Title: Executive Director
Company: Jim Pepper Native Arts Council
Location: Portland, OR, USA
Education: BA in Political Science, Sonoma State University
Career History: Executive Director, Jim Pepper Native Arts Council, Portland, OR (2014-Present); Executive Director, 1000 Nations, Portland, OR (2008-Present); Co-Founder, Friends of Celilo Falls (2011-Present); Chief of Staff for Senator Avel Gordly, Oregon State Legislature (2003-2009); Real Estate Broker (2000-2002)
Sean Aaron Cruz, Executive Director at Jim Pepper Native Arts Council, has been recognized as a Marquis Emerging Leader for his contributions and achievements in the fields of public policy and education.
Mr. Cruz’s interest in public policy issues began at a young age. His father collected history books and his parents subscribed to a number of news and current events periodicals, and he was an avid reader.
Mr. Cruz grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he became involved in the Chicano Movement and the anti-Vietnam War Movement of the late 1960s and 70s. He was initially a music major but switched to political science as the war in Vietnam intensified.
His father was only four months old when his grandparents migrated from Mexico to California and later became a citizen when he enlisted in the U.S. Army. His father was in the third wave of troops landing at Omaha Beach on D-Day and served under General George Patton during the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he became a farmworker advocate and a patrol officer with the Solano County Sheriff’s Office.
His mother was from a white family living in Indiana who moved to California to work in the defense industry during the war, met and married his father afterward. She later became a Solano County Superior Court’s judge’s secretary until her several illnesses forced her out of the labor market.
Mr. Cruz married and began raising a family that grew to include two daughters and two sons, supported by sales jobs and freelance writing and editing. They moved to the Portland, Oregon Metro area in 1988. His then-wife joined a religious group with incompatible views and they divorced in 1991.
In 1996, with the assistance of her church friends, Mr. Cruz’s former wife disappeared into Utah with the children despite an order for joint custody that had protected them for five years. He fought unsuccessfully to regain contact with his children through four jurisdictions in three states, developing a case of clinical depression and complicated PTSD in the process.
He worked as a real estate agent from 2000 to 2002. In 2002, a developer friend was in the process of partitioning a property on a large lot zoned multifamily to build triplexes and asked him to sell “the old house” on it. What began as his listing became a life-changing event.
Mr. Cruz spent considerable time at the property and felt an inexplicable spiritual connection to it, sensing that something about the house was speaking to him and resonating deeply within him in a way he could not explain any other way.
He eventually felt compelled to purchase the home himself, and shortly after moving in, he learned from a neighbor that the house had been for the past 50 years the family home of the late Jim Pepper (1941-1992) —a renowned Native American jazz saxophonist of Kaw and Muscogee heritage – and his mother Floy Pepper, who was an important, highly influential educator and writer.
Not long afterward, while standing outside his new house, a car stopped and the woman driving said “Hi, my name’s Suzie. We used to live here. Wondered if we could see the old house again.” She was Jim Pepper’s sister. During the visit, she said, “My mom would love to see the old house again. Could I bring my mom?”
She brought her mom the following week. Floy, then in her early 80s, gifted Mr. Cruz a bootleg CD of her son’s first album, “Pepper’s Pow Wow” from 1971. Larry Coryell was the guitarist on the recording.
At the time, Mr. Cruz was aware of both Jim and Floy Pepper by reputation but did not know if he had ever seen Jim or heard his music.
He put it on as soon as they left, and while the second track was playing, he recognized the song and the unmistakable sound of Pepper’s saxophone from a concert in Marin County he had attended circa 1970. He had gone to hear guitarist Larry Coryell’s band, and Larry had introduced his sax player as “a real Indian.”
Mr. Cruz had never forgotten the concert of the sax player but had forgotten his name. Now, some 30 years later, he found that he was living in the sax player’s house, had just met his mom, and she had given him the one Jim Pepper album that connected him to Pepper.
