ADA DEER and the world of
social work:
Empowering people
Part 2 of 2
By Jonathan Gramling

     Ada Deer has a wonderful sense of humor, probably because she knows who she is, where she came from and where she is going. Deer, retired from the
UW-Madison School of Social Work and former undersecretary of the Dept. of Interior for Indian Affairs in the Clinton Administration, has also been a social
worker extraordinaire. Recently, the National Association of Social Workers honored Deer as a “Social Work Pioneers.” “I’m probably the first Indian to also be
a pioneer,” Deer joked. Deer is a member of the Menominee Nation.
    Social worker is what Deer is. It’s not so much a profession for Deer as it is a way of life, a way of looking at the world. As we talk about her life, Deer breaks
into thoughts about the social work session. At other times, Deer tells a story, while I am not sure where we are going only to understand completely why when
she gets to the end. Social work is an intricate part of her story as well.
    Deer attended the New York School of Social Work after she graduated from UW-Madison. It was a totally different world that fascinated her because it had
so many different kinds of people in it. Deer wanted to focus on community organizing for her Master’s degree, but the school didn’t provide studies in that
area. After vetoing several field placements, Deer was placed at the Henry Street Settlement on New York’s Lower East Side. “It was 16 stories high,” Deer
recalled. “I had eight floors where I made friends with people on each floor. There were Italians, Puerto Ricans, Jewish people and Blacks. We were
organizing the whole building floor by floor into a friendlier group of people so that everything would be better in the housing.”
    Deer left the school after one year because of a disagreement she had with her professor’s evaluation of her work. “I lived for two years in Brooklyn,” Deer
said. “I worked with young Black kids in the Bedford Stuyvesant area. I had a great time organizing all kinds of little projects for various groups of girls. But
then I came back and finished my year at Columbia.”  
    “To be a good social worker is a triangle: values, skills and knowledge. There are different definitions of social work, but the definition that I like the best
is the conscious application of knowledge, skills and values to assist an individual, a group or a community to help them achieve or overcome a problem or
advance in their lives. I’m not one of those social workers who are out there to ‘rescue people.’ I understand the oppression of poverty and racism and the
effect it has on people, not only as individuals, but also as a group. I try to convey respect — this is very important to the social work profession — to the
individual, the group or community. I convey appreciation and knowledge. You can never know enough about any particular group or individual. Indians are a
life-long topic for me. There are over 500 tribes. Latinos and Latinas. This is sad. There are many people from Mexico on south who have brown skin who
think they are Spanish just because they speak Spanish. Their own real indigenous heritage has really been ignored. It’s very sad that many of the countries
don’t have a legal framework for their indigenous people. In this country, we have treaties that are the legal framework for the tribes. I think that is important.”
   Upon leaving New York, Deer landed a job in Minneapolis at a community center called Neighborhood House. She was the assistant program director.
Word got out that there was an Indian social worker at the center and she was friendly. Soon a lot of people came around out of curiosity. Deer learned that
one person whom she had given 50 cents to — a taboo in the social work field — had landed in jail for drinking. She went to the jail to talk to him.
    “I said ‘We’ll, I’m very disappointed in this,’” Deer recalled. “’You’re going to have to decide right now what you are going to do. You can be part of the
solution or you can be part of the problem. You’re a young person.’ He was only a few years older than I was. ‘You have talent and ability. You have
responsibilities. You have a wife and a couple of young children. And here you are, sitting in jail. You think about this. I’m going to come back and then we’ll
talk.’ I left and came back another time.”
    “He started to say ‘There was this other person …’” Deer continued. “I interrupted him and said ‘We’re not talking about another person. We’re talking about
you.’ He asked me why I was trying to help him. I said ‘Well, I’m very familiar with alcoholism. My father is an alcoholic. My aunts and uncles are alcoholics.
My brother is an alcoholic. I can’t help them, but I could help you.’ I said ‘I like you. You are a very likeable person. And you can decide what you’re going to
do.’ That’s really important as a social worker. You put responsibility on the person and you challenge them to use their talents and abilities to work at
resolving the problems. I said ‘You are going to be out of here in another week or so. You come and see me at the Neighborhood House. We can continue
our talk about this. You need to finish your education and you need to be a responsible person.’ I said ‘You cannot call me up when you are drunk. And you
cannot call me at home at midnight.’ Well the guy shaped up. And he became a social worker. That is my approach, to look people straight in the eye and
affirm them, but also to challenge them and assist them. I came to jail twice to see the guy and I made him think about himself.”
    “I found myself arguing with a psychiatrist once. He was from the East Coast and had never been to an Indian reservation. We were sitting on this
committee talking about minority people and he was making some inappropriate, uninformed remarks. I said ‘I’m sorry. I have to disagree with Dr. So and So.’
