This is true. Historically, for many tribal nations and for literally thousands of years, women chose the chief and sat on various councils. This disturbed early European male colonists, who were not used to seeing a woman sitting across from them, let alone talking politics and making decisions on behalf of the tribe.

In the car, Flanagan was happy to be out of the sun and chug some iced water. I mentioned the reality that we’re the smallest racial minority in our own ancestral land and rarely included in national conversations, especially in political discourse, and then I asked, “How would you describe Indigenous peoples to those who aren’t acquainted or familiar with the Native of today?”

It was, she told me, a heavy question. “We’re beautiful. We are survivors. We’re caretakers of our communities. We’re teachers and scientists, and we’ve always been here,” she said. “We are contemporary people, and of course we’re not a monolith.”

Currently, there are 574 federally recognized tribes, and each tribe and nation is unique in language, politics, customs, cuisine, and spiritualities. Not every tribe lived in tipis and not every nation wore eagle-feather headdresses.

Flanagan lamented, though, that there’s still a need to state the obvious and teach such things, like an “Indigenous 101” every year. She recalled a time when a colleague approached her gobsmacked having just learned that she was, in fact, Native.

“I thought you were all dead!” her colleague, an elected official in the Minnesota State House of Representatives, said at the time.

Not really knowing how to respond, Flanagan shouted, “Surprise!” She considers that exchange, while appalling, “a really important moment” to remind non-Natives that we are still here. “It illustrated the need for people to be in relationship with us,” she said.

Early Tuesday, when news broke that Kamala Harris had chosen Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, Indigenous folks across the country were abuzz, and not because Harris had chosen Walz but because, in accordance with Minnesota’s Constitution, should the Harris-Walz ticket beat out Trump-Vance, Flanagan would assume the governorship and immediately create history.

Celebrity chef Sean Sherman—an Oglala Lakota who owns and operates Owamni, a restaurant in Minneapolis that boasts “‘decolonized’ cuisine” (berries, bison, wild rice, and other foods indigenous to this continent)—gushed at the idea of having a Native female representing his state.

Sherman praised Flanagan for making sure Indigenous peoples are not ignored, that they are seen and heard at the legislature. She has worked diligently to secure economic opportunities for the state’s first peoples. Sherman said that his work “trying to normalize Indigenous foods and create access and education, reconnecting with our ancestral foods and medicines would be much harder” without people like Flanagan, Interior Secretary Debra Haaland, who’s Laguna Pueblo, and Representative Sharice Davids of Kansas, who is of the Ho-Chunk Nation.

Now, a half decade after the protest where Flanagan and I met, the country and the electorate are quickly learning who Flanagan is—the mom, the lieutenant governor, the former member of the Minneapolis school board, and, quite possibly, the next governor of Minnesota. She told me she didn’t think she’d see a woman of color, let alone a Native, in that role, in her lifetime.

Should that come to pass, there will be a thunder of Indigenous jubilation across the United States.

“When I am with other Native folks, and especially young Native girls, I tell them to take up as much space as you can,” she said. “Physically take up space, because you absolutely have the right to be there.”

This is, after all, Native land.