As an active member of the Northern Arapaho tribe, vice president of the Global Indigenous Council, and Director of the non-profit, Not our Native’s Daughter, Grey Bull’s focus in May of 2020 was on responding to the coronavirus, not filing to run for Congress. 

She was focused on delivering food, boxes and diapers, trying to help the many in need on the Wind River Indian Reservation, when the question came again, will you run? This time, Grey Bull decided she would seek Wyoming’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, currently held by Rep. Liz Cheney, R-WY.

If elected, Grey Bull would be the 23rd person – and the first Wyoming delegate – with Native American ancestry to hold office in Congress.

The Wind River Reservation did not have adequate testing or personal protective equipment at the start of the outbreak, attributing to high case numbers of tribes in many states. The pandemic has brought a new national attention to the need for equity in health care across all communities. As of June 23, the Northern Arapaho tribe reported nine of Wyoming’s 20 deaths from COVID-19, or 45% of all cases, even though Native Americans make up 2.7% of the state’s population.

As Grey Bull writes, ‘My family knows something about Wyoming. Our ancestors hunted mammoths here thousands of years before the founding of the Equality State. It is long overdue that we actually put “equality” in the state – and I refer not just to racial justice, but socio-economic justice; women’s rights; the veteran sleeping in a cardboard box beneath an underpass; the rancher, the farmer, who can’t take their livestock and produce to market because the pandemic has dismantled the system; the energy worker whose job went down with the stock market; the LGBTQ couple who are denied service just because of who they love.’