Children’s Advocate Peggy Flanagan Poised to Become First Native Woman Governor

Updated Sept. 26

The first night of the Democratic National Convention, vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s lieutenant governor strode onto the stage to help kick things off. To Minnesotans, Peggy Flanagan has been a constant presence during Walz’s two terms as governor. But to many delegates in attendance — and people watching the event from around the world — hers was a new face.

“My name in the Ojibwe language is Gizhiiwewidamoonkwe, or in English, Speaks with a Clear and Loud Voice Woman,” she said, to thunderous applause . “I’m a member of the White Earth Nation and my family is the Wolf Clan. And the role of our clan is to ensure that we never leave anyone behind.”

If Kamala Harris is elected president in November, Flanagan will assume Walz’s office, making her the first Indigenous woman governor in U.S. history. Since her DNC appearance, headlines in national news outlets have dubbed her Walz’s “understudy,” a rising party star “waiting in the wings” for her turn.

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The actual story is much more interesting. In a rise marked by serendipity, two pivotal moments stand out. The first took place in 2002, when, as a new University of Minnesota graduate, Flanagan was walking past Sen. Paul Wellstone’s campaign headquarters and decided to stop in. She was 22 and eager to help him win a third term.

It didn’t happen. The senator was killed in a plane crash 12 days shy of what seemed certain re-election — a tragedy that served as prelude to the second defining moment. Wellstone’s death galvanized a generation of progressive political activists who created an organization, Wellstone Action, dedicated to teaching ordinary people the fundamentals of running a grassroots campaign.

Flanagan — who had used the Wellstone formula to become the youngest person ever elected to the Minneapolis School Board — was working for the candidate incubator in 2005 when a small-town high school teacher and football coach named Tim Walz turned up at one of its boot camps. He was considering a run for Congress as a Democrat in a deep-red southern Minnesota district. Flanagan ended up being his trainer . They stayed fast friends as each rose through the political ranks.

As lieutenant governor, Flanagan has been a driving force behind many of the policies now being showcased as the middle-class wins Walz brings to the presidential ticket. Advocacy for kids, vulnerable families and early childhood education have topped her agenda at each stage of her political career.

The universal free school lunches , child tax credit and paid family and sick leave that Harris and Walz are campaigning on? Good retail politics, certainly — and also an outgrowth of Flanagan’s childhood experience knowing that her friends were watching as she handed the lunch ladies the different-colored ticket issued to kids who got free food.

“Universal school meals is one of the most important things that I’ve ever worked on in my entire career — removing that shame and that stigma is a powerful tool to make sure that kids are eating right,” Flanagan says. “Anecdotally, we have heard attendance is up. … And instead of asking if kids have enough money in their account, we are asking, ‘Do you want chicken and rice or do you want pizza?’ ”

A literal political pedigree

Flanagan grew up at political strategy meetings. Her grandmother, mother and aunts were Irish social-justice Catholics who worked alongside the late Hubert Humphrey in Democratic politics for decades. When Humphrey ran for president in 1968, Flanagan’s mother, Patricia, moved to Washington, D.C., to work on his campaign.

“I grew up in a family where women just did the work,” Flanagan says. “I didn’t know anything different, right? My grandmother was absolutely the matriarch and was involved in party politics before it was, you know, polite for women to do that work.”

She did not realize that organizing was an activity with a name until she was older and doing it herself, Flanagan continues. “It was just like, well, you see a need, and then you bring people together and try to work together to solve the problem.”

Pat Flanagan was a single parent, getting by thanks to Medicaid, a Section 8 housing voucher, food stamps, state child care assistance, free- and reduced-price school lunches and the Minnesota Family Investment Program — the household subsidy that replaced welfare. She used the benefits to move herself and her daughter to a middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, St. Louis Park, that had good schools and stable neighborhoods.

