Maggie McCarty Sanders are contributing to the decision-making that is attracting businesses and jobs to the city’s waterfront, restoring habitat, and safeguarding the health of the nearshore environment.

They are among numerous Native leaders who are taking Indigenous thinking to legislative corridors, city halls and school board meeting rooms across Washington state – Johnson is Lummi, Wilbur is Swinomish, Whitefoot is Yakama, Lekanoff is Tlingit, Stearns is Navajo, Kauffman is Nez Perce, Iyall is Nisqually, and Sanders is Makah.

Tribal leaders have full plates within their own governments, guiding planning for economic development, housing, health care and climate change adaptation. But they say a Native voice on shared issues is important in a state that exists within the historical territories of 29 federally recognized tribal nations.

They see tribal nations and the state as partners within a shared geography with challenges that know no bounds.

“Tribes are some of the largest employers in many of our counties,” said Lekanoff, who represents Bellingham, Mount Vernon, Anacortes and the San Juan Islands in the state House of Representatives. “Tribal revenue that comes into the state of Washington is phenomenal. Tribes are co-managers of salmon. They operate recovery healing centers for all Washingtonians — not just Native Americans, but all Washingtonians. They're healing Washington state from substance abuse, behavioral mental health and suicide.”

She continued, “During the pandemic, while Washington state was still trying to figure out how to get the shots out, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe said, ‘Come to the reservation.’ So, I think my fellow legislators really have come to value working with sovereign nations that have the capacity to serve all Washingtonians in a balanced way, Republicans or Democrats.”

So far, however, no Native candidate has ever won a statewide office in Washington.

Broadening Their Reach

Native Americans have a voice in various levels of government outside of tribal councils, and Native representation in the state Legislature could be bolstered in the Nov. 5 general election.

Iyall is a candidate for the state Senate from the 22nd District, which includes Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater. If elected, he would be one of four Native Americans in the legislature.

Lekanoff is unopposed for reelection to the state House from the 40th District, and Kauffman, a state senator from the 47th District, is not up for reelection until 2026. Stearns, who won this year’s primary with 55 percent of the vote in his bid for reelection to the state House from the 47th District, is facing former state Republican Party vice chairman Ted Cooke.

Iyall’s top issues are affordable housing; finding funds for new highways, public transit expansion and maintenance of roads and bridges; expanding mental health services; and environmental restoration and salmon recovery.

It’s a tough campaign for Iyall. He’s a Democrat running against a Democrat. In Washington state, the top two candidates in the primary, regardless of party affiliation, advance to the general election. The top finisher, state Rep. Jessica Bateman, received 68.3 percent of the vote; Iyall advanced with 20.5 percent of the vote. Third-place finisher Tela Hogle, also a Democrat, received 8.4 percent of the vote.

Iyall is a retired union bricklayer who later earned a master’s in business administration at Washington State University and became chief executive of Medicine Creek Enterprise Corporation, the economic development arm of the Nisqually Tribe. He also served as chairman of the Native American Economic Development Association.

“If a future where we’re saving the environment, building as much housing as we can to meet demand, [doing] reliable and future-forward transportation planning, and working to make sure everyone who needs behavioral health receives services sounds like a good place to be, then I’m asking for your vote,” he wrote on his campaign website.

Native Americans also serve in elected city, school district and county positions in Washington, among them Ashley Brown, Nooksack, Everson City Council; Lea Anne Burke, Lumbee, Snohomish City Council; James Lovell, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, SeaTac City Council; Chris Roberts, Choctaw, Shoreline City Council; LaTrisha Suggs, Jamestown S’Klallam, Port Angeles City Council; and Elizabeth Villa, Nez Perce, Wapato City Council.

Steve Oliver, Lummi, is Whatcom County treasurer; Jennifer White, Makah, is treasurer of Clallam County; and Raquel Montoya-Lewis, Isleta Pueblo, is an associate justice of the state Supreme Court.

One elected official is pulling triple-duty: Jeremy “J.J.” Wilbur, a member of the Swinomish Tribe’s senate, serves on the La Conner School Board and as an elected fire district commissioner.

Other Native Americans made monumental runs for state office this year.

In the August primary, former Makah Tribe vice chairman Patrick Depoeplaced fourth among seven candidates for state commissioner of public lands. He had received the endorsement of The Seattle Times and, had he advanced out of the primary and prevailed in the general election, he would have been the first Native American elected to statewide office.

Nate Tyler – a member of the Makah Tribal Council as well as the Sheriff’s Advisory Committee in Clallam County – placed fourth among five candidates for the state House of Representatives from the 24th District.

Nine Native Legislators Since 1889

Only nine Native Americans have been elected to Washington’s legislature since statehood in 1889; seven of them served within the last 20 years.

“This country is a democracy — a republic with a representative form of government,” Stearns said. “Ideally, we should be representative of the population. I think, based on our demographics in our state, we're supposed to have eight or nine, maybe 10, Native Americans in the House and four in the Senate. I think that should be a goal. I fully start with the premise that we need to elect more Native Americans.”

The high point in Native representation came between 2016 and 2021. Maia Bellon, Mescalero Apache, was serving as the governor-appointed director of the Department of Ecology – the first Native American to serve in a cabinet position in Washington. Former Superior Court Judge Debora Juarez, Blackfeet, was elected in 2016 to the Seattle City Council, another first. And that year, Colville Tribes Chairman Joe Pakootas, a Democrat, received 40 percent of the vote in his unsuccessful bid to represent the heavily Republican 5th District in Congress.

