For most of the past three decades, a Minnesota U.S. senator has served on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, the preeminent Senate body that works on federal issues impacting Indian Country.
Peggy Flanagan, the current lieutenant governor and the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party nominee for Minnesota’s open U.S. Senate seat in this fall’s election, has made continuing this tradition a pillar of her campaign.
“I think it’s important to have a Native voice on that committee,” Flanagan, who is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation, told Sahan Journal. “But more important than that, it’s important to have someone who’s got the lived experience of working with tribal governments and who understands how important tribal communities are to our state and to the country as a whole.”
Several tribal leaders across Minnesota agree that having a U.S. senator serving on Indian Affairs has been crucial for not just the 11 tribal nations in Minnesota, but the state as well.
Lenny Fineday, who previously served as secretary at Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, emphasized that tribes contribute billions of dollars to Minnesota’s economy and “oftentimes, particularly in rural areas, they are the largest employers in their county.”
“They’re not just employing Native Americans, but non-natives as well,” Fineday told Sahan Journal. “Recognizing that, I think it’s important for Minnesota to have representation on the committee of jurisdiction that oversees tribal affairs at the federal level.”
Other tribal leaders in Minnesota offered similar opinions.
“Having Minnesota senators serve on this influential committee gives Minnesota’s 11 tribal nations a direct and important voice at one of the primary tables in Congress where federal Indian policy is developed and advanced,” said Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community Chairman Cole Miller in a prepared statement to Sahan Journal. “That representation helps ensure Minnesota tribal priorities remain visible as Congress develops legislation, conducts oversight, sets federal policy, and holds agencies accountable for fulfilling the United States’ obligations to tribal nations.”
Melanie Benjamins, who served as chief executive of Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe from 2000 to 2024, said having a Minnesota U.S. senator serve on Indian Affairs means tribes can work with someone local on federal issues.
“They know your issues because they have dealt with them personally,” Benjamins told Sahan Journal. “They know where the reservations are located. They know the demographics. They know the elected leadership. They know the staffers.”
The campaign for Michele Tafoya, the Republican nominee for the open U.S. Senate seat, did not respond to Sahan Journal’s request for comment on how she would approach Native American issues if elected.
Wellstone starts trend
The Senate Indian Affairs Committee dates back to 1820, a time when the federal government was negotiating treaties with Native American tribes. Among the committee’s tasks was researching and recommending people for the role of “Indian Agent,” which regulated sales of goods to tribes and attempted to force tribes into agriculture and manufacturing.
The committee also played a large role in removing Native Americans from their tribal lands for not embracing agricultural or manufacturing work, leading up to the 1870s, when the federal government stopped recognizing tribes as independent sovereign nations that could make treaties.
In the 1940s, the Senate eliminated the Indian Affairs Committee as the federal government yielded much of its relationships with tribes to state governments.
Three decades later, the Senate resurrected the committee, largely in response to Native American rights movements led by the American Indian Movement, which was founded in Minneapolis in 1968. The committee was reestablished in 1977 following a review of Native American issues by the federal government that reaffirmed tribal sovereignty and reemphasized the federal government’s responsibility to work with tribes.
In 1991, Paul Wellstone, a newly elected DFL senator who was involved in various ‘60s and ‘70s-era activist causes as a political science professor at Carleton College, made joining Indian Affairs a priority. This came after several visits to reservations and commitments he made to tribal leaders during his 1990 Senate campaign.
“His view was that Minnesota had a significant Native American population, and there was a lot of data on how Native Americans in Minnesota were underserved when it came to education and health policy,” said Jeff Blodgett, who served as Wellstone’s state director and managed all three of his campaigns for Senate. “He wanted to close those gaps.”
Key to this was Wellstone’s support for gaming on reservations, which had started in the 1980s. Gaming is a particularly important revenue generator for tribes like Mille Lacs, White Earth and Leech Lake, all located far outside the Twin Cities, Blodgett said.
While serving on Indian Affairs, Wellstone opposed efforts from the federal government to meddle with gaming compacts between tribes and states.
“There were always efforts by the federal government to try to take income off of or tax gaming proceeds,” Blodgett told Sahan Journal. “Paul fought all of that.”
Blodgett also remembers Wellstone successfully fighting proposed cuts to Indian Health Service, the federal agency that provides health care to tribal nations across the country.
Franken and Smith continue tradition
After Wellstone was killed in a plane crash in 2002 and Republican Norm Coleman was elected to the seat, Minnesota went eight years without a senator on Indian Affairs. That changed in 2009 after comedian and DFLer Al Franken narrowly defeated Coleman.
In his 2017 memoir “Al Franken, Giant of the Senate,” Franken explains his desire to continue the tradition Wellstone started on Indian Affairs and his various visits to tribes during his 2008 campaign. At the start of his campaign, Franken recalls being “completely ignorant about Indian country.”
