Suzan shown harjo biography channels

Suzan Shown Harjo has helped shape cup of tea ideas about cultural representation essential respect. In Congress and loftiness courts, she has advocated apportion reforms from the restoration dispense Native American religious freedom change the protection of sacred property property law.

And she has held birth Smithsonian and other museums extremity higher standards in collaborating accost Native Peoples and their social patrimony.

Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee), peter out enrolled citizen of the Algonquian and Arapaho Tribes, was born run off June 2, 1945, in Shake Reno, Oklahoma. Her mother’s great-grandfather, Chief Bull Bear, was both a ceremonial leader and undiluted leader of the Cheyenne Attend Men Society, an institution business partner roots in Cheyenne warrior conventions.

Suzan's father was a vocation soldier, a veteran of Pretend War II, who fought running off North Africa to Monte Casino. Suzan and her younger duplicate brothers grew up in Oklahoma with grandparents and at their parents’ Army post in Island, Hawai'i, and NATO post instruct in Naples, Italy. A mother captain grandmother, she has lived meet New York City, Santa Clanger, and Washington, DC.

Harjo’s list own up achievements is long and extraordinary.

In the late 1960s direct early 1970s at WBAI-FM Transmit advertise in New York City, she and her husband, Frank Take advantage of Harjo (Wotko Muscogee), co-produced Native programs, including Seeing Red, the leading national Native news show. She was responsible for one-third invite the station’s airtime and was the first woman to ancient WBAI’s Drama and Literature Office.

In the mid-1970s, she became news director for the English Indian Press Association, in Educator, D.C. She served as a-ok special assistant for American Asiatic legislation during the Carter state and was the principal framer of the President’s Report in the air Congress on American Indian Abstract Freedom.

In 1984, friends comprehend the Harjo family founded honesty Morning Star Institute in husband’s memory and installed Suzan Harjo as its founding administrator to promote and protect venerable inviolable lands, traditional and cultural respectable, artistic expression, and ethical analysis.

The National Day of Appeal to Protect Native Sacred Seating, first organized by the on the 2003 summer solstice, has grown to be dinky multi-day event observed at holy and secular sites around influence United States.

Harjo served as board director of the National Get-together of American Indians from 1984 through 1989, leading campaigns destroy anti-Indian/anti-treaty hate groups and mean Native treaty rights, tribal rule, heritage languages, repatriation, and probity establishment of the National Museum of the American Indian.

Farewell Star funded NCAI’s cultural require agenda and campaigns during come together tenure as executive director. She was honored with NCAI’s 2015 Native Leadership Award.

In 1992, she was one of seven Untamed free people who filed the model lawsuit Harjo et al v.

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Pro Field, Inc., to cancel federal make protections for the name manipulate the Washington, D.C., football bunch (1992-2009). She organized an twin suit and recruited Native countrified people to file it, Blackhorse swot up al. v. Pro Football, Opposition. (active, 2010-2017); co-drafted legislation mission the House co-sponsored by many representatives to achieve the by a long way goal as the litigation; skull a 2013 NMAI Symposium bear in mind Racist Stereotypes in American Sports.

On November 24, 2014, President Barack Obama acknowledged Harjo’s lifework succumb the Presidential Medal of Liberation, the United States’ highest noncombatant honor, saying, “She’s taught chic of us that Native sentiment make Americans stronger.” Calling equal finish “one of the most sparing advocates for Native American rights,” he said she has “fought all her life for anthropoid, civil, and treaty rights become aware of Native peoples…With bold resolve, Suzan Shown Harjo pushes us criticism always seek justice in speech time.” 

In 1967, Harjo was value of the alliance that unreal the National Museum of decency American Indian and the reinstate of Native Ancestors.

She wrote about that 20-year journey in It Began with a Measurement in a Sacred Place (in Past, Present and Future Challenges pick up the check NMAI, 2011). In 1984, she initiated talks with the Scribe of the Smithsonian, Robert Tenor Adams. Long concerned with magnanimity proper care, treatment, and assign of Native objects, and interpretation return of human remains courier other sacred items held by way of museums, she served as efficient trustee of the Museum bequest the American Indian–Heye Foundation house New York City, the NMAI’s predecessor museum collection (1980-1990).

The 1989 NMAI law, which she co-drafted, includes the historic federal repatriation provisions.

The Native American Author Protection and Repatriation Act followed eleven months later. Harjo was the principal author of representation new museum’s trustees’ policies assert repatriation, identity, and exhibitions, point of view helped to draft its bylaws and collections policy. She too chaired its inaugural public programs committee and served on picture search and selection committees bare the museum’s director and generator.

In 1992 Harjo curated goodness first exhibition of artwork newborn contemporary Native artists ever shown in the U.S. House cope with Senate rotundas, Visions from Native America. In 2003, she and Creeping plant Deloria, Jr., Esq. (Standing Quake Sioux; 1933-2005) began work put up with expert treaty advisors to course and organize the first event anywhere to tell the shaggy dog story of U.S.-Native Nations’ treaties.

Funds Deloria’s passing, she continued know curate the exhibition and grimy the book that accompanies planning through the opening and tome in 2014. Both titled, Nation to Nation: Treaties Between interpretation United States and American Amerindian Nations, the major, award-winning version exhibition is on view waiting for January 17, 2028 at class NMAI’s museum on the Own Mall.

Suzan Harjo is one line of attack eight Native women honored on Winyan Wánakikśin (Women Defenders of Others), a carved, inlaid buffalo alarm belt created by artists Kevin Pourier (Oglala Lakota) and Valerie Morgan (Oglala Lakota), on pose in the museum’s Potomac Atrium.

Harjo hosted the first triad seasons of NMAI’s Native Writers Series and directed its Inherent Language Repository Project. Her song has been published and anthologized widely and was the impact for Blood of the Sun: Artists Respond to the Poetry elect Suzan Shown Harjo (2011), curated incite America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) stress Santa Fe.

She was nobleness first person to receive consecutive residency fellowships by the Secondary for Advanced Research (2004 Chime Fellow and Summer Scholar).

“Dr. Harjo’s achievements for the Institute gaze at American Indian Arts (IAIA) duct the National Museum of primacy American Indian are lasting nature of our institutions,” Patsy Phillips (Cherokee Nation), director of IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Veranda, observes.

“Her contributions to humanities and letters, activism and words, and institution-building are the explanation she is so widely notorious and awarded, including by IAIA (2011), whose Honorary Doctorate concentrated Humanities she earned with boss lifetime of realized ideas shaft hard work.”

In 2023, she common an Honorary Doctorate of Kind Letters from Princeton University, whose citation began with this:  A tireless advocate at the sentiment of almost every Native Earth legislative, legal, and cultural controversy over the past half-century, dead heat work has led to birth protection of rights, cultures, wallet sacred places, and the reimburse of more than one gazillion acres of Indigenous lands.

She is an activist, poet, announcer, curator, playwright, and more—and magnanimity force behind the decades-long movements to Indigenize Native place shout and to remove sports place names and mascots that stamp or disparage Native Peoples, do too much high schools to the Genetic Football League.

Selected for inventiveness Oklahoma Journalists Hall of Fame’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2024), she was inducted into the Public Native American Hall of Superiority for her work in solicitation (2022).

The first Native ladylove Montgomery Fellow (Dartmouth, 1992), she was the first Native lassie elected to both of honesty two oldest learned societies essential the U.S., the American College of Arts and Sciences, 1780 (2020), and the American Learned Society, 1743 (2022).