Madonna Thunder Hawk is a Native American civil rights activist best known as a leader in the American Indian Movement (AIM) and as an organizer against the Dakota Access pipeline. She co-founded the American Indian organization Women of All Red Nations and serves as an organizer and tribal liaison for the Lakota People's Law Project. Thunder Hawk was born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation. She hails from the Feather Necklace Tiospaye (extended family) and belongs to the Oohenumpa band of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Thunder Hawk was raised in a strict environment by her mother, who had, herself, been raised in the harsh environment of the Native American boarding schools of the 1920s and 1930s. Thunder Hawk would follow in her mother's footsteps and attend several boarding schools throughout her youth. Thunder Hawk joined the American Indian Movement in its early years and was present at AIM's occupation of the Wounded Knee. She was a member of the Pie Patrol, a group of women active in AIM, which also included Thelma Rios, Theda Nelson Clarke, Lorelei DeCora Means, and Mary Crow Dog, wife of civil rights activist Leonard Crow Dog. Thunder Hawk also served as director of the Wounded Knee Legal Defense Offense Committee (WKLDOC) in December 1975. Along with Lorelei De Cora, she founded and established the 'We Will Remember Survival School,' meant to provide a safe place for American Indian youth whose parents were facing federal charges or who had dropped out of the secondary education system. Specifically, the school was founded for the children of defendants in the Wounded Knee trials which followed the American Indian Movement occupation of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. This alternative model was a component of the National Federation of Native-Controlled Survival Schools that was established during the movement. In 1974, Thunder Hawk and DeCora, along with a handful of other Native American women, founded Women of All Red Nations (WARN). Following the male-dominated activism of the AIM and Red Power movements, WARN organized around women's issues in Native American activism. The group worked to address sterilization abuse, political prisoners, children and family rights, and threats to indigenous land bases. Thunder Hawk was a co-founder and spokesperson for the Black Hills Alliance. The Black Hills Alliance was responsible for preventing the Union Carbide corporation from mining uranium on sacred Lakota land.Thunder Hawk fought to preserve the land in sacred Black Hills from developers wishing to raze the area, and conducted analyses on the water supplies on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, proving the existence of dangerously high levels of radiation in the water supply. The result of her activism was the implementation of a new water system. In 2004, Thunder Hawk joined with the Romero Institute to form the Lakota People's Law Project (LPLP) with the goal of encouraging more vigilant federal enforcement and reform of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) to enable more Lakota children to continue living with their families or, at the least, on their ancestral homelands on the reservation. As LPLP's tribal liaison, she organizes through a "grandmothers circle" in South Dakota to implement IV-E programs—a tribal-run Child Protective Services—on Lakota reservations. In 2016, Madonna joined the movement against the Dakota Access pipeline and provided an inspiring presence at a resistance camp in North Dakota.

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