“I knew enough to know that tribes in our state and all around the country face enormous problems,” wrote Franken, who declined an interview for this story. “These problems can seem so big and so numerous that people in a position to do something about them often give up. Not Paul Wellstone.”
Among his advisors on American Indian issues was Flanagan, who at the time was a Minneapolis School Board member. Franken wrote that he “got a seat on the Indian Affairs Committee—because, in the Senate, anyone who wants to be on Indian Affairs gets on Indian Affairs.”
“It’s not necessarily a sought-after committee,” said Alana Petersen, who served as state director and deputy chief of staff for Franken.
In 2016, Franken helped secure $12 million in 2016 for a badly needed new building for Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig School on Leech Lake reservation, and another $9 million for the Department of Energy’s tribal energy loan guarantee program, which helps tribes pay for energy infrastructure.
Franken also pushed the federal government to remove stored nuclear waste from Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant that’s adjacent to Prairie Island Indian Community. However, that issue remains unresolved.
Sen. Tina Smith, who succeeded Franken in 2018 following his resignation from the Senate over sexual harassment allegations, continued the tradition of serving on the committee.
“When I was negotiating with [Senate Minority] Leader [Chuck] Schumer about what committee assignments I wanted, I told him that my top priority was to be on Senate Indian Affairs Committee,” Smith told Sahan Journal. “And I remember Schumer sort of laughing and saying, ‘That’s not going to be a problem.’”
The committee has traditionally operated in bipartisan ways, Smith said, and its membership typically includes senators from states like Alaska, Montana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, the Dakotas and others that have higher-than-average Native American populations.
“As a result, it’s not the most high-profile committee, but it can be a committee where there’s a lot of longevity and people are really accustomed to working together on issues regardless of party affiliation,” Smith said.
Smith said she wanted to serve on the committee to continue the Minnesota tradition and also because of her proximity to Native American culture growing up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She also had worked with Minnesota tribes as chief of staff and eventually lieutenant governor for former Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton.
Leech Lake re-acquires stolen land
Benjamins recalls Smith helping distribute federal COVID grants to Mille Lacs. Initially, the federal government planned to give a lump sum grant to all six Ojibwe bands in Minnesota. Smith intervened and got the government to give six different grants to each Ojibwe band based on population numbers, helping the six bands avoid having to split the money themselves.
“It would have been more bureaucracy,” Benjamins said. “It would have been more additional meetings to determine what the dollar amount would have been for each of the six [bands], and then there would have been a process where the checks would have had to been issued.”
One key issue Smith worked on involved Leech Lake’s 2024 reacquisition of approximately 12,000 acres of land that the federal government had illegally taken from the tribe in the 1940s and transferred to the U.S. Forest Service. Fineday worked closely with Smith on this issue.
“That almost doubled the land that we hold in trust,” Fineday said, “and that we’re able to utilize to continue to preserve natural resources, protect the water, protect the animals and the medicines on our land, but also in sustainable ways and in planned ways to develop it for the betterment of our community for housing and infrastructure.”
Much of the reacquired land is close to existing housing developments and the tribe is actively looking at how to use it to “meet housing needs on the reservation,” Fineday said.
Fineday, who now serves as general counsel for the National Congress of American Indians, said it’s notable for Minnesota, where the American Indian percentage of the population mirrors the nation at around 2 percent.
“I do think it’s pretty unusual that we’ve had this consistent representation,” he said, noting that senators from states like California and Oregon, which have similar percentages of Native Americans, often rotate in and out of the Indian Affairs Committee. “We’ve been fortunate in Minnesota that we’ve had senators who’ve been interested in serving on the committee.”
Having Flanagan, an enrolled White Earth Nation citizen, on the committee would also be unusual. Since the Senate reestablished the committee in 1977, just two enrolled tribal members have served on it: former Arizona Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who first served as a Democrat and switched to a Republican, and former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a Republican who is currently secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Flanagan’s vision
Flanagan says she wore on her wedding dress, and now owns, a beaded bolo tie that Red Lake Nation originally presented to Wellstone. One piece of legislation Wellstone worked on, Flanagan noted, was the Violence Against Women Act, which first passed in 1994 and strengthened legal protections for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.
This issue is particularly improtant to Native American communities because rates of sexual violence fall disproportionately onto Native women, Flanagan said.
Smith worked on the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act in 2022, specifically expanding how tribes can prosecute non-native people who commit criminal sexual assault acts against Native people on tribal land.
Flanagan said that if elected, she would continue working on this issue through the committee. She said she also would push to establish a permanent federal office for missing and murdered Indigenous women.
She emphasized that the committee has “a powerful legacy of bipartisan work and support.”
“For me, it’s working on issues of economic development,” she said. “It’s working on issues around land management, it’s knowing that you know there is a need for permanent advance funding for Indian Health Service.”
