Suzan Harjo Essay

Suzan Harjo

Suzan Harjo is a Native American rights activist, writer, lecturer, and poet from the Hodulgee Muskogee and Cheyenne tribes. She helped recover more than 1 million acres of stolen tribal lands and served as a liaison between the United States Congress and Native American tribes. Suzan acted as the main plaintiff in Harjo v. Pro Football, Inc., the successful lawsuit imploring the Washington Redskins to change their name. Harjo’s victory against the Redskins influenced several more football teams to change their offensive names.

==Childhood and Family==

Suzan Shown (later Harjo) was born in El Reno, Oklahoma, on June 2, 1945. Her father was of the Hodulgee Muskogee tribe and her mother was of the Cheyenne.Sonneborn, L. (2007).

The family lived there when her father was assigned to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s Allied Forces Southern Europe in the 45th Infantry Division called Thunderbird. She lived there between 1957 and 1961 before returning with her family to New York City.Harjo, 2009

==Early Activism==

In July 1965, Suzan Shown visited New York City’s Museum of the American Indian with her mother. Her mother recognized one of the outfits on display as the clothing she made for her grandfather to be buried in as well as a buckskin dress of a Cheyenne girl with a bullet hole in the belly. Shown’s mother asked her daughter to retrieve the items and bury them properly.

Shown contacted the National Congress of American Indians along with religious leaders from the Arapoho, Lakota, and Cheyenne tribes. They met at Bear Butte, South Dakota on June 1967 to discuss how to repatriate items of significant importance, encourage museum reform, protect Native American languages, ancestral sites, and sacred places. They also discussed the idea of a National Museum of the American Indian. In 1978, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) passed after it was first dreamed up at that meeting in 1967.Weston & Harjo,

She pressured Congress to increase funding of the NCAI’s educational goals while obtaining government documents that discussed the state of Native American assistance programs. Harjo continued her work to repatriate sacred artifacts from museums back to their true owners during this time. She joined together hundreds of other Native American leaders to demand national reform and legislation to protect these items.Weston & Harjo, 2010 Their success resulted in the National Museum of the American Indian Act of 1989 and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990.WIMN,