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As a young woman, Ada Deer met Eleanor Roosevelt, won a beauty contest, and had a one-line role in a Hollywood film. She became a social worker and educator; ran twice for secretary of state and once for Congress (using the slogan, borrowed from a farm implement ad, “Nothing Runs Like a Deer”), all unsuccessfully; served on the board of Common Cause; was for a short time a fellow at Harvard; and from 1993-97, headed the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs.
She has led a remarkable life (Deer is now in her mid-80s), as attests her memoir, Making a Difference: My Fight for Native Rights and Social Justice, just published by the University of Oklahoma. The book is drawn from a series of interviews in which Deer, a member of Wisconsin’s Menominee tribe, recounts her life story. Co-author Theda Perdue has augmented this account with archival records and turned it seamlessly into a thorough and engaging narrative.
Deer grew up on Wisconsin’s Menominee reservation, in a log cabin without running water or electricity, and for a spell in Milwaukee. Her Indian father struggled with alcohol addiction and mostly lived apart from Ada and her two brothers and two sisters. Her white mother, Constance Stockton Wood Deer, emerged as one of the most vocal critics of termination, or the relinquishment of tribal status as a sovereign nation, which the Menominee were conned into in 1954. It was a cause Ada herself would take up, enlisting the help of Sen. Ted Kennedy, among many others, before status was restored in 1973.
Although her mother was a firebrand, Ada Deer “didn’t have anyone sitting me on their knee, pouring Indian traditions into my ear.” It was a time, she recalls, when even tribal elders “did not want to burden their children with a culture that they believed had become obsolete.”
Deer came to have a deeper appreciation of her Native heritage, in a world awash in prejudice. When she was a young girl in Milwaukee, a neighbor yelled at her, “Go back to where you came from!” The neighbor, she notes, was a recent immigrant. Deer and her family had lived in Wisconsin all their lives.
Yes, there are moments — especially those dealing with the hard work of making law and policy — when Making a Difference is less than riveting. But, mostly, Deer comes across as committed and caring, the very embodiment of a public official who grasps, as she says at one point, “that institutions and governments can be forces for good in the lives of individuals.”
She even talks briefly about Donald Trump, who in 1993 testified before Congress as the owner of three New Jersey casinos, eager to beat back competition from tribal gambling venues. As the head of the National Indian Gaming Association said at the time, Trump “launched a campaign noted for its misinformation against Indian gaming and racism to Indians generally.”
Against this backdrop of cruelty and ignorance, Ada Deer stands, holding a torch.