5

Elizabeth Bender Cloud’s Intellectual Work and Activism

While Henry left the national stage, transferred to work as an Indian agent on the Umatilla Reservation, his wife, Elizabeth, began her impressive rise to national prominence as a Native leader. At first, she worked at the local level. She co-directed the American Indian Institute with her husband, Henry, and started the Oregon Trail Women’s Club. Later, as she grieved the loss of her much-loved and cherished Henry, she was named Oregon Mother of the Year and eventually American Mother of the Year. As Elizabeth’s reputation grew, so did her activist and intellectual commitments. Initially, Cloud seemed to see tribal termination—the abrogation of Natives’ treaty rights and end to Natives’ special status with the federal government—as an inevitability, but later, as Indian Affairs chair of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) and treasurer and field secretary of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), she fought against the settler-colonial goal of tribal termination.

As a modern-day Ojibwe warrior woman, Cloud struggled to protect tribes’ rights and interests. She fought for tribal self-determination and sovereignty, linking issues of gender and tribal nations. She supported Native women’s membership of tribal councils during a time when our councils were usually composed of men only, laying the groundwork for later discussions of Native feminisms. At the same time, she supported Indigenous cultural citizenship—the right to be different and belong to the nation-state and our tribal nations. In her role as a “good” Christian Native woman, Cloud challenged settler colonialism. She wore professional dresses and fashionable hats, while she spoke fiercely against racism and settler colonialism. Cloud employed an Ojibwe trickster methodology and could shape-shift, transforming herself into a “good” Indian among white reformers and a “bad” Indian in Native environments. She followed similar rhetorical strategies as other Society of American Indians (SAI) Native intellectuals of her generation, mixing white and Native-centric rhetoric in her struggle for Native rights.1 Her involvement in the pantribal hub of NCAI placed her among other warrior women, encouraging her to fight for tribal nations. At a pivotal moment in history, Native women leaders of NCAI banded together to fight termination and build tribal nations. Elizabeth Bender Cloud was a complicated woman: an Ojibwe and a Christian, a citizen and a warrior, a supporter of tribal self-determination and absorption into the U.S. nation-state.

Indian Affairs Committee of GFWC

As part of their involvement with white women’s organizations, Native American women regularly participated in Native policy reform. Elizabeth Bender Cloud and Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin), a Yankton Dakota, were both actively involved in SAI and the Indian Welfare Committee (later the Indian Affairs Committee) of the GFWC. Native women’s involvement in the GFWC provided them with philanthropic support and a platform for their Native rights struggles. In 1921 Zitkala-Sa founded the GFWC’s National Indian Welfare Committee, an Indigenous hub, and from 1923 to 1924 she acted as a GFWC research agent in Oklahoma. In the early 1920s the GFWC sponsored research agents, who were also creating their own Native reform organizations. In fact, the former commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier, was a GFWC research agent in New Mexico and formed the American Indian Defense Association (AIDA) in 1923. The AIDA was a reform group of non-Natives with several SAI Native intellectuals on its advisory board, including Zitkala-Sa. She was involved in the investigation of Osage Natives in Oklahoma. The ensuing AIDA report was titled Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes; Legalized Robbery (1924). It revealed how Lecie Stechi had been murdered by poison and many other cruelties. This work inspired a full Senate investigation.2 Thus, Native women working with and gaining support from GFWC, a mainstream women’s organization, were instrumental in their struggle for Native concerns, interests, and rights.

White women’s clubs provided Elizabeth Bender Cloud, like her predecessor Zitkala-Sa, the ability to gain national distinction and to discuss Native American affairs, helping her move from local to state leadership.3 In 1948 she became Indian welfare chair for the Oregon GFWC, and in 1950 she became the chair for the Indian Affairs Division of the GFWC, established to assist Native women to assimilate into mainstream U.S. society. Mainstream women’s clubs were similar to federal boarding schools. These clubs encouraged Native women to modernize and assimilate, making the modern, good Indigenous woman the ideal. These clubs were paternalistic, assuming Native women needed guidance from white women and others. They supported a gendered settler colonialism, encouraging Native women to follow white, middle-class notions of gender.

At the same time, Native American women involved in women’s clubs often combined Native and modern identities and struggled for their rights as members of sovereign tribal nations and citizens of the United States. Elizabeth Bender Cloud, Roberta Campbell Lawson, Louie LeFlore, and Ida Collins Goodale all belonged to Native clubs, and their stories are relatively unknown.4 Cloud was also a member of NCAI, a strong pantribal group that fought hard against termination.

NCAI and Termination

NCAI was founded in 1944 in an atmosphere of termination and assimilation policies, which worked to abrogate tribes’ treaty rights. The NCAI began in Denver, Colorado, when around eighty delegates from fifty different tribes gathered together to fight the emerging and growing threat of termination. Thomas Cowger, a historian, argues that NCAI is one of the most important pantribal organizations of the modern era. It provided, Cowger says, an important space to encourage political activism and awareness regarding issues facing Native tribes and communities.5 Members of this Native hub advocated for a greater emphasis on Native education and accreditation of Native schools. They campaigned fervently against termination, supported tribes, and backed pro-Native legislation to protect voting rights and welfare, among other issues. In terms of citizenship, the group supported dual citizenship, membership in our tribal nations and the U.S. nation-state.6

Most scholars who have examined the termination era agree that it began during the Truman administration.7 In 1947 the Senate Civil Service Committee assigned the acting commissioner of Indian Affairs, William Zimmerman, the task of categorizing and identifying tribes in regard to their “readiness” for termination. Unfortunately, Zimmerman created the lists without approval or awareness of the tribes themselves. Zimmerman later realized his error, even saying his plan was a policy of “extermination” and not “staged termination.” But it was too late. The “Zimmerman Plan” laid down the foundation for the termination policies of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.8 While termination policy is usually linked to the 1940s and 1950s, the taking away of federal services was not a novel idea. Federal officials, conservative reformers, and policy makers had constantly pressured the U.S. government to assimilate Natives into the American mainstream. Adversaries of John Collier’s philosophy of cultural pluralism emphasized problems of the Indian New Deal and advocated for termination.9

By 1949 the federal government was establishing the political groundwork for getting out of Native American affairs. That same year the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government (the Hoover Commission) advised the gradual transfer to state governments of the administration of social programs for Natives. In addition, tribal property would be shifted to Native-owned corporations, and Native American lands would no longer have tax-exempt status. In the meantime, until additional Native taxes were collected, the federal government would transfer monies to state governments.10 By the 1950s the federal government abandoned its previous focus on economic development on Native reservations and pushed the rapid assimilation of Native Americans into U.S. society. Federal-government officials fought politically to end tribes’ federal-trustee status. From 1953 to 1964, 199 tribes were terminated, and federal responsibility and jurisdiction was turned over to state governments. A total of 1,365,801 acres of Native trust land was removed from protected status, and 13,263 Native Americans lost their tribal rights.11 Soon, through her involvement with GFWC and NCAI, Elizabeth Cloud would be in the heat of the Native battle against termination.

