Making a Difference: My Fight for Native Rights and Social Justice by Ada Deer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Making a Difference: My Fight for Native Rights and Social Justice by Ada Deer Allyson Stevenson Making a Difference: My Fight for Native Rights and Social Justice. By Ada Deer, with Theda Perdue. Foreword by Charles Wilkinson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. ix + 189 pp. Illustrations, index. $26.95 cloth. Scholars interested in the twentieth-century history of Native American political activism will find the autobiography of Ada Deer essential reading. Making a Difference covers a critical period in the modern struggle for tribal sovereignty. Ada Deer, a Menominee woman, played a valuable role in restoring her community's lands and tribal sovereignty after termination, as well as in protecting tribal interests at the national level. As she narrates her life, reflects on her familial and tribal influences while evaluating her legacy, Deer presents readers with the opportunity to witness the exceptional contribution of a highly educated and dynamic Menominee activist. I happened to read Making a Difference immediately after completing Brenda Child's Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (2013). Despite the differences in approach, and tribal affiliation, both books contribute to a growing field that increasingly centers Indigenous women's unacknowledged roles in preserving communities, culture, and families. Whether as exceptional individuals as in the case of Deer, or as mothers, grandmothers, and cultural knowledge holders, Native American women have sustained and continue to sustain connections to lands, languages, and bodies of knowledge that have undergone continued assault from colonial times onward. Growing up in poverty on the beautiful Menominee reservation, but nevertheless provided a deep sense of social justice from her non-Native American mother, Ada Deer's pursuit of Native rights stems from her commitment to Native American sovereignty promised in the treaties with the United States government. Assisted by historian Theda Perdue, Ada Deer's autobiography spans the period from her birth in 1935 and early years on the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin, through her successful role in advocating for restoration of the Menominee's lands and tribal status, and concludes with her time in Washington, DC, as assistant secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs during the Clinton administration. Throughout the book, we are privy to Ada's reflections and we witness her driving ambition to see Native American tribes, systems of governance, and economies be restored through a relationship to the government based on recognition of Native American sovereignty and self-determination. For readers, it would be helpful to have appendices that include the treaty documents that enshrine the Menominee rights. In addition, as much of her politization stems from the Menominee termination, the book would also benefit from having both the termination acts and restoration acts likewise included for those [End Page 265] interested. Finally, in situating the Menominee people in their tribal homelands, maps to accompany this work would provide the reader with the geographical context that provides much of the specificity of the Menominee tribe's homeland. Allyson Stevenson Department of Indigenous Studies University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln