Harris-Walz win would make Minnesota’s Peggy Flanagan its first Native American and female governor

In 2016, when Flanagan was a state representative, she attended the Democratic National Convention and spoke out against then-nominee Trump, who mocked Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., by calling her Pocahontas.

“Your name is not Pocahontas,” Flanagan said she told her young daughter in a letter. “You should never let any one make you feel anything less than proud of who you are. So despite everything that has happened to our people, and no matter what Donald Trump says, we are still here.”

Flanagan had also been outspoken about Trump’s policies when he was president. In 2020, when Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, one of his senior advisers, visited Minnesota for the opening of the nation’s first task force office dedicated to solving cold cases of missing and murdered Native Americans and Alaska Natives, Flanagan took issue.

“Donald Trump made a career demonstrating and celebrating behavior that perpetuates violence against Native women and girls,” she said at the time.

Since then, Flanagan helped oversee the creation of the state’s first Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Office in St. Paul, developed to help families navigate the justice system.

“It really matters who’s at the table, and who’s elected,” she told MinnPost in 2023. “We finally have Native representation in the governor’s office and Native women in the Legislature.”

However, governors with Native American ancestry remain rare: Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt is a member of the Cherokee Nation.