Nika Bartoo-Smith
Underscore Native News+ ICT
Amanda Page, a citizen of the Klamath Tribes, is running for Deschutes County Commissioner, Seat 3, and aims to have a political seat in a county that encompasses some of the ancestral homelands of her people.
“I’m an Indigenous candidate, but I’m also an Indigenous candidate looking to get a seat in our territory. In my ancestral lands,” Page said. “So there’s an importance to that that I think most people don’t understand. This is a real chance to expand tribal sovereignty and have Indigenous voice[s] in the spaces historically, we’ve been completely ignored.”
Page has spent her career working in emergency services, first as a volunteer firefighter while in college and then as a flight paramedic at Life Flight Network, where she now works as the Social Responsibility & Belonging Advisor. She is also Redmond School Board Director, where she has been elected to serve on the board twice, having been on the board since 2023. Page is also one of only three people for all four seats who has governing experience, she said.
If elected for Deschutes County Commissioner, Seat 3, Page plans to focus policy on prioritizing affordable housing, championing environmental protections and supporting tribal sovereignty.
Primary elections take place May 19.
Page joined Underscore Native News + ICT via zoom from her home in Deschutes County, Oregon.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Underscore Native News + ICT: Tell me about your platform and what issues are important to you.
Amanda Page: Our county, it just became the most wealthy county in Oregon, but you wouldn’t know it talking to people who are providing critical services in our county, and people are having to live with multiple other adults in small apartments just to make ends meet. It’s just wildly expensive compared to income here, and so I really see the county playing a role in using what draws in people to this county.
It’s a beautiful place, a very touristy destination. People own a lot of second homes here, and there’s a lot of short term rentals. And so I really see a way that we can make that beauty and draw of our county work for the people who work here. By placing fees on short term rentals and second homes and creating an affordability fund that then can supplement rent, it can supplement mortgage, it can supplement affordable housing supply. It can supplement child care, transportation.
On the environmental side, the whole reason why I got excited about this is because of the Thornburg Resort that is planned to be built just outside of Redmond, where I live. It’s a luxury resort that originally had three golf courses, a private water skiing lake. This insane use of water in an area that is a desert climate where we’re consistently showing lower and lower water tables and availability.
And, just down the river, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs have noticed a decline in the health of their trout. I went out there fishing with some local guides, and we caught fish, and we looked at them and they have parasites, black dot parasites, on the bottom of these trout, and they’re really suffering because of the water quality and the decrease in water there. And as this development was being created, tribes were never consulted about how this might affect their hunting and fishing rights. And then when they did speak up and say, ‘Hey, this is going to affect us,’ they were pretty much told by the county, ‘well, that’s not our problem. That sounds like a state issue.’ Which is wild and just the lack of understanding of what tribal sovereignty is and what the treaty rights that have been around 150 years, more than that 170 years, mean for them and their ability to sustain themselves. On the environmental side, it’s saying no to those luxury developments, especially when they affect tribal sovereignty, but also just affecting the environment. We don’t have enough water here, or maybe we do have enough water, we’re just not using it in a way that is responsible.
So really focusing on developments that are mindful of that, that we’re not developing in areas where there’s not water available, or if there is now that we can’t say with a really high degree of certainty in seven generations, there will still be water available here. And so those are the things that I really focus my campaign on. Taking care of people, especially people who live and work here and contribute to society, and then also that piece of taking care of the environment.
I think the way that differs from other campaigns who are more progressive is that there’s a feeling in Deschutes County that you have to be super moderate, all of your policy has to be moderate. You can’t be too extreme, you can’t be too progressive, because then people won’t vote for you. And when you do that, you completely leave out groups of people. No one’s willing to take strong stances on how the county can protect our community members who are immigrants from ICE. They don’t want to make those big, bold statements. They don’t want to put really hard stop limits on development. They’re really staying in this lane of we just want to slightly move forward and make it a little bit better than what it is when times are so desperate that that slight incremental movement is not going to be enough to save us here.
UNN + ICT: How do you plan to address housing, cost of living, and healthcare concerns in your county?
Page: I have a passion for public health and mental and behavioral health services, and this last year and a half has just been really concerning with funding cuts and how they’re affecting our departments. Right now, funding has remained somewhat stable, but now we’re going to start to see the decrease in payments from Medicaid, Medicare. Now that a lot of people have been accessing our services, we probably aren’t going to have that anymore. I’m really concerned about what does that look like for the overall budget of public health?
Because when we think about public health, it’s not just how are we vaccinating people in times of emergency? It’s maternal and prenatal care, how people can access mental and behavioral health services for our community. It’s clean needle exchanges, it’s harm reduction, it’s all of these things that deeply impact our county and disproportionately affect groups who have been pushed to the margins historically. And so for me, policy around that looks like ensuring that we have adequate funding, and that becomes one of those sacred spaces where you don’t compromise funding, because it’s already pretty bare bones. The funding that’s going to be coming in is going to be less.