Eventually, Pat became a phlebotomist, but struggle shaped Peggy Flanagan’s views. She has also referred to herself on several occasions, without elaborating, as a “ survivor and child witness of domestic violence.” She speaks passionately about her mother’s insistence that the girl eat first when food was scarce. Somehow, she says frequently, Pat Flanagan always found enough resources to meet her daughter’s needs.

If the women in Flanagan’s life taught her to build coalitions, her father nurtured her sense of resolve. Marvin Manypenny spent decades fighting to recoup lands swindled from White Earth , one of the homes of Minnesota’s largest indigenous group, the Anishinaabe, who were dubbed Ojibwe by colonists. In 1986, Manypenny sued the U.S. government in a case that chronicled more than a century of betrayed promises by federal officials to respect Native lands. In 1991, an appeals court dismissed the suit , ruling that it did not have jurisdiction to decide the claims.

Manypenny was a frequent fixture at protests and active in tribal politics, but not a consistent voter himself until his daughter’s name appeared on a statewide ticket as the candidate for lieutenant governor in 2018.

“My dad oftentimes would say, ‘My girl, I want to burn down the system, and you want to get into the system and change it from the inside out,’ ” Flanagan told Minnesota Public Radio when he died in 2020. “That’s a pretty good summary of how my dad operated and how I operate.”

When Flanagan walked into Wellstone’s campaign office, it was with her maternal lineage’s coalition-building skills and her father’s spine. Wellstone’s organizers put her to work mobilizing the urban Native American community.

A political science professor at Carleton College, located an hour south of the Twin Cities, Wellstone ran a then-unorthodox, bare-bones campaign for U.S. Senate in 1990, ousting two-term Republican Rudy Boschwitz, the owner of a chain of lumber stores.

Accompanied by an army of door-knockers — many of them his students — Wellstone rode an old green school bus around the state, giving stump speeches from a platform on the back. He could afford to air only one TV ad one time, but his grainy, low-budget “Looking for Rudy” — in which he went seeking his rival to set up a debate — became a news story itself.

Flanagan was an early linchpin of Wellstone Action’s grassroots training efforts. A campaign policy aide and longtime friend of the senator’s, Pam Costain traveled the country with Flanagan for several years, teaching people about what they called the Wellstone triangle. Even in her 20s, Costain says, Flanagan had experience with all three legs.

“You cannot do electoral politics without an appreciation for what it takes to build grassroots involvement,” she explains. “And you can’t do [community organizing] work if you’re not willing to contend for power — because then you’re just always going to be the agitator and not the decision-maker.”

Out of college, Flanagan was employed by the Division of Indian Work, a Twin Cities nonprofit service provider, helping to build relationships between the school system and Native families. She had been encouraged by a longtime Minneapolis School Board member to run for a seat in the 2004 election, but begged off.

“I was like, you know, I’m 23. I don’t have any kids in the district,” Flanagan recalls. “I don’t think I’m the one. But I will help you find somebody.”

Not long after that conversation, at a meeting where American Indian Movement founder Clyde Bellecourt was speaking, she raised her hand and told the crowd that if anyone wanted to run for school board, she would help. “Folks in the room were like, my girl, why don’t you do it?”

As she drove home from the meeting, Flanagan passed Wellstone’s former campaign office, where she had stopped to volunteer. She pulled over and decided to run.

“I didn’t think we’re going to win,” she recalls. “But at the very least, the issues that are happening in the urban Native community … will be brought forward. It turned out that a number of people in Minneapolis shared those concerns.”

‘It wasn’t a small thing’

Flanagan was not the first Native person to serve on the board, but her presence made the district’s ongoing failure to serve its Indigenous students harder to ignore. In the 1970s, Indigenous dropout rates in Minneapolis schools hovered around 80%, fueled by decades of official indifference to the continued legacy of American Indian boarding schools that stripped Native children of their languages and cultures. Mistrust of government-operated schools is still high.

Bullying and a near-total lack of Native teachers or curriculum fueled truancy rates, sometimes leading to court-ordered removals of Native children from their families. Before its closure in 2008, a free, private alternative school operated by the American Indian Movement graduated more Indigenous students than Minneapolis Public Schools combined.

Flanagan had graduated from high school in St. Louis Park, a suburb located just west of Minneapolis, but she understood what it was like not to see herself represented in the classroom.

“When I got to the University of Minnesota, I had for the very first time a teacher who looked like me … in my intro to American Indian Studies class,” she says. “It changed everything. Learning accurate history, knowing that there is a teacher who will absolutely understand who you are and where you come from.”

On the school board — where she served alongside Costain, who had also sought and won a seat — Flanagan was instrumental in the negotiation of a 2006 agreement , long in coming, between urban tribal leaders and the district. The first of its kind in the country, it required the school system to create specialized programs aimed at engaging mistrustful families, preserving Native languages and strengthening cultural identity.

Now the head of the Minneapolis Foundation, R.T. Rybak was in the first of three terms as mayor of Minneapolis when the pact was signed. “I t wasn’t a small thing to negotiate an agreement between a public school system and Native leaders, because it starts with an extraordinary amount of historical inequity,” he says. “That was a very significant achievement.”

American Indian students were guaranteed placement at three schools designated “best practices” sites. Educators would be required to interview for positions — a departure from the strict seniority-based placement system then required by the teachers union contract — and would have to agree to undertake ongoing, specialized training and observation. To ensure continuity, they were also supposed to be protected from being bumped from their positions during layoff.

At the time, 38% of Minneapolis Public Schools Native students graduated, more than two-thirds of them from alternative schools not operated by the district. The number of Indigenous students graduating from district schools has ticked up slightly in the intervening two decades, but partly because of a change in the way state officials define American Indian. In 2023, 42% graduated, with 14% dropping out and the fate of another 20% unknown.

Almost half of Minneapolis’s Native graduates enroll in some postsecondary education within 16 months. But in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, none had earned one year’s worth of credits within two years. Since 2021, the percentage of Minneapolis Indigenous students reading at grade level has fallen from 22% to 19%, while math proficiency has hovered between 10% and 13%.

The agreement between the district and Native leaders still exists , but there is no evidence the staffing exceptions were codified in the teacher contract. Last May, the district’s American Indian Parent Advisory Committee notified the school board that it considers the schools out of compliance with a state law regarding its obligations to Native students.

Flanagan’s elected term on the board ended in 2009, but the following year she was appointed to replace Costain, who had resigned to take over the district’s nonprofit education partner. At Flanagan’s first meeting back , the board heard an unflinching presentation on the district’s racial and ethnic achievement gaps, complete with an estimate that at the incremental pace of change taking place, it would take decades for Minneapolis students to catch up to their peers statewide.

Flanagan had an emotional reaction to the lack of meaningful progress. “We know what works for kids. And we’ve just got to be courageous enough to do it, to ask for it, to demand it,” she said. “If white kids were failing in this district … at the rate that children of color and Native students are failing, people would be on fire. They would be storming the Capitol, they would be burning that place down.”

In 2013, Marian Wright Edelman, then president of the Children’s Defense Fund, tapped Flanagan to head its Minnesota branch. During her time with the organization, she spearheaded a successful effort to get lawmakers to raise the state’s minimum wage — then $6.15, more than a dollar an hour less than the federal minimum — and index it to inflation. For large employers, it is now $10.85.

A few months later, Minneapolis’s new mayor-elect, Betsy Hodges, asked Flanagan to head her “Cradle to K Cabinet,” an effort to eliminate disparities in child welfare in the city.

“Peggy understood very clearly that one of the challenges of working with prenatal to 3-year-olds is you cannot help and support them without helping and supporting their parents,” says Hodges. “And lots of people love to support young people but do not love to support young people’s parents. When they’re in school, it’s a little easier to heed that reality. But when it’s prenatal to 3, it’s not. So what are the supports parents need to be really effective?”

