Native American politician Peggy Flanagan wins Minnesota’s open U.S. Senate seat

More than two decades ago, at an education event at the Minneapolis American Indian Center, Peggy Flanagan took the microphone and offered to help anyone who wanted to run for the Minneapolis school board. Franny Fairbanks, the center’s longtime director, had a question for her.

“My girl, why don’t you do it?” Flanagan remembered during a recent interview with MPR News.

On Tuesday, Flanagan won Minnesota’s open U.S. Senate seat, defeating Republican Michele Tafoya. The seat opened when Sen. Tina Smith decided not to seek reelection.

She will be one of the first Native American women to serve in the U.S. Senate. It is the same chamber that ratified treaties between the United States and the Ojibwe and Dakota nations of Minnesota, and that voted in 1863 to cancel the Dakota treaties after the U.S.-Dakota War. Native Americans were not recognized as U.S. citizens until 1924.

Four men who are citizens of Native Nations have served in the U.S. Senate, according to the Senate Historical Office. Charles Curtis of Kansas, who was Kaw, and Robert Owen of Oklahoma, a Cherokee Nation citizen, served in the early 1900s. Curtis later became vice president. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a Northern Cheyenne citizen, represented Colorado from 1993 to 2005. Markwayne Mullin, a Cherokee Nation citizen from Oklahoma, joined the Senate in 2023 and left in March to become U.S. secretary of homeland security.

But Flanagan is far from the first Native woman in Minnesota to lead. For generations, Native women have led their nations and their communities, pushing for better schools, early childhood education, housing, public safety and treaty rights. They have also passed that leadership on, the way Fairbanks tapped Flanagan to run for school board.

Flanagan learned to organize among them, and their work echoes in the issues she has championed, from paid family leave and universal school lunch to the state’s child tax credit and its Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Office.

“I could not run for the U.S. Senate without Native women. I could not exist in the way that I do without Native women,” Flanagan said.

Flanagan traces her win to organizing that began about three decades ago, when votes in Native communities started making the difference in elections across the country. She says organizers invested in registering Native voters and getting them to the polls. It was then, she says, Native people started running for office themselves and winning.

Aunties and elders

Flanagan is a citizen of the White Earth Nation. She grew up in St. Louis Park, where her mother, Patricia Flanagan, raised her on her own with help from public programs. Her father, Marvin Manypenny, was a White Earth activist who helped organize a grassroots campaign to fight for White Earth land claims.

Her first job out of college was at the Division of Indian Work in Minneapolis, where she helped bridge the gap between home and school for Native kids and their families. She says children have been at the center of her work ever since, from her years on the Minneapolis school board to her time leading Children’s Defense Fund-Minnesota, a child advocacy organization.

“It sometimes just feels like, well, that’s just the work. It’s just what we do, and I think it’s just what we do so often as Native women,” Flanagan said.

Flanagan’s focus on children is rooted in a long struggle in Native families and community in Minnesota. For much of the last century, federal and state policies removed Native children from their families, sending them to boarding schools or placing them in non-Native foster and adoptive homes. As a young organizer, Flanagan learned from a generation of Native women who fought to keep their children with their families and their nations.

Some of that work happened along Franklin Avenue in south Minneapolis. The American Indian Movement was founded in Minneapolis in 1968 in response to police brutality. While its history is often told as a story of protest, the organization was responsible for founding many of the neighborhood organizations that form the bedrock of the Native community. The institutions that grew up around it are another verse of the same song.

Women from White Earth who made their homes in Minneapolis, including Louise and Emily Peake, Winnie Jourdain, and Ignatia Broker spent decades building the community, helped to create the Minneapolis American Indian Center and the Division of Indian Work, where Flanagan would get her first job.

Flanagan says that after Fairbanks suggested she run for school board, other women at the Minneapolis American Indian Center also encouraged her. She won the race in 2004. The Rev. Marlene Whiterabbit Helgemo, a Ho-Chunk Nation citizen who served as pastor of All Nations Indian Church in Minneapolis for three decades, became a mentor. Helgemo was the first Native American woman ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and a founder of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

Flanagan remembers her audacious spirit, her purple eyeshadow, and her habit of investing in new leaders.

“She used to always say we just have to speak it into existence,” Flanagan said.

As she prepared for her first campaign, Flanagan also sought out Native leaders who had already won elected office.

Robert Lilligren was the first tribal citizen elected to the Minneapolis City Council, where he served for 12 years beginning in 2001. He is now the first Native member of the Metropolitan Council and a former president and CEO of the Native American Community Development Institute. A citizen of the White Earth Nation, he describes himself as a third-generation Minneapolis urban Indian.