Oregon and American Mother of the Year

Along with Cloud’s involvement with NCAI and GFWC, the motherhood award was a powerful way for Cloud to acquire public attention, fame, and power. These Mother of the Year honors generated speaking and writing invitations, which provided her opportunities to discuss Native American affairs across the United States. Cloud’s honors offered her a national platform and an Indigenous, gendered hub to support and publicize Native concerns.

Feminist writers argue that motherhood is a site of empowerment as well as a place of oppression. As a tactic of cultural genocide, the U.S. settler-colonial project continually denied Native women the right to motherhood. The federal government sanctioned widespread sterilization and reproductive abuse as well as the forced separation of children from their mothers. It is in this context that Native women continually fought for the right to be mothers.12 Native women elders have argued that motherhood is not a site of oppression but instead supports female Native power. Historian Kim Anderson’s research on Native women and motherhood suggests that, in many Native cultures, traditional female roles have been celebrated—not viewed as beneath male roles.13 Cloud’s socialization and training by her own Ojibwe mother, Mary Razier, must have taught her to revere motherhood and see it as a site of power, not oppression.

On April 4, 1950, Oregon governor Douglas McKay announced Cloud’s selection as Mother of the Year for Oregon. Henry’s illness had prevented Cloud from winning the state honor the year before, even though Native women of the Oregon Trail Women’s Club had submitted her name for consideration. The Oswego Women’s Club and their fellow workers at the Oregon City Presbyterian Church also backed her nomination. She was a member of the Grange, the National Conference of Social Workers, and NCAI. In 1940 President Franklin D. Roosevelt had even appointed her as a delegate to the White House Conference for Youth and Children. Governor McKay awarded Cloud a certificate for Oregon Mother of the Year at the General Federation’s banquet on April 20, 1950.14

The Clouds’ youngest child, Lillian Freed, nominated Elizabeth as American Mother of the Year—a process starting at local women’s club and state levels. Lillian asked Henry’s white adoptive cousin, Bess Page, to write a letter of support to strengthen the backing from the Umatilla women’s Oregon Trail Women’s Club and other white women’s clubs. Lillian wrote that the chair of the state-selection committee was an official for the Oregon Federation of Women’s Clubs. This representative would know of Cloud’s involvement with the clubs, likely improving her odds in the selection process. Lillian also wrote how winning the award of American Mother of the Year would support her mother while she processed her profound grief over the loss of her husband: “We are still much saddened by the loss of our cherished and well-loved father. . . . It is human that there seem [sic] now to be a tremendous void in our lives, but his was such a fine life of integrity and service that we cannot but feel fortunate in our rare privilege of having had him. Mother has been magnificent—wonderfully brave, although her immediate loss is greatest of all. It is fitting that we seek such an honor for her as a tribute to her valiant spirit.”15

Even after Henry’s death, Bess Page continued to support our Cloud family. She contacted the Mother of the Year Selection Committee on April 12, 1950, in support of Cloud’s nomination:

Although she is a member of a minority group and as such has been subjected to the humiliations and obstacles which beset such people, she has never allowed this to embitter her or warp her clear judgment. She brought to her chosen profession of teaching a fine mind which she was willing to discipline and a warm breath of sympathy which found an equal challenge in the quick response of the bright child and the bewildered groping of the least gifted. She carried both the clarity of mind and the warmth of heart combined with a very rare common sense into her marriage, and the remarkable achievement of her husband, gifted as he was would have been far more limited without her understanding and discriminating partnership. To have seen her with her children when they were tiny and growing up was an exciting experience. . . . Her work with her husband and for her race has brought her into the highest governmental circles where her contribution has been sound and wise. To have been able to create the balance between the need of her family and her community as she has done with outstanding success is to me her greatest claim to this honor.16

When she writes that Cloud did not become “embittered,” Page positions Elizabeth as a “good” Indian who supported whites despite “humiliations and obstacles,” not a “bad” Indian who fought back. In testament to Cloud’s ability to bridge private and public spheres, Bess comments on Cloud’s facility with multitasking. During this time women lived in the midst of much sexism and were viewed as “good women” only if they married a man, behaved dutifully and subserviently, and remained in the domestic sphere. In fact, their involvement in the public sphere was acceptable only if they properly attended to their domestic duties first. Finally, Page emphasizes how Cloud’s work with her husband and her race brought her into the “highest governmental circles.” In this way Elizabeth’s partnership with Henry followed Native notions of gender roles, which called for complementary and equitable distribution of labor across the sexes.

Cloud was the sixteenth American Mother of the Year ever selected. She was picked out of fifty-two finalists, including Clara Ford. She was honored and revered across the nation. The Saint Augustine mission school in Winnebago, Nebraska named her honorary Indian princess. The Minnesota Chippewa Tribe honored her—which included all the Ojibwe reservations except for Red Lake—with a unanimous congratulatory resolution.17 Elizabeth and our family rejoiced after receiving the news of her winning the Mother of the Year award.

The Christian Science Monitor acknowledged Cloud as the “first of her race to be selected.” The selection committee chose her because of her own religious faith, honesty, and character, as well as the achievements of her children. Cloud’s identities as a Native Christian and modern Native woman who encouraged her children to graduate from college were certainly contributing factors. Her oldest daughter, Marion Hughes, was the first Native to graduate from Wellesley College; her second oldest daughter, my mother, Woesha Cloud North, was the first Native to graduate from Vassar College; Ramona Butterfield, her third eldest daughter, also graduated from Vassar College; and Lillian, her youngest daughter, completed her freshman year at the University of Kansas.18 During this time Native women attending and graduating from college was certainly rare. The Clouds encouraging their daughters to attend college points to their belief that girls and young women should attend college, not believing in the sexist notion of the early twentieth century that college is for men only (see chapter 2).

Fig. 18. Elizabeth Bender Cloud in the foreground, examining newspaper clippings of herself winning the Mother of the Year award. Photograph courtesy of the Cloud family.

The first American Mother of the Year was chosen in 1935. It was created as a public acknowledgment of mothers who contributed to the national U.S. community. In 1950 the award’s notion of community expanded, and the selection committee distributed awards to mothers from other countries for the first time. The International Mothers’ Digest argues that “an invisible chain draws women around the world together; for regardless of nationality, race, or creed, the mothers of the earth have a common bond in their aspirations and dreams for their children’s welfare.”19 When Cloud received the American Mother of the Year award, a newspaper reporter stressed her Ojibwe identity by describing her as wearing “a pair of orchids, a quiet smile, and a yard-long silver necklace hammered with symbols of her Chippewa (Ojibwe) Indian parentage.” While accepting this honor, Cloud said, “My being made the American Mother of 1950 will do a tremendous amount of good for Indians in both North and South America. It means that there is to be something of a square deal for the Indian—finally.” Cloud argued that her selection as American Mother of the Year could also help Natives gain equal rights. By claiming that Natives did not have a “square deal” yet, Cloud emphasizes her incredibly powerful and independent point of view. She directly challenges Henry’s own argument in an earlier radio address that Natives already had a “square deal.”20 She goes on to cross nation-state boundaries, borders that often separate Natives today. By stressing her desire to support Indigenous peoples’ struggles throughout the Western Hemisphere, in other words, she had developed a “Western Hemispheric consciousness.” An Indigenous concept coined by Muscogee scholar Victoria Bomberry, a Western Hemispheric consciousness is the ability to see connections between Natives across national boundaries. Cloud’s words, far ahead of her time, forged a transnational Native hub consciousness and encouraged relatedness between Native peoples throughout the Americas.21

Fig. 19. Anne Woesha Cloud standing next to her proud father, Henry, on her graduation day at Vassar College. Photograph courtesy of the Cloud family.