Dino Rossi, Tlingit, and John McCoy,Tulalip, were serving in the state Senate in 2017; and Jeff Morris, Tsimshian, and Jay Rodne, Bad River Band of Chippewa, were serving in the state House of Representatives.

Zachary De Wolf, Chippewa Cree, was elected in 2017 to the Seattle School Board. Denise Juneau, Mandan Hidatsa Arikara, an educator and former Montana congressional candidate, was hired as the school district superintendent in 2018. And Chandra Hampson, Ho Chunk, was elected to the school board in 2019.

All of them had left office by 2023, however. Lekanoff is confident of a renewed interest among Native Americans to seek office outside of tribal government. She calls this period in Washington’s political history an exciting time.

“We have a number of Native Americans running for school boards or asking to be appointed to commissions and boards across the state,” she said.

Referring to Depoe, Iyall and Tyler, she said, “What you might not see is the thread — their ancestral bloodlines come from Washington state. How powerful is that? The last legislator whose bloodlines came from Washington state was John McCoy,” she said. “My bloodlines don't come from Washington state. The only lens through which I know and understand Washington is the lens of Washington tribes. It is, and always will be, their land, their waters, their salmon, and they are sharing it — and their Indigenous knowledge — with those who now live here.”

‘It’s About Relationships’

Among Native legislators, the late John McCoy of the Tulalip Tribes emerges in political discussions as the Great Collaborator, the senator who welcomed questions from his colleagues and helped legislators understand sovereignty and treaties and Indian law.

McCoy served more than 10 years in the Washington House of Representatives, from 2003-2013, was appointed in 2013 to the state Senate to fill a vacancy, and was later elected to his first full Senate term. He resigned in 2020, citing health issues, and died in 2023.

During his tenure as a legislator, he sponsored monumental legislation requiring public schools to include Native history and culture in their social sciences and history curriculum; and requiring the state to return a portion of sales tax revenue it collects at Quil Ceda Village, an incorporated community on the Tulalip Reservation, to help fund essential public services.

It took several years of compromise — and in the taxation case, a lawsuit — but in the end McCoy achieved his goals. Even after the state prevailed in the taxation lawsuit, the state saw it fair and just to enter into a revenue-sharing agreement with the Tulalip Tribes.

Lekanoff and Stearns are following McCoy’s example in order to help opposing sides find common ground and common benefit.

Farmers resisted a proposal that would have required larger buffers between farming and grazing areas and salmon streams. In discussions with farmers, legislators and the public, Lekanoff reasoned for those buffers this way.

“We need cool and clean water in order to have habitat,” she said more than once. “In order to have habitat, we need pollinators. In order to have pollinators, we need clean air. Go back to the habitat — once the salmon dies off, whatever is in that salmon are the nutrients that make some of the healthiest agricultural growing areas in the state of Washington. So, farmers and fishermen need to work together to coexist, because we cannot have one or the other.”

Stearns is taking a similar tack on alternative energy.

“We’ve eliminated our reliance on coal in Washington and we're starting to reduce our reliance on natural gas, but we need more replacement power,” he said. “As solar and offshore wind are growing, we're hearing from the tribes: ‘We're all for green energy, but be careful of where you're trying to site.’ You know, these are large projects. You just can't plop down a giant solar field on sacred sites or sites where medicine is gathered. Putting giant wind turbines across the Horse Heaven Hills — those are sacred sites for Umatilla and Yakama.

“We're just much better for understanding the things that are important to tribes. But it begins with asking. If we don't ask, we're not doing our jobs.”

Stearns and Lekanoff, both Democrats, said they’ve found most legislators willing to collaborate and compromise.

“My very first day driving to Olympia for freshman orientation, I was thinking, ‘Oh, God, what am I getting myself into?’ because my reference point was working on the Hill for all those years and it's just a crazy situation in Washington, D.C.,” said Stearns, a lawyer who served as legal counsel to two U.S. House committees.

“I was like, ‘Is Olympia going to be like that?’ and I was literally preparing myself,” he said. “And then I got there and it's like, ‘Wow, everyone's sane and cares about the constituents in their districts.’ We disagree, sometimes pretty vehemently, but it's actually a very conducive atmosphere to getting work done.”

Lekanoff counts among her mentors J.T. Wilcox and Joel Kretz, the top-ranking Republicans in the House.

“I think an awful lot of Debra,” said Wilcox, whose district is within the territory of the Nisqually Tribe. “And the thing that makes her a little unique is this: There's really two different kinds of bipartisanship. The easy kind is, ‘I've got this bill. Would you sign on as a co-sponsor?’ and you can say you have a bipartisan bill.

“The harder kind – and I think the more valuable kind, and what Debra really does — is, ‘I'm thinking about a bill. I'd love to have you be a co-sponsor. Would you help me develop the bill so that it really is a bipartisan bill that will have broad support?’ And that's really what she does and she's one of the few that knows how to do that. And when that happens, then you get a lot of Republicans coming to her, including me, saying, ‘I've got an idea. It's not perfect. Would you work on it with me?’ I just wish we had more of that.”

Lekanoff said bipartisan collaboration is key to getting things accomplished in a good way.

“At the end of the day, it's all about relationships, right?” she said. “And it's all about understanding how to work and collaborate together, and to show up at the table and know that you're going to give a little and you're going to get a little.”

She added, “Nothing's going to be perfect in policy and laws. We have to continue to have enough room to pass policies and legislation, continue to work on them, continue to improve them, and be flexible enough to know that if it needs work, bring it back and let's work on it.”