Built, Not Bought, and He’ll Tell You What It Hasn’t Built Yet

Troy W. Green answered every question, claimed less than he could have, and put tribal sovereignty in writing

US Senate candidate visits with folks in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Photo Troy Littledeer.

It is fourteen hours of driving to see his own kids.

Troy W. Green and his wife make the trip to Texas, where both of their adult children live in group homes. Seven hours to pick them up. Seven hours to take them back. The children have Williams syndrome, a genetic condition that brings lifelong medical needs and developmental disability, the kind that takes daily support and trained caregivers to manage. Oklahoma didn’t have what they needed. So the Greens cross a state line to be a family, and they have built their weeks around the highway.

“No parent should have to send their child to another state simply because their own state lacks the resources to care for them,” Green said.

Anybody in Adair County can do that arithmetic without a calculator. The gas. The lost day of pay. The specialist who is always three counties over. When Green talks about rural families getting left behind, he is not reading from a binder. He is telling you about his Saturday.

Green visits with veteran Hominy Littledave of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians’s color guard.

Raised in Oklahoma’s foster system. Out of high school and sleeping under bridges and train trestles at 17. And then, decades later, in his fifties, he walked into a college classroom for the first time. He started at Murray State College in January 2020 and came out in spring 2023 with an associate degree, magna cum laude. He and his wife sold what they had in Ardmore, the pawn shop and the family martial arts school, and moved to Norman so he could keep going. Oklahoma City University, May 2025, a history degree, summa cum laude, with a senior capstone on the Tulsa Race Massacre. He is at the University of Oklahoma now, working toward a master’s in criminal justice, due to finish in August 2027.

“It’s never too late to reinvent yourself,” he said. Coming from most candidates that is a bumper sticker. Coming from a man who learned to read a syllabus at 50, it is a fact about his life.

Before the classrooms came roughly thirty years in public safety, across law enforcement, corrections, juvenile detention, investigations and private security. Green says he carried CLEET certification through his law enforcement career, the license Oklahoma requires to work as a peace officer, and still holds it. Somewhere in there he founded Safe Haven Oklahoma, a nonprofit aimed at human trafficking and child exploitation, and he paid the freight himself. The lawyer, the filings, all of it out of his own pocket. “It was created because I saw a need, not because someone handed me a check,” he said.

Then he did something candidates almost never do. He told the truth about how small it still is. Asked what Safe Haven has accomplished, Green said growth has been slower than he wanted, squeezed between his investigation agency, grad school and a statewide campaign. “I won’t exaggerate our accomplishments,” he said. In a business built on exaggeration, a man who refuses to pad his own résumé tells you something.

Here is the part that matters most on this side of the state. We asked Green where he stands on McGirt, the 2020 Supreme Court ruling that affirmed much of eastern Oklahoma is still tribal reservation land, the case that decides who holds legal authority over what happens on it.

“The Supreme Court did not create new treaties in McGirt; it recognized treaties and obligations that already existed,” Green said. “Tribal nations are sovereign governments, not special interest groups. They deserve a seat at the table when decisions affecting their people, lands, and treaty rights are being made.”

He said he would stand against any move in Congress to narrow McGirt or chip at treaty rights without real consultation with the tribes it touches. “Honor the Constitution, honor the treaties, and work together to solve the practical challenges that follow.” Among the answers the five Democratic candidates have put on the public record, none states the position in writing as plainly. He said it without a tribal voting bloc waiting to reward him for it.

He does not pretend to be a party man. “I don’t believe my job is to vote with my party 100% of the time,” he said. “If my own party is wrong, I’ll say so.” Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Tribal leaders, he said he’ll work with any of them. “I wasn’t sent to Washington to be a party mascot.”

On the Epstein files, the federal records tied to the late financier and his trafficking of minors, he would not guess at evidence he hasn’t seen. Then he set his jaw. “I don’t care how wealthy they are. I don’t care what party they belong to. I don’t care how powerful their friends are. If they harmed children or helped protect the people who did, they should be exposed and prosecuted.”

Ask him for one bill he would carry with Republican Sen. James Lankford in year one and he goes straight to foster care, back to where his own story started. “Children don’t care whether help comes from a Democrat or a Republican. They just need someone willing to help.”

These answers came in writing, in response to questions submitted by email, on deadline. The dates and degrees in them can be checked against the record. Where Green declined to expand, the gaps are his own.

The primary is June 16. If nobody clears half the vote, the top two go to a runoff on Aug. 25.

About the author: Troy Littledeer is a journalist, photographer and researcher from Candy Mink Springs in Adair County, Oklahoma. He is a member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians and has spent more than two decades covering tribal governments, education, rural communities and Indigenous affairs across Oklahoma and Indian Country. His reporting has appeared through outlets including Cherokee Phoenix, Osage News, NDNSports.com and Giduwa Cherokee News. In 2025, he received the Tim Giago Free Press Award for defending tribal press independence and government accountability.