Native American activist to speak March 20

Suzan Harjo

Suzan Shown Harjo, Native American activist, lobbyist, lecturer, and writer, will speak at Penn State Harrisburg Wednesday, March 20 at 6:15 p.m. in the Olmsted Building Gallery Lounge. Part of the college’s Martin Luther King, Jr. 2013 Commemoration Lecture Series, the event is free and open to the public.

Harjo has helped Native Americans recover more than one million acres of land by working on legislation to protect their rights. She also has raised public awareness about issues concerning Native Americans.

She serves as president and executive director of the Morning Star Institute in Washington, D.C., a national Native rights organization which she founded in 1984. She is a founding trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian. Harjo was the first woman to receive the IAIA Honorary Doctorate of Humanities degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2011.

The event is sponsored by the college’s Student Government Association and the Office of Campus Life and Intercultural Affairs.

The final installment of the lecture series, “Creative Interaction: A Move Towards Cultural Synergy,” features Dr. Elijah Anderson, Wednesday, April 3 at 6:30 p.m. in the Olmsted Building Gallery Lounge.

One of the nation’s leading urban ethnographers and cultural theorists, Anderson is Yale University’s William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Sociology. Anderson has been a consultant to the White House, the United States Congress, the National Academy of Science, and the National Science Foundation. He has served on the board of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, as vice-president of the American Sociological Association, and as a member of the National Research Council’s Panel on the Understanding and Control of Violent Behavior. His publications have won the Komarovsky Award from the Eastern Sociological Society and the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park Award for the best published book in the area of urban sociology.