The University of Arizona Alumnus / Spring 2009
RURAL ROOTS
Casting for trout, speaking Chinese,and now representing Arizona’s District 1 in Congress
UA Alumna, Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick
by Ford Burkhart
Imagine a little Annie Oakley who speaks Apache, who wears braids and camp dresses. You get a snapshot of a young Ann Kirkpatrick ’72 ’79, whose father spoke Apache as did most of her friends. She thought she was Apache until one day, as she was playing jacks in front of the schoolhouse, a classmate asked her, “How come you speak Apache when you’re not one of us?”
In tears, Ann ran home, where her mother explained everything about Indians and Anglos and the world beyond her life with her father, Elliott Kirkpatrick, running Lee’s Mercantile, the family’s general store in Whiteriver, and her mother, Nancy, teaching school there. In short, she says, the lesson was, “I was not Apache.”
On Jan. 6, 2009, she became Arizona’s newest member of Congress, collecting 56 percent of the vote as a Democrat in a district that had been Republican for three terms. She had backing from some key Republicans, which was no surprise. Her uncle, William R. Bourdon, was, for a while, the only Republican in the Arizona Legislature. Her mother, from the Bourdon ranching family in Snowflake, was a Republican, her father a Democrat. Dinner-table conversation, she says, was as bipartisan as it was heated.
As a girl, Kirkpatrick rode horses and played the piano, French horn, and violin. She played softball and went trout fishing in summers and skiing in winters. She can shoot a rifle and keeps her father’s rifle (used back then for wild turkeys at Thanksgiving) and shotgun (used for duck hunting), and still casts for trout among the piñon and junipers in the high country. Kirkpatrick and her brother and sister worked in the family store in summers. Not the typical résumé at the U.S. House of Representatives. And there’s more. She enjoys civil law, speaks Mandarin Chinese, rents quarters near Union Station in Washington, D.C., because the trains remind her of home, and walks to her office — once occupied by John McCain — at the stately Longworth House Office Building.
One day the Kirkpatrick’s house at Whiteriver, just north of historic Fort Apache, was reassigned to an Apache family. They had to move, fast. “We were nearly homeless,”
Kirkpatrick recalls. The family found a place near Lakeside, an Anglo community to the north. “It was a difficult adjustment,” she recalls.
“Apaches are taught to be your own personal best, but never to elevate yourself above anyone else in the culture,” Kirkpatrick says. At the Lakeside school, when an Anglo teacher posted Kirkpatrick’s paper with a gold star sticker on the bulletin board, she ran out of the classroom, mortified.
But her future held more gold stars. Kirkpatrick’s accomplishments would include valedictorian at Blue Ridge High in Lakeside, University of Arizona College of Education graduate, teacher, UA law graduate, state legislator, and Coconino County’s first female deputy county attorney.
Kirkpatrick spent a semester at Prescott College where she told a counselor she wanted to study Chinese, with dreams of organizing trade contracts, applying lessons from the general store. The UA was organizing an Asian studies program, and she transferred. Professor Charles Hedtke became her first mentor at the UA. As a country girl, she studied hard and worked as a residence hall assistant to supplement her scholarship.
She knew she needed to make money for law school, and obtained a UA social studies degree in 1972. She taught a few years in Tucson, and then began law studies, where she was inspired by Professor Charles Ares’ class in civil practice and procedure. “I loved it. He was great,” she says. Later she joined the Arizona State Bar civil practice and procedure committee, whose chair then was a young lawyer named Janet Napolitano.
Today, Kirkpatrick is a member of the House Homeland Security Committee and, of course, Napolitano is the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security.
As fall 1976 began, Kirkpatrick was in Stanley Feldman’s class in legal writing, and classmate Patrice Horstman, now a Flagstaff lawyer, recalls seeing her at work in “the Dungeon,” the basement of the old law building on Park Avenue. Her crowd studied behind the “Pacific Second Shelf,” where rows of Ninth Circuit law books offered some privacy. But when the law students gathered at the old Gentle Ben’s, Ann most often wasn’t there, perhaps off studying.
Later, one of her assignments with the Flagstaff law firm, Mangum, Wall, Stoops & Warden, was to handle the contract legal business of Sedona, becoming the equivalent of its city attorney. Over the years, she raised two daughters, one now in medical school, and ran successfully for the Arizona House of Representatives in 2004 for her district, which includes Flagstaff and Havasupai, Hopi, Hualapai, Navajo, and San Juan Southern Piute tribal lands.
At the legislature, one mentor was Jack Brown, the senior Democrat and a rancher from St. Johns (population 3,538). He kidded her about being from Flagstaff. “To us, that’s the big city,” he said. He offered to tell her about rural life, like finding the fish in Lower Zuni River. “You know where I was born?” she countered. “In McNary.”
“McNary, Arizona?” he replied..
“You bet,” she said, which is something they say in a town with a population of 349.
“She and I got on well together,” Brown says.
In her second term in the Arizona House, she resigned to seek the U.S. House seat for District 1 after the three-term Republican incumbent, who had been indicted on a variety of federal corruption-related charges, elected not to run again.
Kirkpatrick’s largely rural district, bigger than the states of New York or Illinois, containing 11 Native American nations, is one of the poorest in the country, and its complexity poses an immense test of legislative skill. “The policy work I enjoy immensely,” she says. “Our district needs basic infrastructure, cell phones, electricity, running water. The hardest thing is explaining to people on the East Coast that we have citizens in Arizona living in these conditions.”
But she adds: “I enjoy trying to make good, common-sense policy that works for people. I take a nationwide perspective on the laws we want to pass, and then go back to my district, meet with people, and take their experiences back to Washington.”
The Arizona Republic credited her with strong outreach to her constituents and hitting the ground running. She spent almost half of her first 60 days back in her sprawling Arizona district hearing about water rights, the beetle infestation in Kaibab Forest, rural electrification, roads, bridges, dams, and solar and wind technology.
Last fall, just days after the election, she bit into drafting her first chunk of legislation. She became chief sponsor in January of HR 1065, a bill, now in committee, providing for a settlement of old water-rights claims of the White Mountain Apache Tribe in four Arizona counties, wrapping up a decade of negotiations.
Like the passing trains, it probably reminded her of home.
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