A member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe has been appointed to serve as the US Department of Agriculture’s Director of the Office of Tribal Relations.
Heather Dawn Thompson is a Harvard Law School graduate and an expert in American Indian law, tribal sovereignty and rural tribal economic development.
Most recently, Thompson served a member of the American Indian Law Practice Group at Greenberg Traurig, where she worked on federal Indian law and Tribal agriculture. Thompson has a long record of public service, beginning as a Presidential Management Fellow at the Department of Justice. Since then, Thompson has served as a law clerk with the Attorney General’s Office for the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, as Counsel and Policy Advisor to the US Senate’s Democratic Policy Committee and as an Assistant US Attorney for South Dakota’s Indian Country Section, where she prosecuted cases involving violence against women and children.
In the private sector, Thompson was previously a partner at Dentons, where she was one of only a handful of Native American partners at an “AmLaw 100” law firm. In addition, she has served as the Director of Government Affairs for the National Congress of American Indians, President of the South Dakota Indian Country Bar Association and President of the National Native American Bar Association. Thompson holds a Juris Doctor cum laude from Harvard Law School, as well as a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Florida, and a bachelor’s degree in International Studies from Carnegie Mellon University.
President Joe Biden has nominated former Obama ag secretary Tom Vilsack to serve in the US Secretary of Agriculture position again. Thompson would report directly to the Secretary.
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