Record number of Indigenous members elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Centuries-old organization honors influential leaders in a wide range of fields

Ten Indigenous leaders have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for 2023 — the largest Indigenous group ever chosen in a single year for the prestigious academy.

The newly elected Indigenous members, who include two international honorary members, are among a group of 269 new members from academia, the arts, industry, policy, research and science.

“I am surprised, honored, thankful and working on my acceptance letter,” Cherokee actor Wes Studi, who is among the 2023 class, told ICT.

The record number of newly elected Native members follows a surge in the last five years that reflects growing recognition of the contributions of Native leaders, said Philip Deloria, Dakota, an historian and author who in 2018 became Harvard University’s first tenured professor of Native American history.

“These things are about representing excellence in all these different kinds of pursuits,” Deloria told ICT. “If you don’t have Native people there, you don’t have representation of Native excellence. And we know there is a lot of excellence by Native people.”

This year’s list of new Indigenous members are:

*Maria Campbell, Métis, an international honorary member who is a writer, broadcaster, filmmaker and advocate, and the coordinator of Indigenous knowledge and wellness at First Nations University of Canada in Saskatchewan

*Cynthia Chavez Lamar, San Felipe Pueblo, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian

*Dalee Sambo Dorough, Iñupiaq, an advocate for Indigenous and international human rights and former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council

*John EchoHawk, Pawnee, an attorney and executive director of the Native American Rights Fund

*Walter R. Echo-Hawk, Pawnee, an attorney, author and noted expert on Indian law

*Matthew L.M. Fletcher, Grand Traverse Band, a law professor who teaches and writes extensively on federal Indian and tribal law

*Stephanie Fryberg, Tulalip, a psychologist and founder/director of the RISE Center at the University of Michigan

*Patricia Marroquin Norby, Purépecha, the first Indigenous curator of Native American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

*Murray Sinclair, Ojibway from Peguis First Nation, an international honorary member who served as chair of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission

*Wes Studi, Cherokee Nation, an acclaimed actor who became the first Native actor to win an Oscar, receiving the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Governors Award for lifetime achievement in 2019

Academy President David W. Oxtoby said the sharp increase in Indigenous members brings new voices to the academy.

“The large number of Indigenous members elected in 2023 is a result of a rigorous nomination and election process rooted in our mission to recognize excellence and advance the common good,” Oxtoby said in a statement to ICT.

“The number of new Indigenous members is a welcome result,” he said.

Although there is no definitive list of Indigenous members of the academy, at least 27 other Indigenous leaders have been named as members in previous years, apparently starting in 1992 with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist N. Scott Momaday, Kiowa, according to a review of the academy membership records.

Deloria was elected as a member in 2017, after a long drought of Indigenous members following the election of a second member in the 1990s — Pulitzer-winning author, Louise Erdrich, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, who was elected in 1999.

Deloria then began working behind-the-scenes with several other academy members, including Loren Ghighlione, former dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and Douglas Medin, a psychology professor and director of the Program in Culture, Language and Cognition at Northwestern. The effort escalated with the publication in 2018 of an entire issue of the academy’s journal, Daedalus, that featured Native and non-Native voices examining “Indigenous Ways of Knowing for the Twenty-First Century.”

Until this year, the largest group elected had been eight in 2020, including then-U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, Muscogee, and policy advocate Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee.

Deloria said he and 2018 class member Robert Warrior, Osage, and Suzan Shown Harjo are now working together to prepare a new list of potential nominees for 2024.

“We find it quite exciting, to tell you the truth, to recognize excellence in Indian Country in this way,” he said.

Chavez Lamar said she, like Studi, is honored by the recognition.

“I’m certainly in good company, especially this year,” Chavez Lamar told ICT. “I’m pretty humbled by the fact that I’m part of that group.”

Other Indigenous leaders elected in years past include Onondaga faithkeeper Oren Lyons; singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, Cree; Cheyenne historian Henrietta Mann; the late Tim Giago, Oglala Lakota, founder of Indian Country Today, now ICT: and Mark Trahant, Shoshone-Bannock, ICT’s editor-at-large.

This year’s class also includes several well-known non-Natives, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, songwriter, actor and playwright who is the sole writer of the hit Broadway production, “Hamilton”; Chinese filmmaker Chloe Zhao; actor Laurence Fishburne III; and actress Michelle Yeoh, an international honorary member.

The academy was founded in 1780 by politicians John Adams and John Hancock, with Benjamin Franklin and George Washington among the first 25 members elected to the academy in 1781.

Today, the Academy is an honorary society that elects new members from the nonprofit, private and public sectors to engage them in issues facing the nation. The academy serves as an independent policy organization for the arts, democracy, education, global affairs and science.

Other members elected over the years include Alexander Hamilton; Albert Einstein; Martin Luther King Jr.; former Presidents Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton; former first ladies Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton; B.B. King; Clint Eastwood; and Nelson Mandela.

The new members will be inducted at a ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in September.

Here are this year’s new Indigenous members, in alphabetical order.

Maria Campbell

Campbell was named an international honorary member this year. She is the author of a 1973 memoir, “Halfbreed,” that described the difficulties she faced as a Métis woman in society. The book was re-released in 2019.

She has also written three children’s books, “People of the Buffalo” in 1975, “Little Badger and the Fire Spirit” in 1977, and “Riel’s People” in 1978. Her first play, “Flight,” was the first all-Aboriginal theater production in recent years in Canada.

