Native American to lead Bureau of Indian Affairs

Published 10:38 pm Friday, April 10, 2009

WASHINGTON — An American Indian who served as the attorney general of Idaho was nominated Friday to become the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

President Barack Obama nominated Larry EchoHawk, a law professor at Brigham Young University and a member of the Pawnee Tribe, to the post. As well as being the former attorney general, EchoHawk also ran for Idaho governor in 1994, losing to Republican Phil Batt by less than 35,000 votes. At the time, he would have been the nation’s first American Indian governor.

He became the first American Indian elected to a constitutional statewide office when he assumed the post of attorney general in the early 1990s, the White House said.