Men have had their day at the tip-top. Having Native women in office can help protect our shared future far better.

The U.S. Congress has been far too white and far too male for far too long. But that’s all about to change.

Come January 2019, a wave of minorities — people of color, women, and women of color — will march into the Capitol and rattle those hallowed halls with their voices of logic and reason. It will probably make a few of the good ol’ establishment Republicans there quite uncomfortable. Good.

And while women, and particularly women of color, in politics may not be a time-honored tradition in the white, European male system of government, for the indigenous people who began human history on this land, women have been calling the shots for literally thousands of years.

You wouldn’t know that if you watched Hollywood flicks and cartoons about Native people that, to this day, portray a stereotypical male chief grunting and Tonto-talking to eloquent, albeit naïve, encroaching white invaders while a Native woman somewhere in the distance plays some subservient role. But that wasn’t the truth of our history, not for my people and not for a great many others.

Even now, there remain plenty of matriarchal and matrilineal indigenous societies in the U.S. that were here long before early European-Americans began marauding and murdering and taking of everything on which they could lay their hands.

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It’s ironic that, when Europeans first arrived generations ago, they needed us to save them, to show them how to farm, survive, and live a harmonious and balanced life with the land. Several hundred years later, it appears they need us again.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/native-women-long-held-political-power-american-soil-until-white-ncna953116