MOUNT VERNON — Ada Deer, the former head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, will speak on “Treaty Rights and Social Justice” for the opening convocation Thursday, Sept. 5, at 11 a.m. in King Chapel at Cornell College. Admission is free.
Deer is director of the American Indian Studies Program and distinguished lecturer in the school of social work at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where she returned in 1997 after four years as President Clinton’s appointment to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs — formally titled assistant secretary for Indian affairs in the U.S. Department of the Interior. She helped set federal policy for the more than 550 American Indian tribes nationwide. She was the first woman in that position.
Deer grew up on the Menominee Indian Reservation in northern Wisconsin. In 1954, after she went off to college, Congress terminated her tribe’s reservation status, and with it financial aid and other benefits. After earning a master’s degree in social work at Columbia, Deer became a spokesperson for a group backing the return to reservation status for the Menominee people. With passage of the Menominee Restoration Act in 1973, Deer became the leader of the transition back to reservation status as the tribe’s first woman chair, from 1974 to 1976.
In 1976 she was one of five American Indians and the only woman chosen by Congress to serve on the American Indian Policy Review Commission. The commission’s report documented areas of federal neglect and mismanagement, and called for a new direction for federal legislation and addressed the question of tribal sovereignty.
Aside from her time as Indian Affairs director, Deer has been at the University of Wisconsin since 1977. She ran for the Democratic nomination for Wisconsin’s secretary of state in 1978 and 1982, and for Congress in 1992. The Wisconsin National Organization for Women named her Feminist of the Year in 2002 for her social justice and activism.