Suzan Shown Harjo

Suzan Shown Harjo is a Cheyenne-Hodulgee Muscogee poet, writer, lecturer, curator, and advocate for Native American rights. Harjo is a policy advocate who has helped Native peoples recover more than one million acres of tribal land. She served as a Congressional liaison for Indian affairs in President Jimmy Carter's administration and later as president of the National Council of American Indians. In 2014, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor. She is also president of the Morning Star Institute, a national Native American rights organization.

Her activism began in the 1960s when Harjo co-produced "Seeing Red," a bi-weekly radio program on a New York radio station that was the first Indigenous news show in the United States. After moving to Washington D.C., Harjo became a legislative liaison for two law firms representing Indigenous rights. Once appointed a Congressional liaison for President Jimmy Carter, Harjo supported issues such as hunting and fishing rights on traditional lands, voting, and land contract rights. Her lobbying work helped lead to the passing of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978, which allowed for the protection of Native Americans for the practice of traditional religion and rituals.

Harjo also served as the Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians, which aimed to ensure that Indigenous children were educated. Harjo also worked on the issue of repatriation of sacred items from museums to tribes and changing the way researchers handled American Indian human remains and artifacts, which resulted in additional reforms and national legislation.

Harjo promotes sacred land claims and protection for traditional cultural rights, artistic expression, and research with the Morning Star Institute. She has lobbied and helped secure the return of one million acres, including holy lands. The Insitute is devoted to ending the use of American Indian mascots and stereotypes by sports teams, which has resulted in dramatic changes in the sports world, with two-thirds of teams with American Indian Mascots dropping them due to the public campaigns.

Harjo oversaw the creation of the National Museum of the American Indian's exhibition and rerpatriation policies when she served as a founding trusting in the 1990s. She has also published poetry as early as 12 years old. One of her poems, "gathering rites," was read at the first International Women's Day celebration in New York City. She is a columnist for Indian Country Today and a contributing writer to First American Art Magazine.

Harjo was the first Native American woman to receive the Montgomery Fellowship at Dartmouth College, which was originally established to educate Native Americans. Additionally, Harjo was the first Native person to be selected as a Stanford University Visiting Mentor. She chaired two seminars about native identity and native women's cultural matters at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico and a seminar on "US Civilization and Native Identity Policies" at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Harjo was selected as the first Vine Deloria, Jr. Distinguished Indigenous Scholar at the University of Arizona.