We are lucky in that our health services department is really creative, and they have been able to get a lot of grants and funding because they’re willing to try things that other counties haven’t tried yet. So their innovation has led to some funding sources that other people haven’t received. I would like to continue that and expand that to create additional revenue for our county and consistently work on being on that leading edge of what’s next so that people are looking to Deschutes County to solve these problems.
The housing piece, I’m not an expert on this. I’ve spent a lot of time learning about it.
And so a lot of the ideas that I think are really important [that come from other people], are having safe, managed camps that are in areas that are low wildland fire risk, that also have access to services that people need. That’s just really the starting jumping off point.
People say that homelessness is a result of addiction, substance abuse, mental health. But more often than not, it’s affordability. When you look at the number one indicator of increased levels of homelessness in any community, it is lack of affordability in an area, and that’s Deschutes County.
For me, that’s where that affordability fund comes into play. Instead of viewing housing as a problem of we just need to create more houses, we also need to view it as a problem of affordability. And so providing rental assistance to people who are either on the verge of experiencing homelessness or who are in it, who are working full time, who just need supplemental income to get into their houses. That’s what we could use that affordability fund for, because providing assistance and rent is the number one way you get people out of homelessness.
For the people who are opposed to spending money on this, you’re going to spend money either way. You can either spend money and fix the problem, or you can spend money and continue to be mad about the problem. So that’s how I view housing.
UNN + ICT: If you’re elected, are there specific policies that you might work on to address climate change and the environment?
Page: Things that the county can do that are really easy-ish fixes are: moving all of our county buildings to self-sustaining solar systems, changing the fleets of any non-heavy operating vehicle in the county to electric vehicles, putting in chargers in all of our spots. Those are relatively easy, not super high investment things that actually pay back the cost that you invest in them.
The climate thing, I think part of our responsibility in Deschutes County is changing how people view transportation, especially in an area like this where so many people are commuting to Bend from Redmond, from La Pine, from Sisters. So we have a large amount of people on the roads everyday commuting. So investing in a transportation infrastructure that helps people get to work, that’s reliable, that’s also hitting these rural areas. It seems like there’s an assumption that if you live in a rural area, you shouldn’t have access to public transportation, which is wild because some of our lowest income people live in these really rural areas, so expanding public transportation to them, I think, is critical and then working with our cities to also invest in public transportation within the city.
Down in South County, they’ve known it’s been going on for about 30 years, but the problem seems to be much worse as water levels are declining. But there’s really high nitrate levels in people’s water, in their homes, not in every well, but there’s this percentage of wells, I think it’s around 10 percent, that are testing high levels of nitrates. And they’re not high enough that it’s toxic right now, but it’s trending that way and it is toxic for small children, and so we need to address that. And that was all the result of really irresponsible development and building. That was people who were like, ‘We need to put in a ton of houses. We’re going to put in cheap septic systems.’ And they’re not reliable, and then no big surprise when 15 or 30 years later, they start leaking and all those nitrates get into drinking water. So for that, we need to put a stop to that building. If you’re going to build, developers have the onus of developing in a way that is safe and is going to protect the water sources there forever. And so stopping the problem at the start and providing filtration systems to those homes that do have those waters, that the wells that are providing that water, and then helping people who have these old, faulty septic systems replace them with newer systems, along with improving like the sewer system in LA pine.
But all of those have to be addressed because water is life like we can’t continue to contaminate water and turn our backs and say, ‘Oh, it’s not really a problem.’
UNN + ICT: Talk about your stance on policy we are seeing on a federal level when it comes to Two Spirit LGBTQ+ people, particularly access to gender affirming care. How will you address this in your position if elected?
Page: Oregon is not a bubble, like we tend to think it is a little bit. We have healthcare providers who did provide gender affirming care who are not now because they’re worried about Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement and how that might limit them in the future. And so it is affecting us, and that doesn’t even take into account the fact that the Supreme Court has shown that they’re willing to even challenge states rights in areas like this. And so if we are safe, we’re in a bubble, I wouldn’t consider it to be a permanent one. So those issues are huge.
Having a queer child myself who hasn’t needed gender affirming care, but has definitely needed reproductive health care that’s appropriate for her, this is near and dear to my heart. Really making a stance that our public health department serves everyone and all of their health care needs, not just the ones that ideologically align with providers or county commissioners or employee administrators, but that they’re meeting the needs of everyone. So I think putting into policy so there’s never a question that these are our priorities, and then putting the funding alongside it, because we know that healthcare for someone who is Two Spirit or part of the queer community looks different. They’re less likely to seek health care because they feel judged. So having providers who have specific training to meet the needs of this population is wildly important.
