Suzan Shown Harjo
Suzan Shown Harjo is an enrolled Cheyenne citizen of the Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes, and is Hotvlkvlke Mvskokvlke, Nuyakv. She is founding president of The Morning Star Institute (1984-), which is dedicated to Native cultural and traditional rights and research, sacred places protection and stereotype-busting. A founding trustee of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, her coalition work that began in 1967 led to NMAI, repatriation laws, and nationwide museum reforms, and she edited and curated NMAI’s Treaties book and award-winning exhibition (2014-2027), Nation to Nation.
In awarding her a 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, President Barack Obama called her “one of the most effective advocates for Native American rights,” saying she has “fought all her life for human, civil, and treaty rights of Native peoples…With bold resolve, Suzan Shown Harjo pushes us to always seek justice in our time.”
In 2023, Princeton University awarded her an honorary doctorate in humane letters, with this citation: A tireless advocate at the center of almost every Native American legislative, legal, and cultural issue, her work has led to the protection of rights, cultures, and sacred places, and the return of more than one million acres of Indigenous lands. She is an activist, poet, journalist, curator, playwright, and more—and the force behind the decades-long effort to remove sports team names and mascots that promote stereotypes of Native Peoples from high schools to the National Football League.
A broadcast journalist in the late-1960s and early 1970s, she produced, directed and reported for the Pacifica Network’s WBAI-FM Radio Station in New York City. As WBAI’s Drama & Literature Director (the first who was not a white male), she was responsible for filling one-third of its 24/7 air time for listeners in a six-state broadcast area. She and husband Frank Ray Harjo (Wotko Muscogee; 1947-1982) co-produced the first national Native news and cultures program, Seeing Red, and were on the faculty of the New York University School oof Continuing Education and presented a popular lecture series on Native issues for six semesters.
After a career in New York City in broadcasting, arts and letters, and Native rights work, her family moved to Washington, DC, where she began as the American Indian Press Association news director. Her columns, essays, poetry, and other writings have been widely published and anthologized, including in every version of Indian Country Today. Selected for an Oklahoma Journalists Hall of Fame’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2024), she was inducted into the National Native American Hall of Fame: Advocacy (2022).
A history of firsts, she was the first Vine Deloria, Jr. Distinguished Indigenous Scholar (University of Arizona, 2008) and the first to receive back-to-back residencies at the School of Advanced Research (2004 poetry fellow and summer scholar).The first woman awarded the Institute of American Indian Arts’ honorary doctorate of humanities (2011) and the first Native woman Montgomery Fellow (Dartmouth College, 1992), she was the first Native woman elected to both of the two oldest learned societies in the U.S.: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1780 (2020), and the American Philosophical Society, 1743 (2022).
For her SAR fellowship, she wrote an oral history poetry collection recounting “dreams, nightmares and visions that made us make the history we made” (cultural rights laws, 1965 to 1990). She read from the collection at the SAR Dobkin Artist Fellowship public reading in Spring 2004, and wrote additional poems for the SAR Summer Colloquium Series, Unquiet Graves, Unsettled Law: Poems and Stories on Native American Repatriation Policy.
Ms. Harjo has given myriad one-poet and group readings, including Women/Voices at Town Hall (1975), in New York City, where she was one of 20 American women writers, with Nikki Giovani, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker and others, chosen for the literary opening event to International Women’s Year.
Her poetry appears in such recent anthologies as in Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry (Norton/Library of Congress, 2021); Power of the Storm: Indigenous Voices, Visions and Determination, Dedicated to John Trudell (Renegade Planet Publishing, 2020); and When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020).
Often working with visual artists, her selected poems were exhibited in Blood of the Sun: Artists Respond to the Poetry of Suzan Shown Harjo (Ahalenia Studios, Santa Fe, 2011), curated by America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) and featuring work by 20 top Native painters, sculptors and multi-media artists, including Marcus Amerman (Choctaw), David Bradley (White Earth Ojibwe), Kelly Church (Potawatomi/Odawa/ Ojibwe), Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee), Bob Haozous (Chiricahua Apache), Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne), April Holder (Sac & Fox/Tonkawa/Wichita), Kenneth Johnson (Muscogee-Seminole), Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi & Choctaw), Marlo Melero (Paiute/Modoc/Tlingit/Haida), Melissa Melero (Fallon Paiute-Modoc), Diego Romero (Cochiti Pueblo), Mateo Romero (Cochiti Pueblo), Hoka Skenandore (Oneida, Oglala Lakota & La Jolla Band Luiseno), Richard Ray Whitman (Yuchi-Muscogee Creek Nation).
Ms. Harjo’s most recent poem is part of The National Museum project, asking which stories, histories, and futures are deemed worth saving and which are ignored or forgotten. The project invites conceptual artists to name a museum and to invite a writer to write in any form on the theme, with an abandoned building in Pittsburgh sporting a new name each month and both the banner and writing digitized and published and distributed for free as a printed broadside. Internationally acclaimed artist Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes citizen) elected Ms. Harjo—who have worked together on important artistic and advocacy projects—and their work is the project’s second iteration: Museum of Broken Treaties.
Ms. Harjo is profiled in myriad publications, including Notable Native People: 50 Indigenous Leaders, Dreamers, and Changemakers from Past and Present by Adrianne Keene (Cherokee Nation) (Illustrations by Ciara Sana; Ten Speed Press, Penguin Random House, 2021): “With a record of leading campaigns for hundreds of laws, and for recovering more than one million acres of Native lands,” wrote Dr. Keene (Cherokee Nation), “there are few other people who have had such an influence on all of the most significant American Indian policies over the last forty years.”