Lilligren says he met Flanagan when she was a young organizer putting together her school board campaign. Lilligren says Flanagan came up through a network of Native organizations that women built. The Metropolitan Urban Indian Directors, a forum of about three dozen Native organizations, was founded more than 50 years ago by seven women who led nonprofits.

“Most Native nonprofits are led by women. It’s part of our culture. It feels good. It feels right, and then it helps to support and promote people like Peggy, give her confidence, give her guidance, give her experience,” Lilligren said.

From organizer to officeholder

Flanagan worked on Sen. Paul Wellstone’s campaigns while she was a student at the University of Minnesota, where she organized the urban Native community. After Wellstone died in a 2002 plane crash, she spent nearly a decade at Wellstone Action, the organization founded to carry on his work. She trained thousands of organizers and candidates there, including Tim Walz, then a Mankato schoolteacher who wanted to run for Congress.

Alfred Walking Bull is the development director for Tending the Soil. He grew up on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota and met Flanagan in 2011 at a Wellstone Action training at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation. He says Flanagan spent the day teaching college students to plan an organizing campaign, walking the room and asking them questions.

Walking Bull says Native women are the ones who take charge when a community is in crisis.

“When things get tough, you go to the Indigenous women, you go to the aunties. Well, you don’t even have to go to them. They’re going to come to you, and they’re going to tell you what to do,” Walking Bull said.

He says that kind of leadership is often misunderstood.

“When we say matriarchy, we don’t mean patriarchy with women. When we say matriarchy, we mean that women are leading, but they are also doing things distinctly different, like getting consent, like advocating self-determination,” Walking Bull said.

Native women have also held power in tribal governments across the state. Marge Anderson led the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe through a treaty rights case it won at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999. Melanie Benjamin succeeded her in 2000 and served as the band’s chief executive for a total of 20 years, from 2000 to 2008 and again from 2012 to 2024.

Benjamin says Flanagan’s run shows Native people what is possible.

“I think she is setting up a system for all of us to know that if we hope, if we work for things, we can achieve it, and that’s kind of our values too,” Benjamin said.

Flanagan won a seat in the Minnesota House in 2015. She joined Rep. Susan Allen, who in 2012 became the first Native woman elected to the Legislature. By 2017, four Native women served in the House, and they formed its first Native American caucus. In 2018, Flanagan was elected lieutenant governor on a ticket with Walz.

As lieutenant governor, Flanagan pushed for a law requiring state agencies to consult with the 11 tribal nations in Minnesota. Benjamin says the Walz-Flanagan administration respected tribal sovereignty at a level she had never seen.

“She understands that she has lived our life, so she knows the struggles,” Benjamin said.

Nevada Littlewolf leads Women Winning, a nonpartisan organization that works to elect women who support abortion rights. She served 10 years on the Virginia City Council on the Iron Range and met Flanagan around 2007. Women Winning has endorsed Flanagan in every race she’s run.

Littlewolf says Native people live under tribal, local, state and federal law all at once.

“We are probably the most legislated people in the country,” Littlewolf said.

Littlewolf says Women Winning’s work is grounded in reproductive justice, a framework first created by Black women. It holds that people have the right to decide whether to have children and the right to raise them in safe and healthy communities. For Native women, she says, that history includes the sterilization of Native women during her mother’s era and the boarding school system that took children from their families.

Littlewolf says that since she first ran for office, she has watched more Native women run and win across Minnesota, from city councils in Cloquet and Bemidji to the state House. She says that work doesn’t rest on elected leaders alone.

“I think that there is so much wonderful power and joy and movement building happening. And the political leaders matter, but we can’t do it without all of the other people in community that are also working on these issues,” Littlewolf said.

The road ahead

As a senator, Flanagan may have the opportunity to weigh in on Indian Affairs, the economy and foreign policy alike.

Journalist Mark Trahant, citizen of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of Idaho, who has covered Native politics for decades, wrote before the election that the U.S. Senate is where the decisions that matter most to tribal nations are made, from treaties to federal budgets. He points out that in 1977, senators tried to eliminate the chamber’s subcommittee. Tribal nations pushed back, and the select committee created through a compromise was eventually made permanent.

Trahant wrote that a Native woman in the Senate, “brings a different kind of leverage, sitting at the table voting on key policies.”

Flanagan says one place she may start is the federal government’s treaty and trust obligations to tribal nations, a commitment she says it has never fully met.

“I think it’s simply asking them to meet that commitment. That is the floor,” Flanagan said.

Littlewolf says Flanagan now carries the concerns of tribal nations across the country.

“Now she’s going to be standing up not just for Minnesota and the tribal nations that exist here, but she’s going to be standing up for all Americans and all tribal nations across the entire country when she serves in the U.S. Senate.”