When Cloud officially accepted her honor as American Mother of the Year, she discussed it with humility. She recognized all the mothers throughout the United States who were fulfilling their roles beautifully. She viewed motherhood not as a site of oppression, as some feminist writers have argued, but as a place of responsibility and privilege. She talked about the importance of both mothers and fathers providing compassionate love and encouraged Native children to be resilient—a perspective especially poignant in contrast to her own childhood in a federal boarding school. Federal-government policy stripped her of her right to live with her parents and of her parents’ right to care for her. As discussed in chapter 2, Elizabeth’s sister, Anna, was away in a federal Indian boarding for so long she no longer remembered our family when she returned home. The horrific agony our Native ancestors suffered while separated from our mothers and fathers is profound. Cloud’s honor of American Mother of the Year could have represented a healing for her but also might have triggered difficult memories of her childhood filled with the painful separation from her parents. Cloud gestured to the racist environment by discussing her appreciation for her selection as not influenced by race or color.22 Cloud stressed how strong her sense of spirituality was, arguing that spiritual faith needs to guide parents in raising their children.

In an interview about her accolade, Cloud told the St. Louis Post Dispatch that her Ojibwe childhood on the White Earth Reservation motivated her to put religion at the center of her life: “The Indian lives in the vast outdoors; he searches for the mystical, for an answer to the mountains and forests and plains. Long before the first missionaries, Indians spoke humbly of ‘The Great Mystery.’ . . . Religion has given the Indians an anchor, a moorage. Today it is more important to him than ever, for he needs some sanctuary from the bustle and clamor of civilization. This is provided by the church, especially by a church which shows interest also in the Indian’s social and economic problem.”23 In this quote Cloud uses storytelling to make a connection to her Ojibwe land, her sense of spirituality, and the importance of the divine. Cloud makes sense of the tremendous wonder of nature, creates a virtual Ojibwe hub, and supports her Ojibwe identity. Her words don’t encourage the domestication of the land—like settler-colonial narratives do—but they call for a relationship with the land that educates and answers spiritual questions.24 At the same time, Cloud argues that a combination of Ojibwe spirituality with Christianity provides a sense of rootedness and connection in the midst of civilization. Thus, as she espouses anti–settler-colonial values, she embraces her Native Christianity identity, arguing that the Christian Church helps Natives better their social and economic situation.

Fighting Racism and Settler Colonialism

Through Ojibwe storytelling in newspapers, Cloud transformed her Mother of the Year title into a modern, gendered, and Ojibwe-centric hub and a platform to fight for Native civil rights. She fought against racism and for civil rights laws. She supported policies in the Western states that would forbid discrimination against Natives and other racial minorities in hotels, theaters, and restaurants. The reporter Richard Neuberger wrote, “The brown-skinned grandmother set her jaw stubbornly when she discussed Hollywood’s version of the Indian. ‘Our western movies show the Apache as a fierce and primitive savage,’ she remarked bitingly. ‘Yet he loved his home and family and he had strong spiritual feelings. He was trying to defend his native soil from traders who plied him with whiskey and from land grabbers who stole the only valleys fit for agriculture.’”25 In this quote the reporter emphasizes her dark skin color and her tense jawbone, racializing her as an angry Native woman. Cloud fights to protect Native Americans from whites’ racism and settler-colonial behavior. She argues for the passage of civil rights laws, and she sharply criticizes Hollywood’s racist portrayals of Indians as “primitive.” She even challenges settler colonialism when she underscores that Apaches fought to protect our lands, and whites used alcohol as a tactic in support of Native land dispossession. Thus, Cloud emphasizes Ojibwe-centric ideas in her role as American Mother of the Year. Once more we see the complexity of her layered identities: Native, Christian, and a modern warrior woman.

Cloud kept in close contact with her siblings and Ojibwe mother throughout her life. She maintained a virtual and geographic Ojibwe gendered hub with frequent letters, trips, and visits to the White Earth Reservation. My mother, Woesha, wrote, “Elizabeth [her mother] kept in touch with her natal family all her life. . . . Later, Mary Razier came to help my mother taking over the household and [took] care of my sister, Marion and me when we were two and four years old, and she was there other times for lengthy visits.”26 Cloud’s close and continual connection with her mother, Mary Razier, meant she could speak her Ojibwe language, hear her tribe’s stories, and receive her mother’s encouragements to be a strong woman leader and warrior. Some Ojibwe women had been leaders of their tribes and met with government officials (see chapter 2). As late as the nineteenth century, U.S. government sources named three Ojibwe women as chiefs of their bands. Indeed, some Ojibwe women became honored warriors, including Hanging Cloud Woman of the Lac Courte Oreilles band of the Ojibwe, who, in the 1850s after Dakotas killed her father, grabbed her father’s gun and pursued them. Afterward various Ojibwe lodges from the surrounding territory honored Hanging Cloud Woman.27 Mary Razier, Cloud’s Ojibwe mother, taught Cloud to be strong and independent and to speak her mind. Mary was a medicine woman who hunted and skinned her kill. She lived independently in a log cabin near the Canadian border until she died.28 During an informal interview Cloud told my mother, Woesha Cloud North, that she could do any job as good as any man. Cloud was a modern-day warrior woman whose weapons were words, not a gun, like Hanging Cloud Woman.

On May 12, 1950, Cloud was presented a specially designed gold-leaf motherhood medal and a scroll citation at an awards breakfast ceremony held at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City.29 Two days later, on May 14, Cloud was honored as American Mother of the Year at the Salvation Army’s Mother’s Day celebration at Central Park Mall in New York City. Afterward she journeyed to attend a NCAI meeting in Washington DC. There Cloud met with Dillon S. Myer, the new commissioner of Indian Affairs, who developed the federal termination and relocation policy, an attempt to terminate treaty rights and force assimilation. The federal relocation program was integral to the government’s goal of the termination of treaty rights. It moved Natives from reservations to cities for vocational training and employment, and it was part of the federal government’s goal to assimilate Natives and move us from our tribal land bases.30 They were both Native policies supporting settler colonialism, attempting to dispossess Indigenous peoples of our lands and eliminate us culturally as Native yet again.

