Warrior Women: Home

Madonna Thunder Hawk

MADONNA THUNDER HAWK is a Lakota Matriarch and organizing force behind every modern Native occupation from Alcatraz, Wounded Knee in 1973, to the Standing Rock #NODAPL protest. Born and raised across the Oceti Sakowin homelands, she was radicalized in the late 1960s as a force of nature within the American Indian Movement and co-founded Women of All Red Nations and the Black Hills Alliance. A powerful voice for Native resistance and sovereignty, Thunder Hawk has spoken around the world as part of the global movement for Indigenous rights, serving as a delegate to the United Nations. Featured in the 2018 Peabody nominated film Warrior Women, she lives on Cheyenne River reservation where she established the Wasagiya Najin "Grandmothers' Group," works as a tribal liaison for the Lakota People’s Law Project and is the matriarch behind the Warrior Women Project, a collective for the development of scholarship, media, and activism. She is the Original Gangster Granny.

Beth Castle

DR. ELIZABETH "BETH" CASTLE works at the intersection of media, scholarship, and activism as a Shawnee-descended anti-racist educator committed to liberating and sharing unknown histories of resistance. She started the Warrior Women Project (WWP) to preserve the oral histories of Indigenous activists and disrupt the dominant historical narrative through her book Women were the Backbone, Men were the Jawbone: Native Women’s Activism in the Red Power Movement. While completing her Ph.D. at Cambridge University, she worked at the White House for President Clinton’s Initiative on Race. She co-directed the Peabody Award Nominated film, Warrior Women (2018), and continues the collective work of the WWP in decolonizing curricula, activist archiving, and community media work.

Dawna Riding In Hare

DAWNA RIDING IN HARE, a member of the Pawnee Nation and Wichita descendent, has served on the Pawnee Business Council since May 2015 and is currently in her second term. She chairs of the Land & Property Committee and Inter-governmental Affairs Committee. Committee appointments also include the Enrollment and Communications Committees. Dawna is a graduate of Haskell Indian Junior College, University of Kansas, and Southeastern Oklahoma State University with a Masters in Native American Leadership. She spent her career with an urban Indian program and Pawnee Nation tribal government.

Dawna is an adjunct instructor in American Indian Studies at Oklahoma State University and Co-advisor for the Native American Student Association. She lives in Pawnee with her husband Charles. They have three children Carly Hare, Electa Red Corn, and Danon Hare, and six grandchildren Lottice, Atticus, Signy, Tawali, Maven and Felix.

Amanda Johnson

AMANDA JOHNSON is currently a PhD candidate and Graduate Teaching Associate in the Department of History here at Oklahoma State University. She also earned a master’s degree in History from Arizona State University as well as a bachelor’s degree in Secondary Education from Oklahoma State University. Amanda currently specializes in the fields of Native American History, Gender and Sexuality, and United State History. She also is an instructor for the Survey of American History course at OSU.

Under the direction of Professor Douglas Miller, Amanda is crafting a dissertation titled, “Beating the Drums for Ourselves: Native American Women and Activism in the Twentieth Century.” Her dissertation explores the lives of numerous Indigenous activists from across North America and their creation of national and international women’s organizations within the context of the Red Power Movement and Second Wave feminism.