The training is not hard. People think like it’s this huge investment, and it’s not. I do DEI type work at my job, and we’ve done gender affirming training. How do we treat people who have different lived experience than us? We have people who are working in really rural Idaho and Montana, and they’re not comfortable with the language around this, they don’t have anyone that they can point to in their life that will help them understand that lived experience, and so we’ve provided training internally, but also we’ve contracted with outside companies that help provide that.
What’s beautiful about healthcare providers is their number one desire is to help people and provide good health care. And so even people who might be a little ideologically opposed to it, at the end of the day, when we talk about it in terms of this is actual health care and here’s the science that shows when we do this, we get better outcomes, they’re like, ‘Oh, well, we want good outcomes for our patients.’ I think most providers want that. It’s just providing that education piece, which is probably the lowest cost, highest impact thing you can do to improve these outcomes.
UNN + ICT: Has U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had an increased presence in Deschutes County? And what is your stance on ICE and the need for immigration reform?
Page:We haven’t seen a huge increase in presence. But I think any community can say that until they can’t.
The thing that I kept on hearing out of Minnesota was ‘we thought we were prepared, but we weren’t prepared.’ And I think the biggest tragedy would be if we didn’t prepare now that we’ve seen Minnesota and we’ve seen the playbook. There’s a lot of room between now and whenever we start to see an increased presence for really vamping up our prevention. So making sure that all of our sheriff’s offices understand what our sanctuary status means. What is it that they have to do, and helping them understand that you only do what you absolutely have to do, and if there’s a way to slow down what you have to do, even better.
I think attaching the sheriff’s office budget to them having a plan for how are you going to keep all of our community members safe, our immigrant community members, but also those people who are trying to step in and protect them? What are you going to do to protect those people? And your budget is tied to that. And then what are you going to do if you have people who are out of compliance at the individual level, but also at the department? And so that’s really important.
As an Indigenous person, I will never be okay with sending people away from here. That will never feel good with me from anywhere, but especially when you’re talking about people who largely are original inhabitants of this very same continent, who are only divided by a fake border that was never there. That doesn’t feel true to who I am as an Indigenous person. And also, in my tribe, we’re matrilineal, and so if you married someone outside of your tribe, they would come and live and be part of your tribe, and now they were Klamath. So this idea that anyone can be illegal or doesn’t belong here is really wrong to me.
Yes, if someone has a criminal record for violent crimes, yes we would handle them as we would any other violent criminal in the United States. Like, if they still have a term that they need to serve, yes, we want to deal with that, we want to keep people safe. But the majority of these people are just here living their lives like you and me.
UNN + ICT: How do you plan to work with Native nations in your region and support tribal sovereignty?
Page: I feel like I’m in a great position, because Deschutes County is on ancestral lands of the Klamath Tribes, the Burns Paiute and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. And so I grew up in the Klamath Tribes. I know every single person on council. I’m the first candidate that they’ve ever endorsed officially, and so we have those relationships built in. But I’ve also met with Tracy Kennedy, the chair of Burns Paiute Tribes, talking about ways that we could engage with each other on the commission that would be meaningful. The same with some leaders in Warm Springs.
I’m a member of the Klamath Tribes, but I’m one person. I’m not the Klamath Tribes. So what does the Klamath Tribes want me to do? What’s important to the Confederated Tribes of Warm Spring and Burns Paiute tribes? Asking them, how do we engage with you in a way that supports your tribal sovereignty, that it reinforces your hunting and fishing rights here, your other treaty rights as well? So setting up and establishing those relationships, and then really shifting a lens, especially around land use, to include, how are we engaging with tribes to see if this land use change will affect their tribal sovereignty, their fishing and hunting rights? Asking that question at the beginning, instead of midway through the process. And having that expectation of developers who come to us.
Another thing is really looking at Oregon’s goals for land use and how we handle land. One of the goals is to be able to inventory natural and cultural resources in areas. And so for me, it would be making sure that we’re contributing financial resources, person power, to documenting cultural resources in this area. So working with the tribes to say, Okay, where are your lands? Where are places that are culturally important to you? So that we can have them all inventoried, and that way, if there’s any land use changes or anything that affects these areas now we know, it’s on paper.
UNN + ICT: I know redistricting is an issue in your region — how would you address this if elected?
Page: So this goes into how I think my lived experience really influences how I think as a commissioner, because a lot of commissioner candidates will say we don’t need districts. But I grew up in a rural area that was largely ignored, the part of Klamath County where we got the last resources, we never had representation anywhere. And so I think this request for districts comes from a very real need and desire of people to be represented. And right now it’s coming from the more rural or conservative communities.
But I think there’s other groups that would like to be respected and to have representation. BIPOC communities, queer communities, people who are really focused on the environment. There’s all of these groups who would like representation too. And so I get this desire to want someone who represents us, but districts, we know, are rooted in a history of trying to decrease the voice of racial minorities or tribal nations.
