If Democrat Kamala Harris wins the US presidential election on November 5th, she will certainly make history as the first female president of the United States and also of mixed descent, Asian-Indian from her mother and Jamaican from her father.
A potential victory for Harris would result in another historic moment for the US. Its candidate for vice president, Hon Walsh, he will follow her to the White House, stepping down as governor of Minnesota. And according to current legislation, he will be succeeded in office by the deputy governor, Peggy Flanagan. And her name may sound Irish, but Flanagan is an American Indian, of the Ojibwe tribe (she also has Irish roots). For the first time in American history, an indigenous woman will become the governor of a State.
From the position of lieutenant governor, the 44-year-old Flanagan is already the American Indiana with the highest state office in history, which she reached in 2019, when Tim Walsh was elected governor of Minnesota, who chose her as his candidate for deputy, while the same “twin” re-elected in 2022.
From early on in the commons
A graduate of the Department of Child Psychology and Native American History at the University of Minnesota, Flanagan became involved with the public early on, mainly working to protect the rights of Native Americans and children. Her father, Moneypenny Flanagan, was a well-known activist for Indian rights and a fierce critic of successive American governments.
His daughter, however, chose to change the system “from the inside” and largely succeeded. Native Americans make up just 1 percent of Minnesota’s population, have been marginalized for decades, and the state’s lieutenant governor has given their voice a major boost. Thanks to Flanagan, in June a special directorate was established in the US Department of Agriculture for the trade of products produced exclusively by Indians.
It was also her initiative to establish, in 2021, by law, a task force to investigate cases where American Indian women are missing or have been murdered. “Indian women are often invisible or expendable. This has to change” has said.
Flanagan, however, is not only focused on representing the citizens of her tribe. She inspired free school meals in Minnesota in 2019, a measure that Governor Tim Walsh has also been credited with by many Republicans.
First election in 2015
Flanagan was first elected to the Minnesota state legislature in 2015. The following year, she represented the state at the Democratic convention where she Hillary Clinton was anointed the presidential candidate against the Republican candidate, Donald Trump.
At that conference, Flanagan took a direct stand against Trump, who had mocked the Massachusetts Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren and a candidate for the presidency by calling her derogatory “Pocahontas” when the politician had claimed that her ancestry was part Indian.
(OR Pocahontas she was the daughter of a Powhatan Indian chief of America, who was kidnapped by British settlers in 1613, forced to convert to Christianity, married the British John Rolfea tobacco plantation owner in Virginia, and died in 1617, aged just 21 in England.)
Flanagan said at the time that despite what happened to American Indians and despite what Trump says, “we’re still here.”
In the 2020 election, Minnesota’s American Indians contributed to Democrat Biden’s victory over Trump. That same year, when Ivanka Trumpthe then-president’s daughter and one of his closest aides, visited Minnesota for the inauguration of the agency that houses the task force that investigates the cases of missing or murdered Native American women, Flanagan blasted the then-president.
“THE Trump has built an entire career promoting and praising attitudes that condone violence against women.”
Supporting Harris
Particularly combative, Flanagan was the first politician to organize a Native American rally in Phoenix, Arizona, in support of the new Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, after Biden announced he was withdrawing from the presidential race.
«Arizona can decide the election” she wrote in a post on social networks (Arizona is indeed one of the ambivalent States that will decide the outcome of the election), “…thebut it is certain that the vote of the Indians will decide the result in Arizona.”
The lieutenant governor of Minnesota is confident that Native Americans will make a difference in the upcoming election. “We are strategically located in different states across the US and I know that wherever we Indians vote, the candidate we support wins.”
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