Deer - a member of the Menominee tribe in Wisconsin - was a champion of tribal sovereignty, the first chairwoman of the Menominee in Wisconsin, and the first Native American woman to lead the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She was the first member of her tribe to graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the first to receive a graduate degree, the first woman to lead the Menominee, and the first woman to lead the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs.
In the early 1970s, Deer led the effort to overturn the federal government’s policy of “termination” — a series of laws that since the late 1940s had restricted and in some cases eliminated tribal sovereignty in favor of integration within the rest of American society. She spent years meeting with representatives and senators, writing briefs and organizing protests. In 1973, President Richard M. Nixon signed the Menominee Restoration Act, and in 1975, the tribe regained its sovereignty. She also worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Peace Corps, and later taught at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Social Work.
Deer became President Bill Clinton's assistant secretary of the interior for Indian affairs in 1993 in charge of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She vowed to reform the bureau from top to bottom and make it work for Native Americans. By the end of her tenure in 1996, she had made enemies among Native American advocates and Administration politicos, though most agreed she had done the best with an awful hand. She did successfully defended the agency against severe budget cuts demanded by Republicans in their Contract for America after they took control of Congress in 1994, denouncing them as “genocide.”
On August 7, a week before her death, Governor. Tony Evers declared the date Ada Deer Day in Wisconsin.
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Sources:
Read the August 18, 2023 New York Times article.
