Ada Deer recalled her past as a Menominee activist in a forum Tuesday alongside Theda Perdue, professor of Indigenous History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of “Ada Deer: Making a Difference.”
An American Indian activist, UW-Madison alumna and former professor in the university’s American Indian Studies program, Deer was the first female head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and served as the Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior.
“I am a Menominee Indian,” Deer said, in a recitation of the first paragraph of Ada Deer: Making a Difference. “That is how I was born and that is how I have lived. I am tall like the trees that blanket my reservation in northern Wisconsin and my skin is brown like their bark. Although I have not lived there in years, my roots grow deep in that rocky soil. That soil has aided me during tumultuous times. I have roots elsewhere, geographically, ancestrally and intellectually. And they too have produced and nurtured the person I have become. But my taproot is Menominee.”
The biographical process gave Deer a chance to recall her past, as well as learn new information regarding her heritage. Perdue and her late husband uncovered a plethora of new information after discovering 50 boxes of Deer’s paperwork and other archived information, as well as conducting over 60 hours worth of interviews with Deer herself.
“I had to tap into my memory and that was hard in certain areas because after all, it has been 83 years and that is a lot of time to cover, but it was an interesting intellectual exercise because I had to rethink and also remember,” Deer said.
In her talk, Deer recounted the constant and unique hardships she faced in government as an American Indian woman.
“Racism and sexism and all these isms in our society are very prevalent and when you’re in a high government position, people have various ideas and if they don’t like you, they undermine you. They don’t read your letters or they start gossip,” Deer said.
Deer paved the way for so many successes of the American Indian community through her mantra of doing as much as she could, as fast as she could, for as many as she could.
“I don’t even think about my legacy. I do what I do, and it gives me great joy to have had the power that I had in the Assistant Secretary position,” Deer said.