Flanagan made it clear up front that families’ opportunities to shape the cabinet’s strategies needed to be meaningful. “W e wanted to have enough parents as part of the group that they didn’t feel like they were being tokenized,” Hodges recalls. “We made sure to arrange meetings for times that they would be able to be there. We made sure to have child care. We did our best to set it up in a way where we could get their feedback in a way that didn’t feel dismissive or condescending.”

The pull of public office

But electoral politics still tugged. In 2015, Flanagan won a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives, serving a handful of suburbs on Minneapolis’s western boundary, including the one where she grew up. She served until 2019, authoring bills in support of early childhood education and a range of benefits for families. She sponsored just one K-12 education measure, to fund diversity, equity and inclusion training for educators in her home district.

In 2017, Walz called Flanagan and asked her to run for lieutenant governor. (In Minnesota, the governor and the No. 2 are elected as a ticket.) For many of her predecessors, the job has been a one-way trip to obscurity, but since their inaugurations, Walz and Flanagan have typically been seen together.

“Every major decision she is there from the beginning and helps me see about them differently and think about them differently,” Walz told Minnesota Public Radio . “You have a 55-year-old rural white guy who was in the Army [National Guard] and coached football, and you have a 39-year-old Indigenous woman who lived in St. Louis Park. That brings a wealth of [ways] to approach these issues.”

Flanagan has an office in the same Capitol suite as the governor. The White Earth flag hangs in the hall alongside the Stars and Stripes and a new state flag adopted last spring, replacing one that was offensive to Native Minnesotans.

Privately, some Republicans have groused that they believe Flanagan pushed Walz to the left politically. Whether that is true is debatable, but her policy priorities have been front and center in the six years since they took office.

One of her first accomplishments as the state’s second-highest executive was securing the first increase in decades to the Minnesota Family Investment Program, the cash assistance program for low-income families her mother depended on when she was a child. In 2019, lawmakers increased the payments by $100 a month.

Flanagan also played a key role in ensuring Native history and culture are included in new state social studies standards. Topics differ by grade level and include Indigenous people’s relationships to land and water, the current state of treaties and American Indian perspectives on the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

A Flanagan administration’s priorities

This year’s appearance was not Flanagan’s first DNC speech. In 2016, she took to the stage to read a letter to her daughter Siobhan, then 3. She was still in the state House, and only the second Native woman to address the convention.

The following year, she told the Minneapolis Native newspaper The Circle that she would run for the House of Representatives seat occupied by Keith Ellison if he did not stand for re-election. She ended up on Walz’s ticket instead.

Many of the political wins the governor and lieutenant governor have enjoyed in recent years were possible because Democrats controlled both branches of the state legislature and the executive branch — by a very slim margin. That could change if Republicans gain control of either the Minnesota House or Senate.

If Flanagan becomes governor, state Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson would like to see more emphasis on closing achievement gaps.

“While Walz and Flanagan both have experience in the education system, their priorities too often focused on satisfying political interests instead of ensuring kids were getting the education they deserved,” he says. “Once a leader in education, Minnesota now lags Mississippi in some areas despite years of historic funding increases.”

Flanagan says her priorities will remain the same if Harris and Walz are elected and she becomes governor. High on her list is addressing chronic absenteeism: “Attendance matters, especially in the post-pandemic world that we live in.”

She also hopes to promote career and technical education, invest more state aid in kindergarten readiness and continue diversifying the state’s teacher corps, which has historically been more than 90% white.

Flanagan says her daughter attends the same school system she did but is having a wholly different experience. “There are over 40 Native kids in her school,” and Ojibwe language is taught to fourth- and fifth-graders, she says. “She can fully show up as her Indigenous self in the classroom and know that she will be valued for who she is, that there will be a curiosity about her identity and culture that is demonstrated in a supportive way.”

The change, she adds, benefits all kids. “I am hopeful that we are in a place, not only in talking about the history of Native people and ensuring we have Indigenous education for all, but also acknowledging Native people are contemporary people who still exist and who live all across the state,” she says. “Everybody benefits from learning the full, rich history of our state.”