She is a member of the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska. Umonhon in her language.

Renee has two daughters and two sons who are Oglala Lakota. She is a poet and an activist and an educator. She teaches the traditional ways and she gives wise counsel.

You can find her on the steps of the state Capitol in the cold and wind.

You can find her lighting candles at vigils and leading prayers at protests.

You can find her in a documentary — 18 minutes long — with her kids at the family shelter at the People’s City Mission, visiting Macy, where she lived with her parents after dropping out of high school, where she married and had kids and where, one day, her mother knocked on her door and told her about an educational opportunity for Native teachers.

You can find her on YouTube, standing in front of a crowd at the Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute, dressed in a long skirt and a jean jacket, talking about the Platte River.

Her mother was a language teacher of the Omaha language, she says in the video. Ni Bthaska, that was our name for the Platte River. Flat water...

You can find her sharing her knowledge in a documentary about Susan La Flesche Picotte, the country’s first female Native doctor. An Omaha woman, like her.

And in the ballroom of the Embassy Suites back in September — surrounded by other strong women — a finalist for an Inspire Founders Award for her work as a community advocate.

Nancy Engen-Wedin nominated Sans Souci for the honor.

She called her a “statewide treasure.” She called her a critical advocate for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

“She took on this work without compensation,” Engen-Wedin wrote, “because she believes that helping Native women and girls means empowering them to find their voices, to share their stories of survival and success.”

It is her calling as a Warrior Woman, Sans Souci says. “We serve the people.”

The translation of the word warrior in many Native languages is this: A person of great heart.

She uses her heart for good.

She is a teaching artist at the Lied Center for Performing Arts. She consulted on Cranes on Earth and Sky — a puppeteering project led by Heather Henson, the late Jim Henson’s daughter, and told from the indigenous perspective.

She writes poems about water and nature and her Omaha ancestors.

She writes about lost Native women, murdered at 10 times the national average.

Where do they go?

Ancestral road?

Ghost Road?

Milky Way?

They are like stardust ...

She seeks justice. She honors her past. The grandmothers and grandfathers living in the spirit world.

She honors her grandparents, who lived at the edge of town and had a big yard where she ran and played with her cousins and a big barn where they played traditional Native hand games.

She honors her parents, who were members of the American Indian Movement and traveled to gatherings as far away as Minneapolis. When Dennis Banks came through Lincoln, he stayed at their house.

She misses her mother, who took her to Native gatherings, feasts and dances. And her dad who took her with him to classes at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

From her early years, she’d wanted what her people had once had, what the government had taken away from them. The spiritual ceremonies. The sweat lodge. The language.

“I was learning so much and I knew this was going to be my life work,” she says. “How to connect and how to help others.”

In 1980, her family moved north to the Omaha Reservation. She'd struggled with school in Lincoln and dropped out the year before.

“I understand what was happening now,” she says. “Especially as an educator. We were invisible. I was almost always the only Omaha child wherever I was attending. I never felt connected to the school system or my fellow classmates.”

She kept searching.

She graduated from UNL with a teaching degree. She worked for the state Department of Education.

“It’s her legacy to help people,” says her youngest daughter, Amber New Holy.

“She’s the type of person who would run into a burning building to help you,” says her oldest daughter, Colleen New Holy.

Her mother has patience, the oldest daughter says.

She likes bacon and eggs and coffee for breakfast. She likes everything Louise Erdrich writes. She likes routine and ritual.

“She’s a beautiful Omaha woman,” Colette Yellow Robe says. “She has such incredible knowledge.”

Yellow Robe works for UNL’s TRIO Program. She calls Sans Souci a mentor and a friend. Wise counsel.

Engen-Wedin says the same thing.

“She is like a teacher to me of her cultural traditions. I’m always learning from Renee, always.”

Engen-Wedin met Sans Souci nearly 20 years ago, when Sans Souci became a student in the Native American Career Ladder Program at UNL and enrolled in a class she taught.

“I never felt like I could challenge Renee,” she said. “She was always light years ahead.”

She admires her activist friend.

“Renee feels comfortable giving voice. That’s her niche, but it’s a niche that isn’t rewarded in our society.”

Sometimes Sans Souci is tired. She has health struggles. She is a single mother. She has been without a home more than once.

“The hard parts of her life have never defined her,” says playwright Chris Cartmill. “There is an unapologetic boldness to her.”

San Souci works as a cultural consultant. She gives presentations on environmental justice, art history, poetry, writing, tribal history. Colonization, the scourge of smallpox, broken treaties, trails of tears, stolen lands, forced assimilation.

“I talk about what happened to the tribes, to my tribe. Afterwards, they’ll come up and say, ‘I never knew that. No one ever taught me that.’”

Her knowledge is deep, said Cartmill, who met Sans Souci when he was commissioned to write a play about Ponca Chief Standing Bear.

The two met on the pow wow grounds at the Indian Center.

“And she was beautifully skeptical, as she should be.”

The two artists — one white, one Native — became friends. San Souci’s journey was the focus of his 2010 play “THE NEBRASKA DISPATCHES.”

Sans Souci was raising her family as a single mom then, he said. Dealing with the loss of her mother. “Trying to have people see her for the artist and educator she is.”

Now they do.

Sarah Sawin Thomas, cofounder of Stand In For Nebraska, calls Sans Souci “truly extraordinary.”

A visionary like Frank LaMere. “An unsung hero.”

Sans Souci gives credit to her elders, to her parents, to the women who walked before her and beside her.

She works to stay in balance. Prayer. Prayer to her is meditation. She participates in ceremonies that challenge her physically and spiritually, cleansing and connecting back to Mother Earth. “Our belief says that anything is possible,” she says. “When we believe that way, anything is possible.”

You can find her at Spring Creek Prairie telling coyote stories.

You can find her at the Indian Center blessing a healing garden.

And you could find her in front of a tall bronze statue of Standing Bear before dawn last Thursday.

A sunrise ceremony to honor the ancestors lost since colonization.

Tribes don’t have a single day they set aside for thanksgiving, she will tell you.

“All Natives are aware of the irony of celebrating Thanksgiving. We are always living in irony.”

But there is this truth, she will tell you. “We are still here.”

She offers prayers for all people — red, black, yellow, white. Prays for healing. Blessings for the sacred water and sacred children.

As the sky lightens, she turns with the elders and the drummers to the east and west, to the north and south, the sound of the drum echoing off the buildings.

Renee Sans Souci is here. Standing for healing, standing for the future, standing tall.

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