ATLANTA

Four women from American Indian tribes came together in a panel organized by Spelman College on Wednesday to ask Americans not to forget about them in conversations about diversity and race.

As part of the Fourth Annual Leadership Conference for Women of Color, Spelman featured its first Women to Watch panel about American Indians, called “Funny, You Don’t Look Indian.”

“If this was going to be a true representation of women of color, we felt the need for having Native Americans on the table,” says Dr. Jane E. Smith, the executive director of Spelman’s Center for Leadership and Civic Engagement.

The American Indian women said they have no questions about their identity in a world where it seems everyone else is questioning who they are.

“We know where we come from, who our ancestors are, and we have great pride in that,” said panel moderator Beverly Wright, president of the consulting firm Soaring Feather, which is based in Martha’s Vineyard. “We were there before it [the Vineyard] became the ‘in’ place for rich families to vacation in.”

Elizabeth Neptune, a councilwoman of the Passamaquoddy Indian Township near Princeton, Maine, said the racism she experienced as a child is still present today. The township is located in one of the 11 poorest counties in the United States and there are people dying of diabetes, AIDS and other diseases.

“The statistics are four times the rate of anything that’s out there,” she said.

Chief Brenda A. Commander, the first woman to be elected chief of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians in Maine, said she has had to move on from the negativity of tribal politics in order to achieve results for her community.

“Politics is brutal and we keep having feuds. It takes a tribe five times longer than usual for anything to get done, but the more tribes keep talking, they’ll get it done,” she said. “We have to keep building bridges within and outside the tribe.”