Deborah Parker
[18][20] Born in 1970[1][2] as the daughter of a Tulalip father and Yaqui–Apache mother,[20] she grew up on the reservation, where she became intimately familiar with many of the problems facing the Native American community that she later sought to address.
[34] Later, in September 2010,[35] she was appointed by the University of Washington's Friends of the Educational Opportunity Program as a member of its board of trustees,[21][35] where she served her full three-year term.
[40] In October 2017, Parker was selected by Marysville School District to serve as its director of Equity, Diversity, and Indian Education[41][42] and continues to do so as of June 2018.
[update][43] Parker lives in Tulalip, Washington, where she is a mother to three children and two stepchildren[23] was married to documentary filmmaker Myron Dewey (who is of Paiute and Shoshone descent)[9][22] until his death in 2021.
[55] During the visit, she learned about the efforts to pass the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2012 and the struggle that Murray's team were having with keeping support for a provision on tribal jurisdiction.
[54][56] Parker, committed to ensuring that the VAWA was reauthorized with tribal provisions, decided that "she had to set aside her fear and become 'the face' and the voice for the issue of Native women and rape.
[5] The next day after the meeting, on April 25, she detailed in a press conference to Congress experiences both she and other women she knew had with violence and sexual abuse on reservations, describing herself as "a Native American statistic".
[56] The Senate passed the VAWA reauthorization the following day[25]: 232 [54] with the protections for Native Americans included,[45] though Republicans in the House of Representatives initially sought to remove them.
[5][45] Parker began to aggressively lobby in favor of the reauthorization and sought to convince members of Congress to support both it and its tribal provisions, so much so that then-president Obama got to know her by her native name[14] and her "toes bled" from all the walking.
[55] While lobbying the opponents of the bill, Parker felt she was "up against some of the worst discrimination I've ever seen in my entire life" and that Native American women were treated "like we were subhuman".
[14][61] A year afterward, in October 2016, Parker was featured in the second campaign advertisement of Patty Murray's re-election in the 2016 United States Senate election in Washington.
[59] During the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Parker served as one of the platform committee members representing Bernie Sanders[15][16] after having been an early and vocal supporter of his 2016 presidential campaign.
[63][64] In June 2016, on the first day of the platform drafting hearing in St. Louis, Parker proposed a substitution amendment that replaced and strengthened the language in the section on honoring tribal nations.
[65][66] Barbara Lee noted afterward that in all her decades of attending Democratic National Conventions, she did not recall "any provision or plank in our platform that acknowledges the first people of the United States".
[65] Lastly, the amendment endorsed "environmental justice in Indian Country" and acknowledged "the past injustices and the misguided, harmful federal and state policies and actions based on outdated and discredited values and beliefs that resulted in the destruction of the Indian nations' economies, social, and religious systems, the taking of their lands, and the creation of intergenerational trauma that exists to this day.
[73] In an April 2018 article, Parker criticized Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and advocated for opposition to the Trans Mountain Pipeline in solidarity with First Nations peoples.
[27] Parker is critical of the US government's current and historic treatment of indigenous populations, comparing Native American reservations to "concentration camps".
