One of Oklahoma’s native daughters, Suzan Shown Harjo, received the highest honor this country bestows upon a civilian, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Harjo is founder and president of The Morning Star Institute in Washington, DC, and a poet, writer, curator, lecturer and policy advocate, who has helped Native peoples protect sacred places and recover more than one million acres of land.
Harjo was key in developing legislation such as the American Religious Freedom Act of 1978 and the Native American Graves Repatriation Act in 1990. She was an early crusader to end the use of American Indian mascots and team names by sports teams since the 1960’s and that just begins to scratch the surface of what Harjo has accomplished.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is presented to individuals that have made especially meritorious contributions to the “security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” This year marks the 50th anniversary since President Kennedy began this award.
On November 20, 2014 Suzan Shown Harjo was one of 19 recipients. Days before the list was announced of this year’s winners, Harjo had received a phone call.
“The two native women who work in the White House, Raina Thiele and Jodi Gillette, contacted me and said they had something important to talk to me about,” Harjo said.
At first, Harjo said she thought, “Who died?”
“It just sounded so serious and so I was just steeled for bad news and then she told that I was going to be a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and I said, ‘What?!’ This isn't bad news, this is good news,” laughs Harjo.
Harjo said she wouldn’t call her long record of activism a “career”, she said she’d simply call it “a life.”
“If you plotted your life out in front of you, you would do things in a very different way. Certainly when you're young you wouldn't want to do things that would take thirty and forty and fifty years to do,” Harjo said.
“But when you look back on your life you really understand how this decision led to that decision led to that decision and how certain things were almost inevitable. That they couldn't have been done in any other way,” Harjo said.
Harjo credits her family as the greatest influence on her life. “It would really have to be my parents and their parents,” Harjo said. “My Dad was in the Army and Mom traveled with him,” Harjo said.
“My brothers and I were brought up in large part by our grandparents and aunts and uncles, part of our extended family all around Okmulgee and Beggs, Oklahoma City and El Reno and then places that are too small for people to have heard of,” Harjo said.
Harjo said tribal ceremonies, and Nuyakv Grounds leader Phillip Deere, gave her skills which involved ways to get things done.
“If you don't show up, you're not going to be a part of whatever is happening. You have to show up!” Harjo said. “That's a really important life skill to learn. All of these people infused me with a sense of commitment, dedication and urgency about setting the record straight.”
Harjo was part of an accomplished group of recipients that included the likes of Meryl Streep, Stevie Wonder and Ethel Kennedy. For Harjo, three posthumous recipients gave her true pause.
“The one I felt closest to is someone who was receiving it posthumously and I never knew him and that was Andrew Goodman,” Harjo said.
Andrew Goodman was one of the three civil rights workers that were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964 for trying to register blacks to vote.
“So I would've been honored just being in the same company as the three of them,” Harjo said.
Coincidentally, Harjo’s first job was at a radio station in New York City where Goodman’s mother sat on the board of the station WBAI. The two women became friends.
“I could just tell the kind of person her son was and what motivated him by the kind of mother he had. She had integrity and was dedicated and committed and really was a go-getter and knew how to move mountains,” Harjo said.
Harjo herself has moved a few mountains, and influenced a new generation of native activists. When asked about the recent vote by Oklahoma City School Board to remove the redskins mascot from Capitol Hill High School, Harjo was elated.
“Isn't that fantastic! And good for them and I'm so happy that they did that, and listen up Union High School in Tulsa!” laughed Harjo.
Opponents have said that surely American Indians have more important things to worry about, but Harjo says not so.
“They're working on this issue because it’s fundamental, it’s overarching and it’s contextual,” Harjo said.
“It’s the prism through which everyone that's not native, views us. If we are just cartoons and just mascots and just diminutive figures and people who can be called names right out in public, then we are not going to be taken seriously as people or peoples,” Harjo said.
“There is not going to be the kind of help that we need from the broader society to help us to reshape and reconfigure the laws and the policies and all that goes with that,” Harjo said.
Suzan Shown Harjo is a Cheyenne citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes and Muscogee from the Nuyakv Grounds.