Most recently, she co-edited the 2018 book, “Keetsahnak: Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters.”

Campbell also serves as coordinator for Indigenous Knowledge and Wellness in the president’s office at First Nations University of Canada in Saskatchewan. She has also been an organizer and activist in Saskatchewan.

Cynthia Chavez Lamar

As the first Native woman to head a Smithsonian museum, Chavez Lamar oversees three facilities – the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.; the museum’s facility in New York; and NMAI’s Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland.

An accomplished curator, author and scholar, Chavez Lamar has focused her research on Southwest Native art and working with Indigenous communities. She is a citizen of the San Felipe Pueblo but her ancestry also includes Hopi, Tewa, and Navajo.

“My goal is always collaboration with Indigenous communities along with outreach efforts,” she told ICT. “And then the other thing is education to the greater public, to help change misinformation and misperceptions about Indigenous people of the Western hemisphere, of which there are many.”

Lamar worked her way up to become director of the National Museum of the American Indian, starting as an intern in 1994. She left NMAI in 2006 to become director of the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, then was named director of the Indian Arts Research Center at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe in 2007.

She returned to NMAI in 2014 as associate curator, and was named NMAI director in 2022.

“Because I know the museum of the past, I also know what it’s been most recently,” she said. “All of this really helps guide me in terms of my thinking about its future. There are things that both of the previous directors spearheaded for the museum that I think are tremendously important to its future. We just have to think, “How do we improve upon the strength of those things and have them integrated throughout all the work that we do at the museum?’”

She has led museum efforts to improve collection access and availability by advocating to make a number of collections available online.

“We’ve tried to work on the visibility of the museum,” she said.

Dalee Sambo Dorough

Dorough is an advocate for Indigenous rights and an expert in international human rights law, international relations, and the rights of Alaska Natives.

As part of the Alaskan tribal sovereignty movement for decades, she served on the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues from 2011-2016, and is co-chair of the International Law Association’s Committee on Implementation of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

She is a former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, which represents Inuit, Yupik and Chukchi people in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and the Russian Far East.

Her parents were raised in the Inuit village of Unalakleet in Alaska, but she grew up in Anchorage.

John EchoHawk

EchoHawk, a lawyer, is founder and executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, a nonprofit organization that works to ensure the U.S. and state governments uphold their legal obligations to tribes, organizations and Native people.

He was the first graduate of the University of New Mexico’s special program to train Native lawyers, and was a founding member of the American Indian Law Students Association. He has been listed as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by the National Law Journal.

Walter R. Echo-Hawk

Echo-Hawk is an author, attorney and legal scholar who also serves as president of the Pawnee Nation Business Council.

He is a former attorney for the Native American Rights Fund and now practices law in Oklahoma. He is considered one of the foremost experts on Indian law, and has litigated cases involving Indigenous rights, treaty and water rights, reburial and repatriation, and tribal sovereignty, according to the Pawnee Nation website.

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Fletcher, too, is an expert on Indian law, and is the Harry Burns Hutchins Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.

He teaches and writes about federal Indian law, American tribal law, Anishinaabe legal and political philosophy, constitutional law, federal courts, and legal ethics, and is the primary editor and author of a comprehensive Indian law blog, Turtle Talk.

He also serves as chief justice of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, and the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, and as an appellate judge for the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians and other tribes. 

Stephanie Fryberg

Fryberg is a psychologist who is the founder/director of the Research for Indigenous Social Action and Equity Center, known as the RISE Center, at the University of Michigan, where she is also a professor of American Indian studies and psychology.

Her research focuses on race, class and culture in relation to mental health, and she testified before Congress in 2011 on the impact of racist stereotypes on Indigenous people.

Patricia Marroquin Norby

Norby is curator of Native American art for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where in 2020 she became the first Indigenous person hired for a curator position in the museum’s 150-year history.

Since arriving at the Met, she has curated several shows with contemporary Indigenous arts. She previously served as executive director and assistant director of the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, and as director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at The Newberry, in Chicago.

Murray Sinclair

Sinclair is a First Nations lawyer and former member of the Canadian Senate who served as chairman of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In 2021, he took over as chancellor of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, becoming the first Indigenous person to hold the position. He is also a member of the Three Fires Society, a traditional Ojibway medicine society.

He grew up on the Peguis Reserve near Winnipeg, Manitoba, and went on to serve as vice president of the Manitoba Métis Federation for the Interlake Region in the early 1970s. He also served as legal counsel for the First Nations of Manitoba. In 1988, he was appointed associate chief judge of the Provincial Court of Manitoba, becoming the first Aboriginal judge in the province.

Wes Studi

Studi is one of the most successful Native actors, appearing in nearly 100 films including “Dances with Wolves,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” and “Geronimo: An American Legend.” He has also appeared in several television series, including “Reservation Dogs” and “Skinwalkers.”

In 2018, he was invited to present at the 90th Academy Awards. With more than 25 million households watching the broadcast, Studi — a Vietnam veteran — introduced a video montage of military movies as a tribute to veterans, and spoke the Cherokee language.

In 2019, he became the first Native actor to win an Oscar, receiving the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Governors Award for extraordinary lifetime achievement.

ICT senior editor Dianna Hunt contributed to this report.