Ada Deer, a tireless advocate for Native American rights, 88

Ada Deer, who advocated for Native American rights both in and out of government, lobbying for tribal self-determination in the 1970s and later shaping federal policy as the first woman to lead the Bureau of Indian Affairs, died Aug. 15 at a hospice center in Fitchburg, Wis., a suburb of Madison. She was 88.

Her godson Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, confirmed her death but did not cite a cause.

Deer, a member of the Menominee tribe in Wisconsin, was a tireless champion for American Indians, campaigning on behalf of Indigenous people while also working as a social worker and educator. “Ada would often talk about how most people wait around for someone else to do something — and you didn’t have to wait, you could just go for it,” Wikler said in a phone interview. “She lived that out all through her life.”

Beginning in the early 1970s, Deer campaigned to reverse the policy known as termination, in which the federal government disbanded tribes as sovereign entities, ostensibly to force Native Americans to assimilate into mainstream society.

The program proved devastating to tribes such as the Menominee, which numbered some 3,300 people before the Menominee Termination Act took effect in 1961. State and federal funding dried up, schools closed, a hospital was shuttered and the tribe’s property was transferred to a state corporation. Menominee Indian Reservation became Menominee County, the smallest and soon the poorest county in the state.

“It was a cultural, economic, and political disaster that struck deep into the hearts of the Menominee — a violation of our treaties and a betrayal of the government’s responsibilities to our tribe,” Deer later said.

In 1970, while in her mid-30s, she partnered with other organizers to launch an advocacy group called Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Stockholders, or DRUMS, which fought to prevent the sale of tribal land. With support from the Native American Rights Fund and Wisconsin Judicare, a legal aid organization, she took the fight to Washington, helping to develop and promote legislation that would restore federal recognition of the Menominee.

“Mainly, I want to show people who say nothing can be done in this society that it just isn’t so,” she told The Washington Post in 1973. “You don’t have to collapse just because there’s federal law in your way. Change it!”

Later that year, President Richard M. Nixon signed the Menominee Restoration Act, bringing federal services back to the Menominee and restoring tribal government. Deer was widely credited with spearheading the legislation — “I don’t know anyone who could have brought that bill so far so fast,” Rep. Lloyd Meeds, D-Wash., the chairman of the Indian affairs subcommittee, said at the time — and became the first woman to lead the Menominee Nation, serving as chairwoman from 1974 to 1976.

Deer went on to teach at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she lectured on social work and helped found the school’s American Indian studies program, which she later directed. She also ventured into politics, running twice for Wisconsin secretary of state and, in 1992, becoming the first Native American woman in the state to run for U.S. Congress.

Campaigning on a platform that called for universal health insurance and cuts to defense spending, she stunned Wisconsin political analysts with her Democratic primary victory over state lawmaker David Clarenbach. Addressing her supporters in a victory speech, she declared, “I’ve been waiting a long time to say this: Me, nominee!” The line, a riff on her tribe’s name, appeared on the front page of the Wisconsin State Journal the next day.

As in her earlier races, Deer was ultimately unsuccessful, losing the general election to Rep. Scott Klug, the Republican incumbent, who got about 63 percent of the vote. But the campaign helped raise her profile, and in 1993 President Bill Clinton appointed her assistant secretary of the interior for Indian affairs. The position made her the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an agency with some 12,000 employees, a budget of more than $1.5 billion and a role shaping federal policy for more than 500 tribes across the country, including through the management of schools, police departments, social services and natural-resource rights.

The bureau had been accused for years of incompetence and mismanagement, and Deer was not entirely successful in shedding that reputation. But she drew praise for granting greater authority to tribal governments and repairing relationships with Native American leaders, and was credited with defending the agency from attacks by budget-slashing Republicans in Congress. Admirers also noted that shortly after her confirmation, the agency reclassified a number of Indigenous Alaskan villages as tribes, granting them the same rights and privileges as other Native groups.