Ada Deer (1935–2023)

I’ve had my eye on this one since it became a staff selection at my library. Since one of the items on our reading challenge this year is to read a staff selection (not your own), I picked it up.
This book made quite an impression on me. Ada Deer’s tenacity in fighting and eventually reversing the government termination of the Menominee was incredible. I can’t imagine having the strength and energy to keep going with all the obstacles and red tape she and her fellow fighters show more encountered. It’s a really amazing story. It’s also infuriating to see how state and federal government kept finding ways to pull the rug out from under so many different tribes in the country, and how hard it was to fight against it. It’s despicable. I hadn’t heard about termination before I read this—I think a lot of it started when I was still a child—but I still wonder why it isn’t more widely known.

She talks a lot about her mother’s influence. A good chunk of the book is about her family and upbringing. Besides being quite interesting, it was important to understanding where Deer got a lot of her fire.

I recommend reading the introductory material that explains how the book was written—a combination of interviews with Deer and documentation from her period with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (and probably some other stuff I’ve already forgotten). The result is conversational, but well-documented. It gives a detailed account of what happened to the Menominee in Wisconsin, but it also has a wider discussion of what was happening to tribes all over the country. show less