Raina Thiele serves as Senior Advisor for Alaska Affairs and Strategic Priorities to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland. In this role, she serves as the Department of the Interior’s policy lead on issues related to Alaska’s public lands, tribal relations, the arctic, and international Indigenous issues. She is the first Alaska Native to serve in this role. Raina has spent her career in public service, the private sector, and the nonprofit sector. She previously served as President Obama’s tribal liaison and led planning for President Obama’s historic 2015 trip to Alaska. She also served for nearly five years in the White House Office of Management and Budget, where she focused on a range of tribal, international, and energy issues. She has served on the boards of the Arctic Economic Council, the Verizon Consumer Advisory Board, and the Environmental Law Institute’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council. She is a first generation college student who earned her bachelor’s degree from Yale College and her master in public policy degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Raina was born and raised in Alaska and her family hails from Pedro Bay Village on Lake Iliamna and Alexander Creek near Mt Susitna. She is Dena’ina Athabascan and Yup’ik of the Tulchina (water) clan. 

JoAnn Kintz is the Deputy Director of the Office of Tribal Justice (OTJ) at the U.S. Department of Justice. OTJ is the primary point of contact for the Department of Justice’s government to government relationship with Indian tribes. OTJ also serves as a source of Indian law expertise for the Department. Prior to her current position, Ms. Kintz served as Senior Counsel at Democracy Forward, where she represented entities, including non-profit organizations, labor unions, and Indian tribes, in legal and policy matters aimed at protecting and advancing democracy and combating unlawful government actions that seek to undermine it. She began her career as a Trial Attorney with the Environment & Natural Resources Division/Indian Resources Section of the Department of Justice, where she represented the United States in a variety of civil matters pertaining Indian tribes and tribal interests. 

Ms. Kintz is a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. She graduated from Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and served as a Managing Director for the Human Rights Law Review. During law school, Ms. Kintz had the opportunity to intern at the Indian Law Resource Center as well as participate in pro bono projects at the Navajo Nation Department of Justice and the Pine Ridge Office of Dakota Plains Legal Services. She received her B.A. from Columbia College.

Gary J. Cooper serves as the Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nafive American Programs at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.  Along with the Deputy Assistant Secretary Heidi Frechefte, they lead the Office of Nafive American Programs (ONAP). Gary provides oversight and management to  the nearly 200 ONAP employees across the Nafion, leading a team of  professionals at the Headquarters Office in Washington, DC, in addifion to six  regional offices, and two satellite offices. ONAP manages over twenty programs dedicated to Nafive American communifies – including one that is the largest  source of housing assistance.  

Gary is a cifizen of the Cherokee Nafion and for nearly twenty-two years before  joining HUD he worked for the Nafion’s housing program. For more than eight of  those years he served as the Execufive Director of the Housing Authority of the  Cherokee Nafion. During his tenure he served on the Board of Directors for the  Nafional American Indian Housing Council (NAIHC), elected by his peers to serve  as the organizafion’s Chairman for two and half years, before stepping down to  accept his new posifion.

Liz Ryan became Administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention on May 16, 2022, following appointment by President Joseph R. Biden. Prior to leading OJJDP, Ms. Ryan served as president and CEO of the Youth First Initiative, a national campaign focused on ending the incarceration of youth by investing in community-based alternatives. Ms. Ryan founded the Youth First Initiative in 2014; under her leadership, it achieved the closure of youth prisons in six states and redirected more than $50 million to community-based alternatives to incarceration.

Ms. Ryan founded the Campaign for Youth Justice in 2005 and served as its president and CEO until 2014. The national, multistate initiative sought to end the prosecution of youth in adult criminal courts and the placement of youth in adult jails and prisons. During Ms. Ryan’s tenure, the campaign’s work led to legislative and policy changes in more than 30 states, a 60 percent decrease in the number of youth in adult courts, and a greater-than 50 percent decrease in the number of youth placed in adult jails and prisons.

