Crystalyne Curley Elected First Woman President of Navajo Nation

Navajo Nation Council Speaker Crystalyne Curley has won election as the 1st woman president of the Navajo Nation, capping a historic November 2026 election cycle in which Native American women achieved milestone victories in tribal, state, and federal offices across the United States, according to an Associated Press report published on KCBS Radio.

Curley and her vice-presidential running mate, Chris Deschene, defeated Window Rock attorney Justin Jones after incumbent Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren was eliminated in the primary election earlier this year. When she is sworn into office in January, Curley will lead the largest Native American reservation in the United States, a territory spanning 27,000 square miles—roughly 70,000 square kilometers—across portions of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah.

From a 3rd-Grade Field Trip to Window Rock Leadership

Curley, who has served as Speaker of the Navajo Nation Council since 2023, traced her public service ambition to a 3rd-grade school field trip to the tribal government capital in Window Rock, Arizona, when she was 9 years old. During that visit, she asked why no woman's portrait hung among the tribal chairmen and presidents and resolved to run for the office herself one day.

Her victory resonated across the reservation. Jordan James Harvill, executive director of the nonpartisan civic group Navajo Power Home, and Navajo voter Lene Bitsui described the election as a generational turning point for young Indigenous women. Jennifer Nez Denetdale, a professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico and chair of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission, noted that while Navajo society is traditionally matrilineal, decades of colonial governance structures had previously sidelined women from the tribe's highest executive post.

Elsewhere in tribal elections, voters in western New York elected Tina Abrams as president of the Seneca Nation, making her only the second woman to hold that presidency.

Breakthroughs in the U.S. Senate, Statehouses, and Congress

Curley's win coincided with two landmark statewide victories on Tuesday night. In Minnesota, Democratic Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, a citizen of the White Earth Nation of Ojibwe, won election to the U.S. Senate, becoming the 1st Native American woman ever elected to the chamber in more than 230 years of Senate history. Previously, only 4 Native American men had served in the U.S. Senate, including current Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Cole, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. A second Native woman could soon join Flanagan depending on the final ranked-choice ballot count in Alaska, where former Democratic Representative Mary Peltola, who is Yup'ik, is challenging Republican Senator Dan Sullivan.

In New Mexico, former U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a citizen of the Pueblo of Laguna whose ancestors have lived in the region for more than 800 years and who became one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress in 2018, won the governorship to become the nation's 1st Native American woman governor.

In the U.S. House of Representatives, voters reelected incumbent Representatives Sharice Davids (D-Kan., Ho-Chunk Nation) and Josh Brecheen (R-Okla., Choctaw Nation) while electing two newcomers: Democrat Claire Valdez, a citizen of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, in New York, and Democrat Sean McCann, a citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, in Michigan.