Ever since Lewis and Clark rolled down the mighty Columbia with a presidential writ, politicians and the judges they appoint have controlled the fortunes of Joe Pakootas’ people. Executive orders confined his ancestors to the Colville Reservation, acts of Congress deprived them of gold-rich foothills, and federal judges ruled from afar about their basic rights as Americans. Now, for the first time ever, a registered tribal member is making a serious bid to represent the people of Washington state’s 5th District in Congress. Running against incumbent Cathy McMorris Rodgers is none other than Joe Pakootas. It is a tough challenge. Not only is Pakootas (pronounced pah-KOH-tas) running as a Democrat in a deeply conservative district, but his main opponent is also the kind of blandly affirmative incumbent who is particularly hard to unseat. McMorris Rodgers is running for her sixth term and is the fourth-ranking House Republican. She’s a hard worker with unexceptional views and an up-by-her-bootstraps biography (first in her family to earn a college degree, worked at McDonald’s to pay her way through school) that she can wield smoothly, as she did when she gave the GOP’s response to the State of the Union address in January. She has raised a tremendous amount of money without much visible effort and won’t really begin campaigning in the district until after the Aug. 5 multiparty primary, in which the top two candidates (regardless of party) advance to the November ballot.

The only Democrat running (the other two candidates are a Tea Party Republican and an independent), Pakootas has still had to work very hard just to have a chance in the primary. Running as a Democrat in the 5th District is, as one organizer put it, “taking one for the party,” and the Democrats in Spokane had to convince Pakootas, the chief operating officer (CEO) of the Colville Tribal Federal Corp., which manages tribal business and brought in $86 million in gross revenue last year, that he should accept the challenge. The Native population can’t deliver many votes (there are just over 9,000 registered Colville members, the largest Native group in the district), but Democratic Party officials saw Pakootas’ potential to be a rare crossover figure.

Pakootas, 57, has an undeniably compelling story. Like his opponent, he comes from humble roots. McMorris Rodgers’ father owned an orchard in small-town Kettle Falls and had political aspirations of his own. Pakootas had a somewhat rougher road: he was born on the reservation and was a ward of the state by the time he was in the second grade. He and six of his seven siblings were sent to live with a foster family on a dairy farm off the reservation; it was three years before they were reunited with their parents. The only one of his siblings who didn’t grow up to be an alcoholic or drug addict was an older brother who died in a motorcycle accident as a teenager. Pakootas himself was a star athlete in high school, but he “went the path of drinking,” as he puts it, for a couple years. By the time he straightened out, his athletic career was derailed, and he was married, with a child on the way.