So for me, the solution lies in proportional ranked choice voting, where people get proportional representation. We’re really lucky in that Portland has been able to model this for us, and they’ve shown the high degree of satisfaction with it. And so I think that it would be a really nice solution to this problem.
UNN + ICT: Have you faced any hurdles in your run for this position?
Page: Tribal Democracy Project has been involved in both of my school board races and now [in my run for commissioner]. For a couple of different reasons. I’m an Indigenous candidate, but I’m also an Indigenous candidate looking to get a seat in our territory, in my ancestral lands. So there’s an importance to that that I think most people don’t understand. This is a real chance to expand tribal sovereignty and have Indigenous voice in the spaces historically, we’ve been completely ignored.
There have been people who are Democrats, who will say they care about tribal sovereignty, and then they question that Tribal Democracy Project is funding part of my campaign, and it completely lacks that understanding of why this grassroots nonprofit, this focus on tribal candidates, would be the only one attacked when other groups like Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood are not. But also, what is wrong with having an Indigenous candidate who gets support because they’re Indigenous on their ancestral lands? Why is that problematic for people? What sits with them so poorly? And so people have been talking about dark money in my race, and it’s just been frustrating, because these are people who should know better and be better, and it’s just been one of multiple hurdles.
I’m consistently talked about because I’m very white presenting that, ‘Oh, you need to get a DNA test.’ I’ve been told that I have no business saying that I’m Indigenous when I look the way I do. I’m okay with questions about ‘how is it that you’re Indigenous’ and ‘like you look white to me.’ Even in that, which I don’t think is an appropriate way to say it, but it’s better than ‘you need a DNA test.’
This is coming from people who are progressives, who are part of the Democratic Party and part of their leadership. The number of racist and anti-tribal sentiments that I’ve experienced is wild from within a party that claims to be progressive. Just this focus on ‘Oh, you are just relying on your identity.’ Actually, I’m relying on the fact that I’m one of only three people for all four seats who has governing experience, who’s been elected twice, and who has experience working in health equity, who has been on multiple policy committees.
I’ve also been told that I’m too busy to do this job. If you are a BIPOC candidate, you either are too busy or you’re not qualified, and those are the only two things you can ever be. And when you try to push back either of those, there’s always a reason why, and that’s just been wild to me from within my own party, to be as qualified as I am, and to still just lack support.
I always introduce myself in our language, in ewksiknii. My grandma’s a boarding school survivor. She was raised by her grandparents because her mom died young, and so she learned the language in a primary ewksiknii speaking house, and she went to boarding school and was separated from her two sisters. They were sent to Nevada, she was sent to Kansas, and she came back, and she never spoke it at all. None of her kids speak a word of it, and none of them, up until recently, have known how to, like harvest[ing] camas, harvest[ing] cat tails, all of these first foods that she grew up eating, they never got that because she went to boarding school. And so of course, I’m going to introduce myself in my language, and I’ve had people say that they’re offended by that. This is the first language of the land you’re on. People who are progressives will say this, it’s wild.
Even just that word progressive is so funny to me, because I think about progressive and all these policies that they talk about. Super progressive policy is really socialism, and that’s so progressive. Our people have done socialism for a really long time. This is not progressive policy, taking care of each other, taking care of the land and the environment. That’s not progressive, that is old school Indigenous wisdom.
UNN + ICT: Is there anything that wasn’t asked that you would like to share?
Page: I just really want to emphasize I’m here because I just got a tremendous amount of privilege. There’s nothing special about me, or anything incredible, I just got really incredibly lucky, and I got the best of both worlds. On my mom’s side of the family, I got to understand Indigenous culture and teachings that are way old and way sacred. And then on my dad’s side of the family, I got more socioeconomic privilege than most people I come from, and so I’ve just gotten to do things that most people where I come from won’t get to do, and my whole platform is really based on this idea of how do we create pathways for people who don’t have the same privilege that I have? How do we expand this path towards real political involvement for everyone, because there’s people who are way smarter than me, who have way more skills and talent, but they don’t get to be in this position because of all of this systemic stuff.
I have been handed loads of privilege throughout my life, and it’s still this hard. It wouldn’t be this hard if I refused to identify as Indigenous, if I would just go along with it, and if I would be the candidate that the Dems wanted me to be. It wouldn’t be that hard for me, which is just wild in my mind. So even with all the privilege in the world, if you’re still going to choose to adhere to your identity, you’ll still come across obstacles, and we’ve got to work on a system that allows people who don’t have that same privilege to be successful, because I can do something, but there are other people who are just untapped talent and wisdom that I don’t have.
This story is co-published by Underscore Native News and ICT, a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest.