Peggy Flanagan is poised to become the country’s first female Native American governor

Peggy Flanagan, who is poised to become the first Native American woman to serve as governor if the Harris-Walz ticket is victorious in November, is accustomed to plowing new political ground.

In 2016, she became the second Native American woman to address a Democratic National Convention. Two years later, she was elected Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, making her the country’s highest-ranking American Indian elected state official.

But the 44-year-old enrolled member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, who also has Irish roots, knows Native Americans still face unusual barriers to recognition and respect.

“Too often elected leaders don't know we exist,” Flanagan said in an interview with POLITICO. She recounted a colleague’s reaction to her retirement speech from the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2018.

“I didn't know you were Native American,” said the member. “I thought you were all dead.”

That type of ignorance persists even though Flanagan would follow two male American Indian governors, including current Oklahoma GOP Gov. Kevin Stitt, a member of the Cherokee Nation. And Charles Curtis — who served as Herbert Hoover’s vice president — remains the highest-ranking Indigenous elective office holder in U.S. history.

Flanagan would bring a wide range of experience to the office. She served one term on the Minneapolis School Board in the mid-2000s and then became executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Children’s Defense Fund. In 2015, she was elected to the Minnesota House, serving three years before being tapped by Tim Walz to be his running mate.

They’d met more than a decade earlier, when Walz was one of the students that Flanagan helped train at Camp Wellstone , a kind of political bootcamp for aspiring progressive political candidates and operatives.

The conversation with Flanagan covered her efforts to build Native American political power, the progressive governing record she and Walz established in Minnesota over the last six years — and what happened when her daughter was discovered to have lice one day after her mom was elected lieutenant governor.

“I need help. Who do I call? Tim Walz,” Flanagan recalled. “He was amazing and coached me through the whole thing, and that is who Tim Walz is.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

If Kamala Harris and Walz win in November, you would become the country's first female Native American governor. What do you think the significance of that would be? And what does it say about American politics?

Representation matters. I'm the highest-ranking Native woman in executive office currently, and it is a real honor. But I also think we are in a moment in American politics where things are changing, and I think it's a good thing when our elected leaders more accurately reflect the communities they seek to represent. I think it’s good for democracy.

Growing up, I had Geraldine Ferraro, as [Walter] Mondale's running mate. And now my daughter has all of these examples: Deb Haaland, who's the secretary of the Interior; Sharice Davids, who's a congresswoman; her mom's lieutenant governor, which she's probably not that impressed with. But it's just a completely different reality. If I am not the first Native woman who is a governor in this country, she is shortly on her way.

You mentioned Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids, two other Native American women who have had massive political accomplishments. You also have a background as a political activist. What are the biggest challenges in building Native American political power that you see?

There's a lot of distrust of government systems for incredibly good reasons. That's something that is absolutely a challenge, but it also provides an incredible opportunity. Native people — and I would say Native women — have been leaders since time immemorial. It is just modern society that is catching up.

Thankfully, we are beginning to see more Native people in elected office. But if we want to reach parity, we have to elect 17,000 Native people at all levels of government. I’m the co-founder of an organization called Advance Native Political Leadership, and it grew out of Wellstone Action and the Native American leadership program that we had there. This is an organization that is training Native people to run for office and to work on campaigns all across the country.

The Native vote makes a huge difference. We are strategically located in swing states all across the country. I think President [Joe] Biden and Vice President [Kamala] Harris were elected because of the Native community in Arizona. Ignore us at your peril. We are a really important voting block.

You've mentioned that your dad — Native American rights activist Marvin Manypenny, who died in 2020 — said to you, “I want to burn down the system, and you want to get into the system and change it from the inside out.” Do you think that's an accurate summation of your disparate approaches to political change?

He would quickly follow that up with, “My girl, we need to do both.” One of the things that my dad really understood is that there are different roles in this work and in the movement, and that there are folks who need to be outside agitators and there are folks who need to be at the decision-making table. My dad didn't really vote until I was on the ballot, and then he was wearing Walz-Flanagan T-shirts and rocking buttons all over the place and telling everybody how important the election was.

