Chief Oren Lyons
(1930-)

Native-American "Faithkeeper of the Wolf Clan"
& Indigenous Rights Advocate

 

Chief Oren Lyons was born to a traditional Native American family and grew up on the Onandoga and Seneca reservations in upstate New York. As a young man he was an All-American lacrosse player, graduated from Syracuse University College of Fine Arts and went on to become a very successful commercial artist in New York City. Never forgetting the traditional ways in which he was schooled by his family, he returned to the Onandoga reservation in 1970 and took up his responsibility as "Faith Keeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onandoga Nation". Since then, he has addressed the United Nations and other gatherings of leaders around the world, concentrating on world peace and the Earth's environmental problems. He organized a delegation from the Iroquois Confederacy to attend the U.N. Conference on the environment in Rio in 1992, and is in demand as a speaker in many countries. He is now a professor of Native American Studies at the State University of New York in Buffalo.

Bio © Larry Auld

Kids | Youth | Adults | Calendar | Quotes | Heroes | Stories | The EMILY Fund | Scholarships
DO ONE THING and BetterWorld Kids Clubs are projects of The EMILY Fund (The Emily Silverstein Fund, Inc.)
Hero portraits are included for illustration purposes only - no celebrity endorsement implied

The Emily Fund
Education, Mentorship, Inspiration, Leadership, Youth
- for a Better
World

PO Box 430
Roosevelt, NJ 08555-0430
info@EmilyFund.org