A staunch advocate for youth, Ms. Ryan cofounded and cochaired Act 4 Juvenile Justice, a campaign to reauthorize the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act. She also served as advocacy director for the Youth Law Center, national field director for OJJDP’s Juvenile Court Centennial Initiative, and as an advocate for the Children’s Defense Fund. She has written extensively about juvenile justice reform, including articles, editorials, reports, and chapters of books.

Since 2020, Ms. Ryan has worked as a student investigative journalist with the Louisiana State University Cold Case Project, focusing on the murders of African Americans by the Ku Klux Klan during the civil rights era. She collaborated with other Cold Case Project students on Killings on Ticheli Road, a four-part narrative investigating the murders in 1960 of four Black men in Ouachita Parish, LA. The reporters reconstructed the day of the murders and questioned local authorities’ failure to prosecute the killer: the murdered men’s employer, a white man who later became a statewide Klan leader. For their work, Ms. Ryan and the other Cold Case Project reporters were named semifinalists for the 2022 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, an award by the Harvard Kennedy School for reporting that impacts U.S. public policy. They were the only students recognized.

Ms. Ryan also worked with families of the Martinsville Seven and other advocates to obtain posthumous pardons for seven young Black men who were executed in Virginia in 1951 for the alleged rape of a white woman. Ms. Ryan and her colleagues revisited the convictions, ultimately asserting that they were tinged by systemic racism, a rush to judgment, and a lack of due process. The Virginia Governor issued posthumous pardons in 2021, saying the men did not deserve the death penalty.

Ms. Ryan earned a bachelor’s degree from Dickinson College and a master’s degree in International Studies from the George Washington University.

U.S. Special Envoy Abby Finkenauer grew up in a working class family in rural Iowa and was a first generation college graduate. At the age of 24 she successfully ran for the Iowa House of Representatives and served her community and her state in the Iowa House from 2015-2019. She was the Ranking Member of Government Oversight while also serving on Economic Development, Ways & Means, Transportation, and Labor. She led the fight against attacks on collective bargaining and workers rights and was an advocate for legislation addressing equal pay, public education, infrastructure funding, voting rights and women’s reproductive health access.

At the age of 28, Abby successfully ran for the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2018 she became the youngest woman in history to flip a Congressional seat as well as one of the first of two congresswomen from the state of Iowa. In 2019, within her first two weeks as a Congresswoman she became the youngest woman in history to pass a bill through the U.S. House of Representatives. She served as Democratic Caucus Assistant Whip, Vice Chair of Highways and Transit on the Transportation Committee, and was the youngest woman to chair a subcommittee with her role as Chairwoman of Rural Development, Agriculture, Trade, and Entrepreneurship Subcommittee as part of the Small Business Committee. Abby also founded the Endometriosis Congressional Caucus, and doubled the NIH research funding for the disease, which affects 1 in 9 women worldwide.

In November 2022, Abby was appointed as the U.S. Special Envoy for Global Youth Issues and is focusing her energy on lifting up the voices and stories of young people across the globe and fostering relationship for the United States that will span generations advancing and protecting democracy.

PaaWee Rivera serves as a Senior Advisor to the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Director of Tribal Affairs for the Biden-Harris Administration. Prior to his appointment, Rivera served as the Western Coalitions Director for the Biden-Harris presidential campaign. He also served as Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Western Political Director, as a Special Advisor for her 2018 Senate re-election campaign, and as Colorado State Director for her 2020 presidential campaign. He also led Senator’s Warren’s Native American engagement and helped formulate her Native American policy platform. Rivera spent 3 years at the Democratic National Committee in a number of positions, including as the DNC’s national Native American Engagement and Finance Director. Before the DNC, he worked as a government relations advisor working with Tribal governments on federal public policy and political affairs. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a major in Government and minor in Native American Studies. Rivera is from New Mexico and is an enrolled Tribal member of the Pueblo of Pojoaque located just north of Santa Fe New Mexico.