Why Wyoming should vote for Lynnette Grey Bull

Although absentee ballots were mailed out more than a week ago and early voting continues daily throughout the state, many Wyoming residents will head to the polls on August 18th to vote in our state primary elections. This year, Democrats will have the opportunity to elect Lynnette Grey Bull as their candidate to beat Liz Cheney for Wyoming’s sole seat in the US House of Representatives. In doing so, Lynnette would become the first Native American in the history of Wyoming to ever run in a major party election for federal office. I’m going to vote for Lynnette Grey Bull not just because of the historic nature of this moment, but because she is a full human with a real story herself. She is someone who has experienced hardship, and someone who will actually represent my interests as a Wyoming resident concerned with the sustainability of our democracy, our environment, and collective dignity.

I first met Lynnette when I was a student at the Yale School of the Environment, where she was invited to give a talk. I expected the event would be similar to most others throughout the busy school year. In my mind, the handful of committed students who invited her to speak in the first place would show up and ask some smart questions about environmental justice or Western conservation. A good but modest conversation would materialize, but ultimately everyone involved would leave feeling unsatisfied — Lynnette feeling somewhat underwhelmed by what a talk at Yale would be like, and the students in attendance somewhat resentful of the other 99% of students who didn’t show up to listen to one of our country’s leading #MMIW activists and educators speak on the intersection of human trafficking and the environment. But that’s not what happened. By the time I got to Burke Auditorium, the largest room at the School of the Environment, it was standing room only.

Over the course of two hours, I listened as Lynnette took about two hundred of the world’s soon-to-be environmental leaders and a handful of Nobel Prize-clad faculty on an unforgettable ride through the heartbreak of Indian Country. Her personal story takes the form of the classic American storyline of escaping troubled small-town life — in her case, the Wind River Reservation — and making it in our modern capitalist society — in her case, in finance — only to return with new eyes to her home. One of the central jobs of a good politician is to maintain and update the collective story of their constituents. And in this regard, I can vouch for Lynnette’s ability as a storyteller, and thus future politician.

Earlier this year, I interviewed her for an episode of my podcast Yonder Lies. She told me that in 2010, while she was working on a mortgage rate project in her cushy finance industry job, she came across some new US Census Bureau data on Native American communities, like the one she grew up in on the Wind River Reservation. At that moment, she said, everything changed as the inhuman numbers stared back at her from the screen: lowest life expectancy, highest youth suicide rate, poorest counties, highest unemployment. And just like that, she left her job and returned West.

Home on the Wind River Reservation, Lynnette has been working for a decade to address some of our country’s darkest problems with little-to-no resources. She started her own organization called Not Our Native Daughters to bring attention to one of our country’s oldest problems: the abuse and dehumanization of Native women, who continue, almost invisibly, to be the most stalked, raped, and murdered demographic group in our country.

In addition, she’s currently the Vice President of the Global Indigenous Council, a former trainer for the Department of Justice’s Amber Alert Technical Service Assistance Program, an Executive Board Member for Winged Hope Family Advocacy Foundation, and a Program Assistant for Training and Resources United to Stop Trafficking (TRUST). When COVID-19 hit, she started the Wind River Community Alliance almost overnight, making sure that homebound and disabled seniors on the reservation would continue to get needed resources, food, and cleaning products. But when it comes to the divisive politics of today, what is most admirable about Lynnette is that she just doesn’t get distracted by the daily food fight. She is pragmatic. She is dedicated. She is a coalition builder.

This is primarily why you should vote for Lynnette: despite being positioned as someone who could tell a powerful story of victimization, she instead embodies a story of transformation. She invites you in and says: life is hard, but let’s make it better together. And although times like these require us to write and rewrite our history, they also require compassion and the ability for our politicians to stand in solidarity with everyone they represent — from cattle ranchers like the Grey Bull family to the eighteen-year-old Black Lives Matter activist to the hunters and anglers passionate about public lands.

And her laugh is infectious.

It will be an uphill battle against the rich, powerful, and corrupt Liz Cheney. But I think Lynnette Grey Bull is Cheney’s worst nightmare and the state’s most promising politician — she is a brilliant and charismatic Native woman who is actually from Wyoming.

Learn more about her growing policy platforms HERE!