In response Cloud once more used a newspaper to create a virtual Native hub, discussing both white and Native ideas. According to the Washington Merry-Go-Round newspaper column, Cloud told Myer—who was also the mastermind behind the Japanese internment camps during World War II—“Indians don’t want to be treated like museum pieces, but as Americans. They need, above all, good schools and a chance to earn a decent living. All we want is half a chance.” She continued, “Indian children should go to public, rather than segregated schools. We are Americans first and Indians second.” She said, “Let the tribal councils take a greater part in running Indian affairs. It is far, far better for them to make a few mistakes at first than for Washington to say, ‘You are no good. White men must run your lives.’”31

In these quotes Cloud defends Natives, while challenging settler colonialism, sharply criticizing Myer for treating Natives as static relics of the past. Static notions of culture based in classic anthropology support the notion of the vanishing Native, which is another way to make Natives disappear—an act of elimination and, therefore, settler colonialism. She also emphasizes that Natives deserve to be treated as equal American citizens both economically and educationally. She privileges Natives’ identity as American citizens over our identity as members of tribal nations, alluding to her strong support for Natives becoming apart of the U.S. nation state, a move that arguably weakens tribal sovereignty and supports settler colonialism. At the same time, she challenges the federal government’s paternalism of Natives and instead supports our right for self-determination and tribal sovereignty, relying on tribal councils to run our own affairs. In this way Cloud fought for Natives’ right to Indigenous cultural citizenship, becoming full members of the U.S. nation-state and active governing members of their tribal nations, ultimately a kind of dual citizenship.

At the same time, Cloud supported a modern motherhood that “traditional” Native women needed to aspire to, a problematic and painful settler-colonial assumption. In June 1950 Cloud visited Wichita, her old home, where she helped run the American Indian Institute. She told a reporter for the Wichita Eagle that “modern mothers . . . have more leisure to devote to welfare of their children. They no longer have to be household drudges. They can organize a better home life, and have time to help build a better community. . . . The home has to be organized much in the same manner as a good business. . . . It has to be run wisely and have good management. That’s what I did as a young mother, and my children show the results possible with such a program.” She also discussed the work of the NCAI, which she said was fast improving the status of Indians. “Through the work of such agencies,” she said, “Indians are starting to run their own affairs. Soon, rigid supervision by government agents will be a thing of the past.”32 In this quote Cloud supports NCAI’s efforts to help fight for tribal self-determination and sovereignty, promoting NCAI, an Indigenous hub. Indeed, Cloud often performed the role of a spokesperson for NCAI. She also emphasizes the importance of efficiency so women can contribute to the world outside the home, bridging the private and public spheres. Her discussion of efficiency is a white idea that fits within progressive, white, modern ideals of motherhood. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, “scientific mothering” became popular. Women were expected to rely on parenting experts to mother children appropriately. Children were assumed to need rigid control and scheduling to help them master their natural “drives” and impulses.33

Thus, Cloud encouraged Native women to develop a modern mother identity, tribal nationhood, and sovereignty. This points to her complicated Ojibwe and modern identity, supporting both settler-colonial notions of motherhood and tribal nations’ fight for self-determination. It is unlikely white reformers would have given Cloud a platform to speak as American Mother of the Year or Indian Affairs chair of the GFWC unless she was a “modern,” Native Christian woman. She certainly did not occupy a pure category of Ojibwe warrior woman—like Hanging Cloud Woman might have—but her identity was much more complex. Elizabeth Cloud occupied many categories all at once. Her complicated identity, similar to other SAI intellectuals, means her warrior stance seems to have been missed, especially by historian Hazel Hertzberg in her famous book, The Search for an American Indian Identity, and by Lisa Tetzloff in her article, “Elizabeth Bender Cloud: Working for and with Our Indian People.”

Cloud talked to a reporter for the Oregonian on October 1, 1950, about her hope for the improvement of Natives’ lives: “Though the General Federation has done much in bringing about beneficial legislation, given scholarships, [and] has been mindful of starving groups in a land of plenty, we must be more determined and more enlightened in our efforts to inform ourselves and act upon the problems involved. . . . Like tribes and nations across the sea, like all peoples everywhere, Indian tribes in our midst are struggling to survive, and it is our goal to make possible adjustment which will assure this survival.”34 Here Cloud compares Natives in the United States to tribes and nations in other countries, alluding to Natives’ status as sovereign nations, like other nations. She also gives the GFWC credit for its support of disadvantaged groups, while suggesting the importance of Natives’ independence, as opposed to the paternalism of the GFWC. She encourages Natives to assert our own tribal autonomy and sovereignty. Her involvement in NCAI, an important pantribal Native hub, could have influenced her Native intellectual ideas, strengthening her resolve to support tribes’ struggles.

The month before, in September 1950, Cloud was one of forty representatives of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs who traveled to Europe to learn about Marshall Plan aid and European perspectives. Cloud’s trip to Europe could have influenced her conversation in October of the same year with the reporter for the Oregonian about people in other parts of the world. Indeed, Cloud met with Queen Juliana of Holland, who had also been given the Mother of the Year award. Cloud discussed feeling depressed about the plight of displaced people in refugee camps in Europe. She was especially saddened to learn about the struggles of elderly refugees.35 Cloud’s traveling to Europe must have expanded her intellectual insights to include peoples’ experiences across national borders. Other Natives had traveled to Europe, including the famous Pocahontas, who died in England and never made it back home.36

Cloud’s discussion of Natives’ citizenship and belonging ranged from spirituality and family values to the U.S. Constitution. She argued against racism and for Native cultural citizenship—our right to both be different and belong to the U.S. nation-state and our tribal nations. In an article Cloud wrote for the Associate Press, she related family values to the character of society: “We shall have little fear if we provide the spiritual guidance for our children which alone gives unwavering strength, the steadiness of vision, the clarity of perspective so needed by a world in its values.”37 In an address to the sixtieth convention of the GFWC in May 1951 in Houston, Texas, she evoked the language of the U.S. Constitution to promote the values parents should teach to their children: “Spiritually motivated . . . [It] is the foundation stone of our democratic way of life—the enunciation of our fundamental belief in the infinite worth and dignity of each individual, in the basic truth that all men are created equal with certain inalienable rights. . . . How splendid would be the growing up years of our children and young people if from their earliest years they knew and felt the enrichment of life that comes from our differences from one another, rather than seeing our differences as bitter divisive forces in daily living.”38

Cloud traveled to New York City for the GFWC’s national board meeting and to Chicago to accept the Indian Council Fire’s 1950 Achievement Award—an award that Henry received in 1935. In 1923 Indians and non-Indians founded the Indian Council Fire. It provided education, legislative, and social services to reservation and urban Indians. The Indian Council Fire Achievement Award emphasized that Native self-development is rooted in traditional values and not merely a result of federal programming.39 According to the Indian Council Fire, Cloud “has rendered distinctive service in educational work for Indian young people; in advancing the cause of Indian welfare; and in religious work. She is outstanding as a lecturer on the interests of Indian people, and in great demand as a speaker before prominent women’s and missionary organizations.”40

American Indian Development Project

In 1951 Cloud exchanged her honorary role of American Mother of the Year for the paid position of assistant director of the American Indian Development (AID) project. NCAI and the Field Foundation backed this Native self-assistance effort. Cloud’s friend Ruth Muskrat Bronson was executive director of NCAI, and Cloud was field secretary. These two Indigenous women in NCAI leadership positions worked together to support and build tribal nations. The purpose of AID was Native community development and revitalization. D’Arcy McNickle, a Cree, who was enrolled on the Flathead Reservation and a founder of NCAI, was one of the initiators of this project, and it was funded by the tax-exempt Arrow company. McNickle hoped that summer workshops would encourage tribal leaders to transform Native communities and make them more economically self-sufficient. As participants discussed and communicated similar ideas and experiences, the workshops helped to bring the community together. Cloud was a fundamental part of this project—which encouraged Native independence and discouraged BIA paternalism—and certainly shows her support of self-determination and sovereignty.41

