BOZEMAN, Montana — Before the evening meet-and-greet with Democratic candidates, Katie Fire Thunder has already participated in a photo shoot, put together freshly printed campaign signs with her staff and filmed an endorsement with a state senator for her Instagram page. It’s mid-September, a little less than eight weeks from Election Day, and Fire Thunder is running to represent the state’s House District 59, a seat she was appointed to by a unanimous vote in December, when the incumbent resigned. Between campaigning and serving as a sitting lawmaker, the 26-year-old juggles her day job as a legal assistant at the county attorney’s office.
The crowd at the outdoor meet-and-greet skews older and seems enthusiastic about meeting a younger candidate who could represent their party and their district. Throughout the evening, they come over to chat with Fire Thunder between bites of wood-fired pizza and libations as a guitarist strums Woody Guthrie in the background. One woman asks her why she’s decided to go for the seat.
Fire Thunder gives a simple explanation: “I want to raise a family here.” “That’s why I got involved,” the woman responds. I know we can do better.” Fire Thunder’s talking points throughout the evening focus on keeping that dream alive by addressing rising house prices, expanding access to healthcare and making sure wealthy transplants pay their fair share in taxes. Like other candidates her age, affordability is top of mind as her generation tries to carve out a stable life in an increasingly unstable economic environment.
Before running for office, Fire Thunder co-founded a tenant union to organize renters against rising prices and worked on a successful campaign to ban short-term rentals of homes that are not primary residences in the city. Just an hour from Yellowstone National Park, Bozeman has seen an increase in the number of vacation homes that is impacting the availability of local housing — and a surge of wealthy outsiders who started moving to the region during the pandemic. Having grown up in subsidized housing with her mother and sister, Fire Thunder fights for the working class amid these changes to her hometown because she is the working class.
But her interest in politics came much earlier: at 18, she attended a hearing on the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women for a school project. Fire Thunder, an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, remembers listening to family and friends of missing people testify before a House committee. Nationally, Indigenous women are winning elections at higher rates than ever before, according to data compiled by Advance National Political Leadership and Indian Country Today, a nonprofit news outlet.
This year, according to the organizations’ most recent data, the pool of Indigenous candidates has grown to a historic high, with at least 355 Native candidates running for office. Half of these candidates are women, 47 percent are men and 3 percent identify as trans, two-spirit or nonbinary. This year, Native women could also break two glass ceilings: Deb Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, is running to be the first Native woman to serve as a governor in New Mexico, and Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, and Mary Peltola, a Yup’ik Alaska Native, are running to be the first Native women to serve in the U.S.
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