He was very surprised that an ‘Indian woman’ would challenge a medical doctor/psychiatrist. I said ‘Have you ever been to the reservation or have you worked
with any native people?’ He said ‘No.’ I told him that was part of his problem. Everyone else was sitting there going Wow, what’s going to happen here?’ I
then explained why I thought what I thought and why my point was more credible than his point. So I just have it in me to just look at the world and challenge
misinformation or ignorance. It was a real joy to read of the social work code of ethics because being a good social worker; we are bound by our code of
ethics. We’re not just people fluttering around, going through motions. A good social worker has a love and compassion for people and tries to work to
eliminate poverty, eliminate racism, and empower people.”  
    Deer had heard about the problems on the Menominee reservation after the Menominee people had been terminated as a tribe by the Federal
government. She moved to Stevens Point where she became the director of the Upward Bound program at the university so that she would be closer to the
reservation and find out more about this termination thing.
    Ever since Deer had attended the UW-Madison on a tribal scholarship, she had always felt indebted to the tribe and wanted to pay the tribe back in some
way. She was a social worker. She liked community organizing. She enjoyed working on the macro level. And she wanted to change the world. Fate had
placed her in the right place at the right time.
    “It was a great catastrophe,” Deer emphasized about the impact of tribal termination. “It was a cultural, economic, and political disaster. We were no
longer affiliated as a tribe. They abolished the tribal government. They imposed a structure on the res. The Menominee were at the bottom. They had one
little sheet of paper that said they were certificate holders. They wouldn’t allow parents to assume their parental responsibility. They took all of the minors and
gave guardianship over the minors to the First Wisconsin Trust Company of Milwaukee who held 40 percent of the certificates. The Indians were a part of a
trust with this big corporation and they didn’t understand anything about it. The high school was closed. It was terrible.”
    “I know the history of Indians, the government consciously created dependence for the Plains Indians. They killed off millions of buffalo. I saw some figures
once where there were 60 million buffalo out there. It got down to 1,000 around 1900. The buffalo was important to the Plains Indians’ way of life. It was a
source of food, clothing and shelter. There are buffalo dances, part of a whole belief system. And then, they got placed on reservations. Look at a map of
Wisconsin. Fort Howard in Green Bay wasn’t just put there. The soldiers were to protect the settlers from the Indians and keep the Indians on the reservations.
They took away their food supply. There was very poor health care. They destroyed a lot of their religion, their culture and their belief system. They became
very dependent, even on the reservations. If you read the history and some of the situations, the traders were dishonest. They didn’t deliver all of the food
they were supposed to deliver. A lot of the food was spoiled. They really destroyed a lot of people. And of course, the diseases also killed a lot of Indian
people. I read one book called ‘American Indian Holocaust’ where they estimate that 90 percent of the indigenous people in this hemisphere died from the
diseases.  There was dependency not only among Indians, but also among a lot of low-income people.”  
    When Deer learned that the status of the Menominee had changed by an act of Congress, she sought out Joseph Preloznik, director of Wisconsin Judicare,
to explain it to her. Deer was incensed.  “I love our land,” Deer said. “I love our life. I love our people. Now this doesn’t mean I love every single Menominee.
That’s not true. There are good ones, bad ones and mediocre ones. I absorbed the respect for the land and the respect for the people.”
    “I didn’t want history to repeat itself,” Deer continued. “A land developer cut a bunch of trees down on our most beautiful lakeshore and started slicing and
dicing. They held dinners in Chicago and Milwaukee and people would come up here and live on Indian land, blah, blah, blah. I went to the reservation
because I heard they were protesting the land sales. Sure enough, they were. When all of this came together, I said that I had to do something about this. I
wasn’t going to sit by and let the land leave the Menominee. People were suffering. They couldn’t go to school. They were no longer Indians. Some people
from around the country would tease us that we were no longer Indians. I said ‘Yes, we are.’” Preloznik took Deer and two of her siblings on as clients. The
fight was on.  
    “Our tribe is one of the few tribes that live on its aboriginal homeland. We weren’t brought here from anywhere else. We were always here, at least for
5,000-10,000 years. We ceded away over nine and a half million acres of land in the 1800s and retained approximately 235,000 acres of land. That was to
be kept as a homeland for the Menominee. We’ve always had strong leadership for the tribe. There’s a history professor at UW-Stevens Point who is
fascinated with Indian history, but especially fascinated with the Menominee. I asked him why once. He replied ‘You have always had strong leadership at
every crisis.’ We did not go to Minnesota. There was the whole removal period in the 1830s when Andrew Jackson was the president. All of the Indians east
of the Mississippi River were supposed to be moved west of the Mississippi. The Trail of Tears not only the Cherokees, but also a lot of other tribes were
forced out. We were supposed to move to Minnesota. I like to tell this story to people from Minnesota. Chief Oshkosh — our chief at the time — said ‘We’ll
send some people over there and they’ll scout it out.’ They came back and said ‘It’s unfit for Menominee. The land is poor. The game is poor. We’re not
going.’ So we retained our reservation. It’s a small portion of land. We resisted the allotment period in 1887 when vast tracts of tribal land were broken up
into individual allotments. People experience a lot of problems because a lot of Indians lost a lot of land. They didn’t understand that they had to pay taxes.