Cloud supported the development of tribal self-determination and sovereignty and encouraged Natives to solve our own problems. In July 1951 she participated in NCAI’s summer workshop held at the Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City, Utah. The purpose of the workshop was to reach out to Natives from reservations and rural areas and identify their needs. Around fifty to seventy-five Natives attended, including a student group, representing leaders from the Navajo, Blackfoot, Pueblo, Apache, Nez Perce, Sioux, and other tribes. Cloud discussed the workshop’s emphasis of self-help and democratic participation to the student group.42 Along with the growth of AID were summer workshops for Native youth in 1955, organized by the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago. In 1959 AID began facilitating these summer workshops for Native youth, giving them a Native pantribal hub to discuss Native American affairs, ultimately inspiring the creation of the Native youth movements of the 1960s. Eventually these summer workshops influenced Clyde Warrior, a Ponca leader of the National Indian Youth Council, and he decided to become an activist. He ultimately coined the term “Red Power.” Thus, by organizing these summer workshops for NCAI, Cloud supported community organizing that laid the groundwork for mobilizations in the 1960s, in which Natives fought for tribal self-determination and sovereignty.43 With the support of NCAI leadership, including Ruth Bronson, Cloud was instrumental in strengthening and building tribal nations.

In late October 1951, as part of their NCAI duties, Cloud and Bronson joined a delegation of three leaders of the Pyramid Lake Paiutes of Nevada to Washington DC. Their trip as representatives of NCAI showed this Native organization’s support of tribal nations’ struggles and concerns, including fighting to retrieve stolen land, challenging settler colonialism, and strengthening the creation of a pantribal hub. While talking to Bronson and Paiute leaders, Cloud could let down her protective mask and speak openly about tribal rights and concerns. For ninety years the Paiutes had been fighting for the return of three hundred acres that white squatters had stolen and occupied. The Paiutes sent a delegation of six to seek the BIA commissioner Myer’s approval for the tribe’s contract with Washington attorney James E. Curry. Myer, however, said the tribe could send only two delegates because the Indians had only $6,700 in their budget, according to an article in the New York Times.44 This article describes Myer as a Hitler-like dictator and the tool of a senator who did not actively support Natives, showing how incredibly difficult and challenging Myer was for Cloud and other Native leaders to deal with.

While advocating for tribes’ interests, Cloud discussed her “Point Four Program.” This program was in her report for the chair of the Indian Affairs Division of the GFWC, assuming the inevitability of termination. It discussed Natives’ absorption into the U.S. nation-state—a change that would lead to second-class Native citizenship and loss of tribal rights. Cloud was aware of the federal government’s plan for termination and her program prepared Natives for the government’s withdrawal. The most painful aspect of the program for me was training Native leadership for the end of self-government—including adult education regarding social, political, economic, and citizenship responsibilities—to anticipate the gradual withdrawal of supervision of Indian affairs. Reading this part of the report was especially difficult for me, because her husband, Henry, had worked so hard supporting self-government and ending assimilation. According to Elizabeth, Natives should attend public schools, thereby reducing the “segregation” of Natives while promoting integration. At the same time, she encouraged Natives’ practice of our arts and crafts, which contribute to the richness of U.S. culture, suggesting the importance of maintaining tribal identities. Cloud’s ideas were consistent with the mainstream women’s clubs’ goal of assimilating Native Americans.45

Reading about Cloud’s “Point Four Program” was incredibly distressing and challenging for me. It stimulated memories of the terrible assimilation campaign of the federal boarding schools that indoctrinated Native children to abandon our tribal nations, land, and sovereign rights. Cloud’s report was a plan for Natives’ dispossession of our tribal rights. Reading this report recalled in my mind the “thicket of white ideas” my mother, Woesha Cloud North, discussed in her memoir notes (see introduction). In this instance Elizabeth’s warrior identity seemed mostly masked or camouflaged by settler-colonial rhetoric. Cloud, however, did not support Natives’ assimilation or erasure of our tribal identities like Richard Pratt, the founder of the federal boarding schools. Therefore, historians Tetzloff and Hertzberg calling her an “assimilationist” is incorrect and does not honor her struggle to support tribes’ interests. This “Four Point Program,” however, does show a contradiction between her work anticipating tribal termination and developing and supporting Native autonomy, self-determination, and sovereignty.

At the same time, in her report as chair of the Indian Affairs Division of the GFWC, Cloud included AID’s “Charter of Indian Rights” that was adopted at NCAI’s October 1952 Phoenix Workshop. The charter revolves around Natives’ citizenship and belonging to “exert active citizenship within his Tribe, State, and Nation.” The charter includes, for example,

Indeed, Cloud’s incorporation of the Charter of Indian Rights suggests her support of Natives’ fight for dual citizenship and Native cultural citizenship, tribal belonging, and U.S. citizenship.

Cloud’s ambivalent rhetoric points to her doubleness, being both a “good” and a “bad” Native woman simultaneously. Cloud employed dominant rhetoric with white women reformers, reinforcing assimilation. At the same time, she worked for the NCAI in strong and passionate support of tribes’ self-determination and sovereignty. Both Elizabeth and Henry may have learned doubleness speech from listening to Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe trickster stories while living in the midst of settler colonialism. I argue it was a tribal trickster methodology that taught shape-shifting and the ability to move in multiple contexts, including both Native and settler-colonial environments. Cloud could be seen as a “good” Indian among white women reformers and then shape-shift into a “bad” Indian among Natives. This way she could fight to support Native rights, including tribal sovereignty and self-determination. In newspaper articles she is both a “good” and a “bad” Indian, employing Native-centric rhetoric about tribal independence and dominant discourses that frame Natives’ identity as secondary to our identity as U.S. citizens. Cloud was complicated and subversive. She cannot be pigeonholed into static categories. She was Ojibwe, Christian, warrior, citizen, “good,” and “bad.” And this flexibility was necessary to gain the support of white women reformers—support that could eventually be used for Native goals and objectives. Indeed, SAI intellectuals of Elizabeth’s generation had to work with white reformers to gain power in the public sphere and fight for Native rights; consequently, playing the role of a “good” Indian was necessary.

Cloud described the NCAI’s American Indian Development project in a guest editorial for the newsletter, the Amerindian.47 Although still in the developmental stage, she said, the project responded to the expressed wishes of Natives of many tribes for improved conditions under which to raise their children, which included cheaper and better housing; improved health facilities and care; superior home industries, education, and scholarship aid for Indian youth; and robust recreational and community programs. She argued that the project strived to secure, for every Indian community, the opportunity for every person to be educated and healthy, to have an adequate standard of living, and to receive moral and spiritual training. Again, Cloud, as the director of AID, supported Natives’ efforts to claim their right for full citizenship in Native communities and the nation-state, which was a move toward Native cultural citizenship.