Receiving the CD and making a direct family connection became a pivotal moment that linked his lifelong passion for jazz music to a legacy, ultimately inspiring Mr. Cruz’s dedication to preserving Jim Pepper’s memory and creating culturally relevant music education for Native youth.
Later in 2002, Mr. Cruz subsequently pivoted toward public policy and legislative action, serving for six years as Chief of Staff for Senator Avel Gordly, the first African-American woman elected to the Oregon State Senate. Through his work with Senator Gordly, several significant bills were passed into law.
In 2003, Senator Gordly and Bureau of Labor and Industries Commissioner Dan Gardner teamed up to secure the right to meal and rest breaks during the workday for Oregon farm workers.
In 2004, he testified as to how both the criminal and family law systems had failed to protect his family before the Senate President’s Task Force on Parental and Family Abductions. The Task Force made recommendations that were incorporated into Senator Gordly’s Senate Bill 1041 in the 2005 legislative session.
In 2005, he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate Rules Committee and the House State and Federal Affairs Committee and SB 1041 passed into law.
With its passage, Oregon became the first state in the nation where abducting a child creates a civil cause of action, enabling both the parent and the child to hold the abductors accountable in civil court. When the child turns 18, a six-year window in the statute of limitations opens, giving the child(ren) ample time to consider the events associated with the abudction and determine if they want to seek damages. This section is designed to act as a deterrent to carrying out an abduction and to provide some level of justice if it does occur.
The law is ORS 30.868. It resides on the Oregon State Police Missing Persons Clearinghouse website. The law was of no benefit to Mr. Cruz’s family, as it took effect only for abductions that began after it was signed by the Governor.
Also in 2005, Mr. Cruz drafted what became Senator Gordly’s Senate Joint Resolution 31, honoring Jim Pepper’s life and achievement.
Living in the Pepper family home helped Mr. Cruz get through some very hard years and Jim’s music played a very important role, inspiring him not to give up, to not resort to suicide. Pepper’s “Witchi Tai To,” with its line “Makes me feel glad that I’m not dead,” was key.
Mr. Cruz promised Jim’s mother Mr. Cruz promised Jim’s mother that he would do all that he could to see that her son got the recognition he deserved, which led to his founding of the Jim Pepper Native Arts Council 501c3 in 2014. He created the mission statement which was to “improve access to culturally relevant music education in Jim Pepper’s name and reflecting the educational legacy of his mother, Floy Pepper.”
Living in Pepper House, exploring the family legacy, brought him ever deeper into Indian Country and opportunities to build meaningful friendships with members of many dozens of tribes and learn about issues important to them in depth.
He completed two book projects with Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe): Co-Author of her “The Militarization of Indian Country” in 2011, and Editor of “The Winona LaDuke Chronicles: Stories from the Front Lines in the Battle for Environmental Justice” in 2016.
Mr. Cruz wanted to create a class addressing the high dropout and suicide rates prevalent in Indian Country, that would draw students to come to class and engage in learning.
He began developing concepts for a culturally relevant music curriculum based on a broad overview of Indigenous contributions to popular music and added a commitment to create and deliver such a curriculum to the Council’s mission statement. The class would welcome and be a benefit to students of all races.
Mr. Cruz raised funds and hired a team of Native educators based out of Southern Oregon University to create the curriculum, four PhDs among them. In 2023, the Oregon Department of Education reviewed his concepts and contracted the Council to create units for grades K-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12.
The Council delivered the curriculum – named Speak/Sing NativeTM – in summer 2025. It resides on the Oregon Open Learning Hub, available for educators statewide free of charge.
Looking towards the future, Mr. Cruz is developing capacity for the Council to hire and train a team of Speak/Sing NativeTM specialists to provide support to educators interested in learning how to teach the curriculum statewide. The Council will also reach out to school districts and state departments of education across the US and Canada.
His overarching goal is to integrate Jim Pepper’s music and the contributions of other Indigenous artists into the K-12 educational repertoire across the nation, ensuring that all students have access to culturally relevant and affirming educational experiences, with a special focus on Native youth.