Suzan Shown Harjo

Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne & Hodulgee Muscogee) is a writer, curator and policy advocate, who has developed landmark laws and led myriad campaigns protecting Native Peoples’ rights and recovering over one million acres of land, including cultural, historic and sacred places.

In awarding her a 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, President Barack Obama said she has “fought all her life for human, civil, and treaty rights of Native peoples…her tireless efforts have protected Native culture, returned Native lands, and improved Native lives. With bold resolve, Suzan Shown Harjo pushes us to always seek justice in our time.” Calling her “one of the most effective advocates for Native American rights,” the President said, “through her work in government and as the head of the National Congress of American Indians and the Morning Star Institute, she has helped preserve a million acres of Indian lands, helped develop laws preserving tribal sovereignty. She has repatriated sacred cultural items to tribes, while expanding museums that celebrate Native life.”

A Member of the American Philosophical Society, she was elected in 2022 in The Arts, Professions, Leaders in Public & Private Affairs. Founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743, the APS is the oldest learned society in the United States. She was elected to the 2020 Class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences—in Leadership, Policy & Communications, in the Specialty: Scientific, Cultural & Nonprofit Leadership—and is a Founding Member of the AAAS Anti-Racism Committee. She also was elected to the National Native American Hall of Fame and will be inducted in November 2022.

The first Native woman Montgomery Fellow (1992) and the first Vine Deloria, Jr. Distinguished Indigenous Scholar (2008), she was the first Native person invited to present the prestigious annual Dudleian Lecture (2014), the oldest endowed lectureship at Harvard University, which began in 1755 at the Harvard Divinity School. In 2022, she was featured in conversation with Dr. Philip J. Deloria, at Harvard’s conference on God Is Red at 50.

The first woman awarded the Institute on American Indian Arts’ Honorary Doctorate of Humanities, she received its 2011 degree for her life’s work in the arts, cultures, societies and policies. In 1985, IAIA’s Dr. Dave Warren (Santa Clara Pueblo) asked if she and Alan R. Parker, Esq. (Chippewa-Cree, Lakota, Oneida) could write and attain a congressional charter to make IAIA more independent and financially secure. IAIA approved their draft and selected a board by a 1986 congressional charter to oversee IAIA, and Congress granted federal 501c3 status in the Higher Education Amendments of 1986.

A Founding Trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, she began coalition work in 1967 that led to the NMAI establishing act, repatriation laws and nationwide museum reforms that took more than 20 years to achieve. She wrote about that journey in It Began with a Vision in a Sacred Place (in Past, Present and Future Challenges of NMAI, Smithsonian NMAI Press, 2011).

Guest Curator of the Smithsonian/NMAI exhibition (Museum on the Mall, 2014-2025), she is Editor of the book that accompanies the exhibition (SI/NMAI Press, 2014), both titled, "Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations," which was created and conducted by The Morning Star Institute’s Treaties Project (2003-2017). She hosted the first three seasons of the NMAI Native Writers Series and directed the NMAI/ANA 2004-2005 Native languages project.

The NMAI and IAIA honored her with a 2019 Symposium, where 14 writers presented papers that are being published in "A Promise Kept: The Inspiring Life and Works of Suzan Shown Harjo" (NMAI Press, Founders Series, 2023). She also is working with IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Art on a separate book, to be published at the same time, "Art and Activism: The Harjo Family Collection" (IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Publication).

She is Founding President of The Morning Star Institute (1984-), which is dedicated to cultural and traditional rights, advocacy and research and has conducted such projects as Just Good Sports (1984-), The 1992 Alliance (1989-1993), Our Visions (1992), National Sacred Prayer Days (2003-) and Treaties (2003-2017). Morning Star has partnered with the Native American Rights Fund in the Sacred Places Protection Project, which she serves as Senior Policy Advisor. A Carter Administration political appointee, she served as a Legislative Liaison and was Principal Author of the 1979 President’s Report to Congress on American Indian Religious Freedom. She also served as Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians during the 1980s and was honored with NCAI’s 2015 Native Leadership Award.

An award-winning Columnist, she has worked for all Indian Country Today incarnations—Native-owned newspapers, magazine and online digital publication—and was News Director of the American Indian Press Association, Co-Chair of The Howard Simons Fund for American Indian Journalists and Board Representative of the Native American Journalists Association for UNITY: Journalists of Color and UNITY: Journalists for Diversity.

A broadcast journalist in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she worked for WBAI-FM Radio Station and was its first Director of Drama & Literature who was not a white man. She co-produced “Seeing Red,” the first regular program on Native issues, with husband Frank Ray Harjo (Wotko Muscogee; 1947-1982).

Perhaps best known for her activism against the former name of the Washington NFL team, she was recruited to the no-mascot movement in 1962 as a senior in high school in Oklahoma City by Oklahoma Indian Youth Council President Clyde Warrior (Ponca), who was the leading force behind the elimination of the first “Indian” mascot in American sports, the dancing mascot of the University of Oklahoma, “Little Red,” in 1970. She organized three lawsuits—the first and third of which she served as lead plaintiff and the second identical suit filed by young Native people she was an expert witness and advisor—that engaged Pro Football, Inc., in a quarter-century of continuous litigation, 1992-2017. The name was dropped in 2020.

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