In 1953 participants of the American Indian Development project summarized their experience with it in one statement: “The community grows when the people get together. . . . We have lost much, but we can gain this back with renewed vigor in the right direction, each doing his best in solving the problem at hand. Each mother making a good home for her children. Each father living a good, exemplary life for his sons. It is in group cooperation and activity that the needs within a neighborhood can be met. It is in the stimulation of group cooperation and activity that Indian leadership will make its real contribution.”48 In this quote AID participants discuss the energizing experience of gathering together to solve their own problems, meet their own needs, and claim leadership of their own destiny—all actions necessary for working toward Native autonomy and tribal sovereignty. Participants also emphasize Native women as “making a good home for her children,” honoring their role as mothers.

On June 22, 1953, while vising the Navajo Reservation in Window Rock, Arizona, Cloud discussed her involvement in NCAI’s American Indian Development project in a letter to her daughter Marion and her family:

I have just been swamped with engagements, interviews, planning the Ft. Defiance workshop, and short trips to Indian communities—Sawmill, Hunters Point, St. Michaels, Mexican Springs, Ganado, and Crystal and all within a radius of sixty miles. We had the most successful workshop that we have ever had and we held it at Fort Defiance from June 15th to June 20th. Our morning sessions averaged around 40, afternoon 35 and evening meetings twenty to thirty. The day sessions we had to use an interpreter and he was excellent, a college man and formerly a teacher. The more time I spend among the Navajos, the more knowledge I gain as to their way of life, philosophy, ethics and humor. They are a kind, friendly people and will share with one their last morsel of food, as Daddy would say, “Not steengy.” . . .

We shall be here until the sixth or seventh of July. Then I shall go to Mescalero for two or three days, where we shall plan our Aid project. Two very intelligent Apache women drove all the way from Mescalero (southern part of N.M.) to give us the invitation. The older woman knew Daddy. . . .

We shall be in Oklahoma again about the 17th of July for two weeks, then back here again in August.

We are stressing housing here and you would be surprised how the Navajos are really wanting better homes. One dear Navajo woman said to me, “I am not young. I am old, about 66. I see only in one eye. I would like to get a pension. I live with the same man all my life. He is not young. He is old. I think 78. He is too old to work. My well is dried up and full of dirt, so I haul water two miles. I need a new well and a new house, just a small one. I am tired of the old, old Hogan. My name is Yonci Nez.”

She was such a sweet old lady. When she got up to leave she said, “Thank you sister, because you listen to my story.”49

Cloud’s letter describes how busy she was working on this project for NCAI. She supported Natives’ goals for better housing, education, health, and leadership trainings, and she organized well-attended workshops focused on these issues. She listened to Natives’ goals and objectives rather than pressing an outside agenda. In other words, she supported tribal sovereignty. Cloud stresses her respect for Navajo culture and describes participants feeling heard by her and appreciating her community-development work. Participants even invited her to provide these services elsewhere, showing her ability to be respectful and to connect with Navajo women and with Natives’ goals and objectives.

Cloud’s work to help provide Natives with scholarship aid fit with NCAI’s goals and objectives. It helped Indigenous people become educated. As part of her involvement in AID, Cloud visited Sophie Van S. Thies in New York to discuss the need for scholarship money for Phil Dixon, a Navajo, to attend school to become a qualified hospital technician and for Stella Tsotsie, who needed scholarship aid to get a master’s degree in education.50 According to a letter Cloud sent to Helen Peterson on May 26, 1954, this visit was successful in receiving scholarship aid from Sophie Van S. Thies.51

For NCAI Cloud traveled around Indian Country and conducted field visits of Native communities in California and Arizona, evaluating schools and socioeconomic and health conditions on reservations. She visited Sherman Institute, a federal Native boarding school in Riverside, California, and Cook Indian Training School in Phoenix, Arizona. She spent three days on the San Carlos Reservation, and one day she attended the tribal council meeting. In her NCAI report, she wrote, “Their council was made up only of men, that these days we say that this is also a woman’s world. Later on as I talked to some of the council men, they told me that they would welcome the participation of their women as members of the council but the women were timid and too bashful.”52

In this NCAI report Cloud claims a gendered, Ojibwe virtual hub. She writes about her experience challenging sexism within tribal councils composed of only men and alludes to the right for women to become tribal council members. In this way Cloud links gender, tribal nation, and sovereignty together. She emphasizes that it is a “woman’s world,” pointing to women’s right to be in leadership positions and on tribal councils. This linkage of gender, tribal nation, and sovereignty foreshadows Native feminist discussions today, which emphasize Native women’s right to become full members of our tribal nations.53 Finding Cloud’s NCAI field report made me realize that I learned my passion for Native feminism from my Ojibwe female ancestors, who passed down the importance of the struggle for Native women’s rights. As discussed in the last chapter, my mother occupied Alcatraz Island and taught for Red Rock School in 1969. My mother also was a founding member of the Native Women’s Action Council, formed around the same time. Contemporary Native women’s struggles and my Ojibwe lineage have influenced my Native feminist ideas.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower started his presidency of the United States in 1952, he picked Governor McKay of Oregon to become his secretary of the interior. On November 21, 1952, Cloud wrote McKay to wish him well and to advocate for Natives to occupy leadership positions in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This letter shows her role as a vital and significant Native leader involved in national politics and concerns. She discussed necessary qualifications for commissioner, and she spoke on behalf of herself: “For myself and for those whom I know to be the most sincere, able and reliable of the Indian leaders . . . we feel the time has come when we should look to qualified Indian leaders to assist in leading Indian people out of the dilemma of the present Indian Bureau administration with its high-handed, dictatorial, misunderstood, mass ‘withdrawal’ program,” under commissioner of Indian affairs Dillon S. Myer.54 Here Cloud sharply critiques federal termination. She uses strong language, including “high-handed, dictatorial, [and] misunderstood,” suggesting that the leadership of the BIA is paternalistic and unsympathetic to Native concerns and issues.

Cloud also wrote in her letter to McKay that, even though she was not of the same party (a Democrat) like John Collier, the former commissioner of Indian Affairs was usually seen as compassionate of Natives. She incorporated Collier’s statement of policy, which Native leaders chiefly supported. Cloud wrote, “I am fervently hopeful that you will guide this nation into more responsible discharge of its trusteeship obligations towards Indians rather than give support to the idea of mass, premature withdrawal of essential federal services.”55 In this quote she argues that Natives had to be consulted in the transfer of federal services, that Natives would cooperate when the transfer occurred without damage and with efficiency, and that the federal government must consider each reservation as a separate case. Cloud emphasizes the importance of tribal consent, and she argues against the federal government forcibly terminating tribes. In other words, she fights back against the government’s paternalism by arguing that Natives should be consulted. NCAI had been grappling with the federal government’s enforcement of termination, and Cloud’s discussion supported NCAI’s political goal: consent of the governed, not government by force.56 She also wrote that the qualifications of the new commissioner should include the ability to collaborate with Congress, good administration skills, real knowledge of Indians, humanitarian instincts, specialized knowledge in one or more technical fields, and the desire to plan and execute programs in cooperation with tribal leadership.