Millions of acres of land were lost. We didn’t accept allotment. Other reservations here in Wisconsin accepted allotment. We got terminated in 1954. The
Menominee Termination Act was passed. It couldn’t become final until 1961.”
    Deer hooked up with the Native American Defense Fund and they got the Menominee Restoration Act introduced. While they had done a lot of
community organizing around the issue on the reservation and had done a lot of agitating, Deer decided that she needed to go to Washington, D.C. to help
the act get passed.
    While she wasn’t a trained lobbyist, her heart was in the project and that trumped the efforts of any $400 per hour lobbyist. “I didn’t take a course in
lobbying,” Deer said. “I was in it for justice and love. I lived with different people. I didn’t have any money. There were people in the Bureau who helped and
there were other people in Interior who thought nothing could get done. But everyone knew it was a grave injustice.”
    Deer also became leery of the games that get played up in Washington. “There are thousands of lawyers in Washington and they run a lot of agencies and
have a lot of expertise,” Deer said. “But there are other people out there too. So the BIA lawyers said ‘We were across the street and we were talking about
amending …’ I said ‘Stop right there. We’re not talking about amending. We are talking about repeal. English is my first language. I have a BA from UW-
Madison. I have a Master’s from Columbia University. You and I both know the difference between amend and repeal.’ They said ‘Okay Ada, okay.’ So if you
pick up the Menominee Restoration Act, the first words are ‘To repeal.’”
    Congressman David Obey and Senators Gaylord Nelson and William Proxmire got behind the effort. Deer visited the powerbrokers in Congress. “Senator
Kennedy called us up when he was in Wisconsin once,” Deer recalled. “We told him what we were doing and he said that when we got to Washington, that we
should come to his office. So I did. He always has great people on his staff. I walked in and told them who I was. They sent me to the legislative director, Ted
Sussman. He was a great guy. They all conceded our cause was just and a doable thing. Fred Harris, the senator from Oklahoma, hosted this huge reception
for us. He had everyone on his staff calling everyone to come to this reception. It was a mega-reception when the bill was introduced.”
    While Deer had the continuous assistance of NARF and the people back at the reservation — they held many meetings in Milwaukee and Chicago —
probably Deer’s biggest weapon were the words of President Richard Nixon who in expressing his Indian policy said ‘Self-Determination without Termination.’
The Menominee had the tacit support of the most powerful person in Washington.
    After four long years of lobbying, testifying and traveling back and forth between Washington and Wisconsin, the Menominee Restoration Act was passed.
Deer could go back home to Wisconsin.  
    “Social work is a noble profession. If we didn’t have social workers in this society, they would have to invent them. Social worker touches the lives of
humans across the life span. We, as human beings, need help at various times in our lives. I get great joy in assisting my fellow humans in different ways. I
want to encourage young people to know that it is a profession, which means it has transmittable knowledge and skill sets. It takes this very human trait,
which most humans have, compassion and helps the social worker to understand the helping process and be the mechanism by which help is given to
individuals, groups or communities. One will not become wealthy as a social worker. But you will be wealthy in the joy of helping your fellow humans. It is
hard work being a social worker. Humans are very complex beings. In order to be effective, it requires the full application of your skills, knowledge and value
system. That is the triangle of the social work profession. It is a very dynamic process. It is very challenging because no two humans are alike and it requires
the highest and foremost dedication and application of one’s energy, skills and intellect.”
    Deer became an instructor at the UW-Madison School of Social Work. In 1992 Deer ran for the U.S. Congress and lost to Scott Klug. But she made it back
to Washington any way when President Bill Clinton appointed her as his undersecretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs, the very agency that had negatively
impact her family’s history so many years before.
    Deer wielded the power of the office in the interest of Native people to the extent that she was able. “One of the most significant things I did was to affirm
the sovereignty of 223 Native Alaskan villages,” Deer said. “It was very, very important to them. That was around 15 years ago. People from Alaska say to me
‘Oh you’re Ada Deer.’ And I say ‘Ah, yes?’ And they say ‘Wow the people up there really appreciate what you did. You understand the complexity of it …‘ I
signed an order as undersecretary that these 223 Alaskan villages are tribal governments. They are sovereign. The two senators and the congressman did not
want to have that done. They are still fighting about it. They’re trying to take legal action and so on. I could have sat there saying ‘I don’t know if I should do
this.’ That’s not me. I look and say ‘Okay, what’s the issue. What’s the problem? What are the options?’ And I signed the order. ‘Yes.’ That gives you an
understanding on how I proceed when I have the power to proceed.”
    Even as she reached the pinnacles of power in Washington, Deer remained true to her social work creed. And then she came home once again.
Ada Deer is a former tribal chair for the Menominee Nation and
undersecretary of Indian Affairs
for the U.S. Department of Interior.