Stuck stumps for Congress with Stockbridge-Munsee

Candidate holds listening session to learn issues
By: 
Lee Pulaski
City Editor

BOWLER — Amanda Stuck first got interested in politics at age 10 when she was taken to a speech being given by then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton.

Since then, she’s wanted to “be Bill Clinton,” she said.

Currently serving in the Wisconsin Assembly representing Appleton and Menasha, Stuck is now seeking to unseat two-term U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher in November and become the District 8 representative in Congress for Wisconsin.

Stuck journeyed Saturday to the Stockbridge-Munsee Reservation and met with about a dozen tribal members for a listening session as she tried to gather some information about what constituents want done in Washington. She said she decided to run for Congress after receiving a letter from a man concerned about what would happen if the pre-existing conditions requirement of the Affordable Care Act went away.

Stuck noted that the letter was also sent to Gallagher and to state Rep. Tom Nelson. She said that she learned from the man that the only one who didn’t reply to the letter was Gallagher.

“That was the day that I decided I was going to run for the seat,” Stuck said.

Molly Miller told Stuck how sick she is of all the partisan politics in Washington. She asked if Stuck believes there’s any hope of taking the federal government away from that mindset.

Stuck, in her time with the Assembly, helped to create the Future Caucus, a bipartisan group seeking to find solutions to compromise and avoid the party politics that seem to shape state and federal governing bodies. She vowed to bring the same attitude to Congress, if elected.

“It’s the Future Caucus that has given me more hope than anything,” Stuck said. “When I go these national gatherings with millennial legislators from across the country, I honestly don’t know sometimes if I’m talking to a Democrat or a Republican. I just know I’m having a really good conversation about energy policy or any other topic you can think of.”

Denise Palmer, an enrolled Stockbridge-Munsee tribal member, said a lot of the struggles that Wisconsin Native American tribes face are similar and sought answers from Stuck on how the federal government can address them.

“For the most part, people in our communities really struggle,” Palmer said. “We have the highest unemployment rates, the highest poverty rates and, I’m very sad to say, we’re dying at very young ages.”

She noted that there are plenty of people interested in protecting Social Security and Medicare, but she’s concerned that little is being done to protect Medicaid, which she said is vital to helping Indian Health Services programs.

Stuck said she’s heard similar concerns from the Menominee, Oneida and other tribes.

“It’s not that we don’t know what to do,” Stuck said. “We have a system. We just need to fund it better.”

Roy Martin, a disabled veteran, told Stuck about how he’s dealing with terminal cancer, and because he was no longer able to work, he had to go onto the federal health care system. Martin said, as a result, he was taken off the medication he’d been taking because the system would not pay for them.

“That just made me even more sick, and I had seven different specialists watching me laying in my bed, waiting to die,” Martin said, noting he couldn’t get help from the veterans administration because his cancer was not service-related. “The government program, the tribe and the VA won’t work together to spend money on one person. They won’t work together. It’s quite ridiculous, actually.”

Martin told Stuck that he took his health care into his own hands and got involved with cannabis therapy in Michigan. He said he’s raising a young son on his own at age 42, and he wasn’t ready to die.

“I’m back to work full-time and 100% off of their pharmaceutical poison,” Martin said. “Those seven specialists who were watching me die and saying there was nothing they could do because I lived in Wisconsin is ridiculous.”

Stuck said she would support legalizing marijuana if elected to Congress.

“Your story is an example of how we say we honor veterans, but we don’t,” Stuck said. “Our government should be ashamed of itself.”

Lori Miller, a fourth-grade teacher, told Stuck about how Native American history is pushed to the side at both the federal and state level, despite state Act 31 requiring that schools teach the subject to their students. She noted that teaching the history has been proven to close the achievement gap between Native American students and non-native students.

Miller agreed that more needed to be done to strengthen the education system, and teaching tribal history and culture was important for all students in order to promote better cultural understanding. She decried the education she received from the public schools in Appleton.

“I learned the history that I learned was not the truth,” Stuck said. “We need to do a lot better to make sure we’re teaching the right things.”

lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com