Cloud proposed two possible Native candidates for the position of commissioner of Indian Affairs: William Keeler, principal chief of the Cherokees and an executive of Phillips Petroleum; and Benjamin Reifel, a Sioux, who had a Harvard doctorate in public administration and was superintendent of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. She recommended candidates for assistant commissioner, including Reginald Curry, a Brigham Young University graduate and tribal chair of the Uintah and Ouray Utes; and Francis McKinley, a George Washington University graduate and business manager for the Uintah and Ouray Utes. Thus, Cloud emphasized the importance of Natives rising to the position of commissioner of Indian Affairs.

In this same letter Cloud revealed that Native politics impacted the timing of her correspondence. NCAI had assembled in Denver the week prior, developing a “conditional endorsement of Alvin Simpson of New Mexico, for the post of Commissioner of Indian Affairs. . . . The involved resolution, which contained at the very end the conditional endorsement referred to, was brought before the convention after a very lengthy, delayed and bitter session of the National Congress, at about three o’clock in the morning, after at least half of the delegates had left. . . . It was introduced and pushed through with the use of objectionable, confusing methods.”57 Sixty-five thousand Navajos and many other tribal groups, she wrote, had strongly challenged the NCAI’s backing of Simpson.

Commissioner of Indian Affairs

Cloud’s national prominence extended beyond her national Native leadership positions. Her name was put forward as a candidate for commissioner of Indian Affairs. Woody Crumbo, a Potawatomi, an alumnus of the American Indian Institute, and a famous artist, suggested Cloud as the next commissioner of Indian Affairs. Crumbo wrote McKay in January 1953 that Elizabeth Bender Cloud was the most capable and logical candidate for the job. He said he encouraged Cloud to pursue the position, and she answered, “If I were offered the position I would not turn it down, because I do feel that I have an understanding of the Indian problem and could do much to alleviate the bottle necks which have stymied the growth and development of Indian progress.” Crumbo wrote that Cloud was one of the greatest living Americans:

[Cloud is] greater by far than the celebrated Sacajawea (spoken with all due respect) who merely guided Lewis and Clark on a river expedition. . . . She has never intimated to me as a student or as an adult that we should expect the government to look after our affairs, but that we should prepare ourselves to handle our own interests and take our place in society just as any other people are obligated to do. Mrs. Cloud probably knows more about the needs and working possibilities of the American Indian, as well as how to deal with their problems, than any living person.58

Crumbo’s high praise shows how much Cloud was respected as an Ojibwe activist, intellectual, and administrator in her own right—not just as the widow of her late husband, Henry. Crumbo alludes to Cloud’s support of Native citizenship and inclusion in the U.S. nation-state, emphasizing that she urged him and the other students at the American Indian Institute to “handle our own interests and take our place in society,” like everyone else. Crumbo’s statement that Cloud was greater than Sacagawea—who led the Lewis and Clark expedition—recalls her position as a helper of whites and as a “good” Indian.

After her two favorite candidates, Keeler and Reifel, both Natives, removed themselves from consideration, Cloud supported Glenn Emmons, a New Mexico banker, for the position of commissioner of Indian Affairs. During a workshop in Fort Defiance, New Mexico, in June 1953, Cloud shared with a reporter that “since my favorite sons are out of the picture it doesn’t matter to me whether the new appointee is Indian or non-Indian, provided he has a comprehension of the Indian needs and sees to it that the withdrawal program does not injure the Indians of the southwest.” In a telegram Cloud endorsed Emmons succinctly, arguing that appointment of a new commissioner was essential. “Morale of Indians and Indian Service is at low ebb. Many valuable employees resigning. Indians disturbed over propaganda hasty withdrawal services.”59 She discussed that Emmons was a great businessman and knows about tribes of the Southwest, and she was impressed with his honest approach to the Indian situation.

Emmons took office on August 10, 1953. He was commissioner of Indian Affairs for eight years under the Eisenhower administration. Unfortunately, Emmons, similar to Myer, supported the federal government’s attempts to abrogate the federal government’s treaty relationship with Native Americans and dispossess us of our lands and tribal rights—whether we chose to be terminated or not. Emmons followed in the footsteps of Myer and continued to implement the government’s plan of termination.

At the same time, in 1953 another warrior woman, Helen Peterson, a Northern Cheyenne but enrolled Oglala Sioux, took the important job of the new executive director of NCAI. Cloud traveled to Washington DC to help Peterson in the transition. She and Peterson visited reservations throughout Indian Country in Cloud’s late-model Chevy to listen to Native needs and create tribal contacts. Peterson got much support from Ruth Bronson, whom she called almost daily. Bronson shared her experience, talents, and time with the new executive director of NCAI. Peterson was the right leader of NCAI. Her grandmother had always taught her to be a role model for the Native community and to respect and deeply value land. She had been active in NCAI since 1948.60

Cloud’s trip with Helen Peterson was a mobile, gendered, and Native hub experience. Strong warrior women had trained these two Native women leaders. Mary Razier had educated Cloud to be an independent and powerful Ojibwe warrior woman who spoke her mind and fought back. And Peterson’s grandmother taught her to respect and value Native land. Driving together provided alone time to discuss tribal concerns, needs, and issues.

While Elizabeth was busily involved in NCAI and GFWC, she learned of wonderful news about her brother Charles. During September 1953 Charles Albert Bender was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Coopertown, New York. Bender had a lifelong career in baseball. He regularly experienced racism, and he was usually called “Chief.” Fans repeatedly greeted him with war whoops, and he would challenge them, calling them “foreigners.” He pitched for Connie Mack and the Philadelphia Athletics from 1903 to 1943. Mack referred to Bender as the best money pitcher the game has ever known.61 Charles’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame was a happy occasion for Elizabeth and our Cloud family.

Federal termination was made into a reality when House Concurrent Resolution 108 (HCR 108) was approved on August 1, 1953. It proclaimed that Natives “should be subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges, rights, and responsibilities” as all American citizens.62 It recommended the immediate removal of federal guardianship and supervision over certain tribes. Congress proposed the immediate termination of the Flatheads of Montana, Klamaths in Oregon, Menominees of Wisconsin, Potawatomis of Kansas and Nebraska, and the Chippewas of North Dakota. The resolution called for the secretary of interior to recommend legislation to end federal responsibility by January 1, 1954.

Congress began a series of deliberations about the termination bills for various tribes on February 15, 1954. Both the Senate and House Subcommittees on Indian Affairs began joint hearings. Representatives were pressured by the unreasonable deadline of January 1, 1954, and draft termination bills were discussed before Congress, state officials, or Indian tribes had the opportunity to evaluate their consequences.63

Emergency Conference

While Cloud was working hard to support Native leadership training and back tribal self-determination and sovereignty, Congress pushed for the termination of tribes. Consequently, NCAI called an Emergency Conference of American Indians on Legislation in Washington DC from February 25 to 28, 1954. Tribal members gathered together to fight back against termination. This emergency session was a strong and intense expression of pantribal agreement and a powerful intertribal hub. Tribal members from the across the country gathered to challenge the federal government’s attempt to eliminate them as tribal peoples with treaty rights to land, education, and other rights, a governmental act of settler colonialism. According to Cowger, the NCAI’s Emergency Conference encouraged an incredibly potent Native protest that was comparable in strength and size only by the Red Power protest ten years later. Refusing the enforced nature of termination policy and asserting Natives’ right to control our own destinies, NCAI had been fighting in the postwar years to beat or change the coercive termination policy. As the chair of Indian Affairs of the GFWC, Cloud wrote a “Policy Statement on American Indian Legislation,” in support of the tribes’ fight against termination. She presented it at NCAI’s Emergency Session:

The present bills now before Congress to terminate federal supervision of American Indian property and the trustee responsibilities assumed by the nation for our American Indian citizens are being pushed through Congress in the face of Indian opposition, and without Indian consent, and without Indian participation at the tribal community level. Our democratic system of government is founded on the basic principle, government by the consent of the governed. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs must insist that Indians should be given the respect due all citizens under such a system of government—that of self-determination and consent. Because these bills violate this principle basic to our democratic way of life they must be opposed vigorously. Indians believe that the above legislation is aimed at destroying tribal existence and that while the above bills now before Congress may affect only certain named tribes that such bills are introduced singly as trial balloons to test public reaction and because it is easier to destroy one tribe at a time before attacking the whole Indian concept of cultural identity and freedom of Indian choice in the ownership of their property under the trustee status of the federal government. The Indian tribes are unanimous in their desire to keep their trustee status, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs supports them in this. The motives behind these bills as the Indians see it, is to destroy not only their cultural existence as a distinct group within our nation, but also their basic economy, which is land and the natural resources accruing from the land. The American Indian has had too harsh treatment in the past at the hands of the exploiters within our nation. The General Federation of Women’s Cubs cannot accept legislation affecting them which will break the Nation’s treaty commitments to this group of loyal and useful citizens, nor do we wish to see our nation embark upon a second “Century of Dishonor” in or relations with these people whose country we conquered.64

In this quote Cloud fights against the settler-colonial goal of tribal termination and for tribal sovereignty and self-determination. Ultimately, Cloud supports Natives’ treaty rights. She links her argument for tribal sovereignty to the American democratic goal of consent of the governed. She exposes the federal government’s insidious use of tribal termination as a barometer of public reaction and as the first step toward the erasure of the tribes’ existence overall. She emphasizes an Indigenous analytical perspective when she frames tribal termination as trying to erase not only tribes’ cultural existence as distinct groups but also our separate economies tied to our tribal land bases. Cloud underscores the history of Natives’ oppression by the colonizer, using the word “exploiters.” She even alludes to Helen Hunt Jackson’s book, A Century of Dishonor, when she argues that the federal government should not make the same colonial mistake twice. Finally, she asserts the power of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs as political leverage to support tribes’ continued cultural and tribal existence and sovereignty. In this way she strategically uses her leadership role in white women’s clubs for Native goals and objectives.

In the letter of March 30, 1954, to Helen Peterson, executive director of NCAI, Cloud discusses the Emergency Conference: “I am wondering if the ‘big blow’ is over and as you view the ‘Emergency Conference,’ . . . you discover some very real accomplishments. You and your staff worked practically twenty-four hours during the conference and we who attended marveled as to your organizational ability and the excellent meetings. Some of the California delegates were on the same plane as far as Kansas City, and we discussed the conference quite at length. They . . . were in high praise over NCAI’s aid and help.”65 This letter is evidence of Cloud’s encouraging spirit, as she recognizes the fierce efforts of Helen Peterson as the executive director and her staff and evidence of the strength of NCAI as a pantribal hub. These two warrior women seemed to have a supportive, strong relationship as part of a Native and gendered hub.

Cloud resigned as assistant director of the NCAI’s American Indian Development project on February 1, 1954: “I have given thoughtful planning, time and service in connection with the work of American Indian Development. And since I have spent forty years as educator and welfare worker and religious work director among the Indian people at the American Indian Institute and at Haskell Institute as well as field worker on several reservations, I feel that I have earned a goodly rest and can carry on some of the hobbies I have had in mind for a long time.”66 Cloud fought back against the federal government’s efforts to abrogate Native treaty rights and terminate federal responsibility to tribes. She would go on to observe the culmination of the termination era in the 1960s and the exciting mobilization of Native activism. Philleo Nash followed Emmons as commissioner of Indian Affairs, and Robert La Follette Bennett replaced Nash in 1966, becoming the first American Indian commissioner since Ely Parker in 1869.

That same year Cloud traveled to Wichita, Kansas, for the naming ceremony of the newest school in the Wichita School District: Henry Roe Cloud School. Zelma Zimmerman, principal of the school, invited her. “I had so hoped to have a real dedicatory service at the school, Oct. 10, but due to shortness of time (We have been open only three weeks), and the lack of an auditorium, this was not advisable. The newly organized P.T.A has therefore planned an Open House to which we will be most honored to have you present.”67

Cloud’s final years revolved around family. She lived with her daughter Marion. She regularly traveled to visit each of her daughters and would stay with them for a few months at a time. When she came to visit our childhood home, my siblings and I were very happy to have her with us for a few months each year. Marion Hughes followed in her mother’s footsteps and was busy with community work. She was president of the Portland League of Women Voters from 1955 to 1957. In the early 1960s Cloud suffered a series of strokes. Unfortunately, my aunt Marion was no longer able to care for her, and she moved into a nursing home. Her daughters and grandchildren visited her there. I remember my mother telling me that the strokes had impacted her recent memory. She lived in the past, as though the events of her childhood had occurred yesterday.

Lyndon Johnson’s presidential inauguration in 1965 provided an opportunity for honoring Henry Cloud’s memory. On January 20 the inaugural parade included a float called “Great Achievements,” including people who dressed as Sequoyah, the author of the Cherokee alphabet; the artist Ace Blue Eagle; and Henry Cloud. The parade honored Henry Roe Cloud, along with Jim Thorpe, Charles Curtis, Chief Joseph, Will Rogers, Dr. Charles Eastman, and Sacagawea.68

On September 16, 1965, at the age of seventy-seven, Elizabeth Georgian Bender Cloud died. She was buried adjacent to her cherished husband, Henry, in the Crescent Grove Cemetery in Tigard, Oregon.69 Elizabeth Bender Cloud was an important warrior and a Christian woman, an intellectual and an activist, who fought back against termination and struggled for tribal sovereignty and self-determination as the Indian welfare chair of the GFWC and NCAI. Cloud worked closely with other warrior women, including Helen Peterson and Ruth Bronson, to build tribal nations and struggle against termination. Cloud’s attire included stunning dresses and stylish hats that concealed her subversive Ojibwe warrior woman identity. With this camouflage and with the help of virtual and geographic hubs, Elizabeth kept her Ojibwe gender and identity strong. Cloud was an inherent contradiction: she supported Natives’ absorption into the nation-state, while aligning herself with tribal interests and fighting against settler colonialism. By supporting Natives’ struggle for equal belonging in the United States and fighting for tribal sovereignty, Cloud asserted Native cultural citizenship. She also linked gender, tribal nation, and sovereignty together by advocating for women to serve on tribal councils, supporting later discussions of Native feminisms. She emphasized the importance of connections between Natives throughout the Western Hemisphere, demonstrating a Western Hemispheric consciousness. She was an articulate and smart and a loving grandmother. As her granddaughter and a professor of Native studies and anthropology, I am deeply proud of her and her efforts to make the world a better place for Native peoples at the local, community, tribal, national, and international levels.