Indian Times: Part 1 of conversations with Suzan Shown Harjo (Jan 05, 2013)
Suzan Shown Harjo is Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee and has long been an advocate for American Indian rights. She is a poet, writer, lecturer, curator, and policy advocate, who has helped Native peoples recover over a million acres of land. She serves as President of the Morning Star Institute, a national Native American rights organization based in Washington, D.C.  She was born  in El Reno, Oklahoma^[3] and lived on her Muscogee family's allotment near Beggs, Oklahoma.^[4] Her great-grandfather was the Cheyenne Chief Bull Bear.  The roots of her activism date from the mid-1960s, when she produced "Seeing Red," a bi-weekly radio program on New York's WBAI FM station which was the first Indian news show in the United States. Harjo moved to Washington D.C. in 1974.  Harjo has been involved in major advances in US federal Indian policy, and served as the Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians from 1984 to 1989.  Harjo developed important federal laws protecting Native sovereignty, arts and cultures, language, and human rights. These include the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act,  the 1989 National Museum of the American Indian Act;  the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which allows tribes to reclaim their human remains and ceremonial items from publicly funded institutions  and the 1996 Executive Order of Indian Sacred Sites.  In other words, she knows her stuff.  So with that in mind, I got her on the phone to discuss her article called the 2012 Hall of Fame and Shame Awards,  as published in Indian Country Today Media Network.

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