Henrietta Mann
Henrietta Mann is a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes and was the founding President of the Cheyenne an Arapaho Tribal College (Retired). She was the first individual to occupy the Endowed Chair in Native American Studies at Montana State University, Bozeman, where she is Professor Emerita and was the Special Assistant to the President 2003-2016. Prior to that she taught for some twenty-eight years at the University of Montana, Missoula.
She, also, has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, and Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. In addition, Dr. Mann has served as the Director of the Office of Indian Education Programs/Deputy to the Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She, also, was the National Coordinator of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Coalition for the Association on American Indian Affairs.
In 1991, Rolling Stone Magazine named Dr. Mann as one of the ten leading professors in the nation. In 2008 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Indian Education Association. The College Board, Native American Student Advocacy Institute presented her with its first Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. In 2016 she became one of two Native American scholars ever to be elected to the National Academy of Education and was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018. In 2017 she received a SPIRIT ALIGNED Legacy Award as a carrier of indigenous community values, memory, and wisdom. Dr. Mann holds an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Smith College in Massachusetts. In 2021, Dr. Mann received one of the nation’s highest honors — the National Humanities Medal — presented to her on March 21, 2023, by President Joe Biden.