SUZAN SHOWN HARJO

Suzan Shown Harjo ( & Hodulgee Muscogee) is a poet, writer, lecturer, curator and policy advocate, who has helped Native Peoples protect sacred places and recover more than one million acres of land. She has developed key laws in four decades to promote and protect Native nations, sovereignty, children, arts, cultures and languages, including the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, 1989 National Museum of the American Indian Act, 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and 1996 Executive Order on Indian Sacred Sites. Former Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians and NCAI Fund (1984-1989), Special Assistant for Indian Legislation & Liaison in the Carter Administration and Principal Author of the 1979 President’s Report to Congress on American Indian Religious Freedom, she served on the Native American Policy Committee for Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and as an Advisor to the Transition in 2008-2009.

Ms. Harjo is President of The Morning Star Institute, a national Native rights organization founded in 1984 for Native Peoples’ traditional and cultural advocacy, arts promotion and research. A leader in cultural rights protection and stereotype busting, Morning Star sponsors the Just Good Sports project, organizes the National Prayer Day for Sacred Places and coordinated The 1992 Alliance (1990-1993). Ms. Harjo is one of seven Native people who filed the 1992 landmark case, Harjo et al v. Pro Football, Inc., against the disparaging name of the . They won in 1999, when a three-judge panel unanimously decided to cancel federal trademark protections. Their victory was reversed on a technicality by the District Court and Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court declined review in 2009, without reaching the merits of the case. Ms. Harjo organized an identical suit, which was filed in 2006 by six Native young people. In 2010, she and five other Native people filed formal protests of new trademark requests. These new matters are pending before the Patent & Trademark Office. Ms. Harjo’s essays, Fighting Name-Calling and Just Good Sports, are published in Team Spirits (Univ. of Neb. Press, 2001) and in For Indigenous Eyes Only (SAR Press, 2005).

Ms. Harjo is Guest Curator and General Editor for the National Museum of the American Indian’s upcoming exhibit and publication on Treaties. An NMAI Founding Trustee (1990-1996), she began work with a coalition in 1967 that led to the NMAI and to federal repatriation laws reforming museum policies dealing with Native peoples, and was a Trustee of NMAI’s predecessor museum and collection in New York City (1980-1990). Chair of NMAI’s first Program Planning Committee, she was Principal Author of the NMAI Policies on Exhibits (1994), Indian Identity (1993) and Repatriation (1991). Host of the NMAI Native Writers Series’ first three seasons (2004-2007), she was Director of the 2004-2005 NMAI/ANA Native Languages Archives Repository Project (“Native Language Preservation” CD, 2007).

Curator of “American Icons Through Indigenous Eyes” for the District of Columbia Arts Center (DC/AC-2007), she also curated the first Native art exhibit ever shown in the U.S. Senate and House Rotundas, “Visions from Native America” (1992), and the 1998-2000 “Healing Art” exhibit at the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C. Guest Curator of the Peabody Essex Museum’s 1996-1997 major exhibition, her curatorial essay appears in the show’s award-winning catalogue, Gifts of the Spirit (Eitlejorg Museum, 1998). She curated three print gallery exhibits for Native Americas Journal: “Native Images in American Editorial Cartoons” (2001); “New Native Warrior Images in Art” (2001); and “Identity Perspectives by Native Artists” (2002), and “9-11 Art by Native Artists” for Native Peoples (2002). A Banff Centre Aboriginal Program Council Member (2005-present), she co-founded Indian Art Northwest and chaired its Judges Committee (1997-2000); judged the first Sundance Native American Film Initiative; and co-chaired the 1992 historic gathering of 100 Native wisdomkeepers, writers and artists at Taos Pueblo, “Our Visions: The Next 500 Years.”

The first Vine Deloria, Jr. Distinguished Indigenous Scholar (Univ. of Ariz., 2008), Ms. Harjo also was awarded unprecedented back-to-back residency fellowships by the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe, where she was the 2004 Dobkin Artist Fellow for Poetry and a Summer Scholar. She chaired SAR Seminars on Native Identity and on Native Women’s Cultural Matters, and a 2006 Seminar on U.S. Civilization and Native Identity Policies at the Univ. of Penn. Museum. A 1996 Stanford Univ. Visiting Mentor and a 1992 Dartmouth Col. Montgomery Fellow, she was the first Native American person selected for the honor by Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Policy and the first Native woman chosen for the prestigious Montgomery Award. One of More Magazine’s “Alpha Women 2004: The Year’s Brightest and Best - Heroines” for protecting sacred places, she keynoted AIRFA at 30 at Suquamish Nation (2008) and the Ariz. State Univ. Col. of Law’s AIRFA at 25 (2003; published, Wicazo Sa Review, 2004) and Repatriation & NMAI at 20 (2010).

A veteran broadcaster, she was “Seeing Red” Producer and Drama & Literature Director for Pacifica’s WBAI-FM Radio, New York City, as well as News Director, American Indian Press Association, and Founding Co-Chair, The Howard Simons Fund for American Indian Journalists. A past UNITY Journalists of Color’s Brain Trust member, she was an organizer of UNITY ’04, ’99 and ’94 conferences. Award-winning Columnist for (2000-2008), she wrote the Foreword, “Camp Criers Speaking Across the Generations,” and 11 featured columns in America Is Indian Country (Fulcrum, 2005). Her essay, , Savages and Other Indian Enemies: An Historical Overview of American Media Coverage of Native Peoples, is in Images of Color/Images of Crime (2005). She also was an invited speaker for the Univ. of Neb.-Lincoln journalism project, Native Daughters (2009).

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