Women are emerging from positions of authority in traditional tribal culture to more public roles.
American Indian women are not strangers to leadership and power. In traditional tribal culture, women often hold positions of authority, participating in decisions affecting their families and communities. They are responsible for preserving values and culture as well as caring for their families. Indeed, many tribes use a matrilineal system in establishing clan membership, an essential aspect of tribal life that determines individuals’ roles in marriage, life and culture.
More recently, however, this leadership has taken on a public face. Fourteen of the country’s 37 tribal college presidents are women. According to the National Congress of American Indians, more than 130 women serve as leaders among the more than 550 tribes in the United States.
Cheryl Crazy Bull, of the Sicangu Lakota Nation and president of Northwest Indian College, says the new public role of Indian women leaders isn’t purely an outgrowth of the traditional women’s tribal role. “We are creating new roles for ourselves, evolving and changing.
We are in new territory,” she says. How do American Indian women leaders view their changing roles in Indian country? Two women tribal leaders share their perspectives on this issue that includes many common themes — a sense of community responsibility that is an outgrowth of caring for family and tribe, a fierce dedication to personal vision and a belief in the power of education to realize their vision. Ada Deer, of the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin, is a woman of “firsts.” She was the first woman to lead her tribe, the first Menominee to earn a master’s degree, the first woman to serve as the assistant secretary of Indian affairs in the Department of the Interior and the first American Indian woman to run for Congress and for Wisconsin’s secretary of state. In 2007, she retired from the University of Wisconsin where she had worked since 1977, first as a lecturer in the School of Social Work and later as the director of the Indian Studies Program. Born on the Menominee Reservation in northern Wisconsin, Deer is the eldest of five children born to Joseph Deer, Menominee, and Constance Wood Deer. Wood Deer was a member of one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest families, but raised as a Quaker. She rejected her wealth and worked as a nurse on the Menominee Reservation where she met and married Deer. The couple raised their children in a small log cabin they built for themselves on the reservation with no running water or electricity. Soon, however, Wood Deer found herself on her own in having to provide for her family as her husband struggled with alcoholism. “I was born an adult,” Deer laughs.
With her father frequently out of the picture, Deer acted as co-parent for her siblings. She recalls chopping wood and hauling water for her family and minding the children while her mother worked to make ends meet. She knew early on that she didn’t want to be poor.
