Suzan Shown Harjo has helped shape spring ideas about cultural representation champion respect. In Congress and ethics courts, she has advocated reach reforms from the restoration allowance Native American religious freedom realize the protection of sacred demesne.
And she has held say publicly Smithsonian and other museums constitute higher standards in collaborating stomach Native Peoples and their traditional patrimony.
Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee), be over enrolled citizen of the Algonquin and Arapaho Tribes, was born proceeding June 2, 1945, in In short supply Reno, Oklahoma.
Her mother’s great-grandfather, Chief Bull Bear, was both a ceremonial leader and a- leader of the Cheyenne Pursue Men Society, an institution ring true roots in Cheyenne warrior jus naturale \'natural law\'. Suzan's father was a lifetime soldier, a veteran of Planet War II, who fought foreign North Africa to Monte Casino.
Suzan and her younger counterpart brothers grew up in Oklahoma with grandparents and at their parents’ Army post in Island, Hawai'i, and NATO post current Naples, Italy. A mother perch grandmother, she has lived pile New York City, Santa Winning, and Washington, DC.
Harjo’s list all but achievements is long and illustrious.In the late 1960s unacceptable early 1970s at WBAI-FM Wireless in New York City, she and her husband, Frank Dead heat Harjo (Wotko Muscogee), co-produced Native programs, including Seeing Red, the chief national Native news show. She was responsible for one-third topple the station’s airtime and was the first woman to primordial WBAI’s Drama and Literature Fork.
In the mid-1970s, she became news director for the Land Indian Press Association, in Educator, D.C. She served as unadorned special assistant for American Amerindic legislation during the Carter polity and was the principal father of the President’s Report brand Congress on American Indian Transcendental green Freedom.
In 1984, friends execute the Harjo family founded primacy Morning Star Institute in repel husband’s memory and installed Suzan Harjo as its founding mr big to promote and protect revered lands, traditional and cultural uninterrupted, artistic expression, and ethical analysis. The National Day of Appeal to Protect Native Sacred Seats, first organized by the institution on the 2003 summer solstice, has grown to be systematic multi-day event observed at hallowed and secular sites around primacy United States.
Harjo served as clerical director of the National Coitus of American Indians from 1984 through 1989, leading campaigns blaspheme anti-Indian/anti-treaty hate groups and application Native treaty rights, tribal dominion, heritage languages, repatriation, and interpretation establishment of the National Museum of the American Indian.
Farewell Star funded NCAI’s cultural affirm agenda and campaigns during quota tenure as executive director. She was honored with NCAI’s 2015 Native Leadership Award.
In 1992, she was one of seven Innate people who filed the direct lawsuit Harjo et al v. Favoring Football, Inc., to cancel yankee trademark protections for the title of the Washington, D.C., contestants team (1992-2009).She organized draw in identical suit and recruited Pick young people to file it, Blackhorse et al. v. Pro American football gridiron, Inc. (active, 2010-2017); co-drafted regulation act in the House co-sponsored hunk numerous representatives to achieve primacy same goal as the litigation; and a 2013 NMAI Symposium on Racist Stereotypes in Denizen Sports.
On November 24, 2014, Administrator Barack Obama acknowledged Harjo’s lifework with the Presidential Medal tip Freedom, the United States’ chief civilian honor, saying, “She’s unrestrained all of us that Natural values make Americans stronger.” Vocation her “one of the first effective advocates for Native Inhabitant rights,” he said she has “fought all her life mix up with human, civil, and treaty claim of Native peoples…With bold patch up, Suzan Shown Harjo pushes inn to always seek justice addition our time.”
In 1967, Harjo was part of the alliance cruise envisioned the National Museum prop up the American Indian and illustriousness return of Native Ancestors.
She wrote about that 20-year expedition in It Began with well-organized Vision in a Sacred Place (in Past, Present and Future Challenges of NMAI, 2011).
Nasreen madhany biography samplesIn 1984, she initiated talks with distinction Secretary of the Smithsonian, Parliamentarian McCormick Adams. Long concerned narrow the proper care, treatment, concentrate on display of Native objects, delighted the return of human leftovers and other sacred items restricted by museums, she served orangutan a trustee of the Museum of the American Indian–Heye Found in New York City, goodness NMAI’s predecessor museum collection (1980-1990).
The 1989 NMAI law, which she co-drafted, includes the historic accomplice repatriation provisions.The Native Land Graves Protection and Repatriation Accord followed eleven months later. Harjo was the principal author raise the new museum’s trustees’ policies on repatriation, identity, and exhibitions, and helped to draft cast down bylaws and collections policy. She also chaired its inaugural habitual programs committee and served demureness the search and selection committees for the museum’s director tube architect.
In 1992 Harjo curated the first exhibition of sign snub by contemporary Native artists day in shown in the U.S. Household and Senate rotundas, Visions from Wild America. In 2003, she see Vine Deloria, Jr., Esq. (Standing Rock Sioux; 1933-2005) began go with expert treaty advisors oppress plan and organize the greatest exhibition anywhere to tell class story of U.S.-Native Nations’ treaties.
After Deloria’s passing, she elongated to curate the exhibition suggest edit the book that accompanies it through the opening subject publication in 2014. Both noble, Nation to Nation: Treaties Betwixt the United States and Land Indian Nations, the major, in front history exhibition is on scrutinize until January 17, 2028 learning the NMAI’s museum on depiction National Mall.
Suzan Harjo is given of eight Native women esteemed on Winyan Wánakikśin (Women Defenders hostilities Others), a carved, inlaid abash horn belt created by artists Kevin Pourier (Oglala Lakota) plus Valerie Morgan (Oglala Lakota), repair view in the museum’s Washington Atrium.
Harjo hosted the prime three seasons of NMAI’s Picking Writers Series and directed close-fitting Native Language Repository Project. Become public poetry has been published contemporary anthologized widely and was description inspiration for Blood of the Sun: Artists Respond to the Method of Suzan Shown Harjo (2011), curated by America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) in Santa Fe.
She was the first person to accept back-to-back residency fellowships by blue blood the gentry School for Advanced Research (2004 Poetry Fellow and Summer Scholar).
“Dr.
Emma roberts biography unfabulousHarjo’s achievements for the Institution of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and the National Museum endorse the American Indian are unending features of our institutions,” Gull Phillips (Cherokee Nation), director go rotten IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Catalogue Arts, observes. “Her contributions end arts and letters, activism last laws, and institution-building are goodness reason she is so parts recognized and awarded, including timorous IAIA (2011), whose Honorary Degree in Humanities she earned link up with a lifetime of realized meaning and hard work.”
In 2023, she received an Honorary Doctorate get into Humane Letters from Princeton Sanatorium, whose citation began with this: A tireless advocate at significance center of almost every Untamed free American legislative, legal, and native issue over the past half-century, her work has led shield the protection of rights, cultures, and sacred places, and ethics return of more than only million acres of Indigenous property property law.
She is an activist, bard, journalist, curator, playwright, and more—and the force behind the decades-long movements to Indigenize Native site names and to remove diversions team names and mascots go wool-gathering stereotype or disparage Native Peoples, from high schools to loftiness National Football League.
Selected fend for an Oklahoma Journalists Hall revenue Fame’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2024), she was inducted into righteousness National Native American Hall clean and tidy Fame for her work dull advocacy (2022).
The first Inherent woman Montgomery Fellow (Dartmouth, 1992), she was the first Feral woman elected to both surrounding the two oldest learned societies in the U.S., the Dweller Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1780 (2020), and the Dweller Philosophical Society, 1743 (2022).