One of the biggest challenges that we face is that too often elected leaders don't know we exist. When I was wrapping up my time in the House of Representatives, I gave my retirement speech and one of my colleagues came up to me after my speech and said, “I didn't know you were Native American.” First of all, oh, cool, that means you haven't been listening to anything I’ve said. But he literally said, “I didn't know you're Native American,” quickly followed by, “I thought you were all dead.” This is an elected official who clearly represents Native people, because we're literally everywhere, and that was his perspective and position.

Would you like to name the former colleague who made that statement — I thought you were all dead?

I sure don’t, because they still work there.

Since 2022, Minnesota Democrats have enacted a pretty bold progressive agenda, including universal free school meals, universal paid family and medical leave and many other things. Do you see any sign of a backlash in what is pretty much a purple state?

Paid family and medical leave is overwhelmingly popular with folks on both sides of the aisle. It's not a secret that we were going to enact paid family medical leave. We literally told people all about it as the candidates running for the Legislature, and we won because Minnesotans were interested in having paid family medical leave and not having to choose between a paycheck and taking care of a new baby or a sick loved one or themselves.

About universal meals, we met with a lot of advocates who work in the the hunger space, a lot of school nutrition workers who told me stories about how hard it was to see a kid come to school with a lunch box that had an apple or one container of yogurt because they just didn't have enough food in the house, but yet didn't qualify for free and reduced price lunch. At Maple Lake Elementary, I had a social worker who told me that she did a home visit and that the kids were eating crayons because they were so hungry. As a kid who grew up with a different colored lunch ticket, removing the shame and stigma matters.

Democrats have been remarkably unified in Minnesota over the last two years, considering how slim the legislative majorities are in the House and Senate. But one area of tension, and I'm relying on reporting by the Minnesota Reformer , was over the decision to expand Medicaid to undocumented immigrants, which Gov. Walz was reportedly opposed to. How would you characterize that debate?

He signed the bill, and that's the most important expression of support. Ultimately, we want people to be healthy. For goodness' sake, we went through a pandemic. I want people to have access to health care and to preventative care and to vaccinations. We're not in the business of picking and choosing who gets what, whether that's meals or health care.

We put out our budget at the beginning of every legislative session, and the Legislature then puts out their budget and priorities, and then we compromise and get to the end of the session and wrap it all up. So I'm under no illusions that in 2025 when we roll out our budget that that's going to be exactly what gets across the finish line.

I think it's pretty remarkable how well our coalitions have worked together and withstood a lot of pressures. You see conservatives have a lot of fights in public. We have a lot of, “Can I see you in the kitchen?” conversations. I think that's important to maintain those relationships and that trust. A lot of the folks that I've been working with on these issues and these policies that we’ve passed, I've been working with for the last 20 years and those relationships have endured. That’s part of the special sauce for what we've been able to do here in Minnesota.

Nearly two decades ago, when Walz was first looking to run for Congress, you were one of the trainers at Camp Wellstone when he attended. What lessons that he learned there do you see on display as he runs for vice president?

One of the things that's really on display right now is just his authenticity. What you see is what you get. One of the things that people really liked about Paul [Wellstone] is that you knew who he was, and even if you didn't agree with him all the time, you knew who he was and why he approached policy issues the way that he did. And I see something similar in Gov. Walz. There's folks who are like, “I don't agree with him on anything, but I like the guy.” That's kind of the vibe that people have with Tim Walz.

I heard you say that your daughter was discovered to have lice the day after the 2018 election. Can you share how the newly elected Walz-Flanagan ticket handled that early crisis?

My first instinct was to call Congressman Tim Walz, also governor-elect Tim Walz, to say, “Help, my child has lice, and I don't know what to do.” So that was interesting. But he was amazing. I was super freaked out. We'd never dealt with it before. Siobhan was a total trooper.

He said, “Go to Target, and then FaceTime me from the aisle.” And so I did. He had me show all the different shampoos and stuff. He was like, “This is the one that you get.” And then he’s like, “Once you get home, FaceTime me again.” So I FaceTimed him again from the bathroom, as I'm picking nits out of my child's hair. And he was amazing and coached me through the whole thing, and that is who Tim Walz is.