Profile · Fitchburg, Wisconsin
Ada Elizabeth Deer
Menominee leader who won tribal restoration; first woman to head the BIA; late-life Fitchburg resident
$116,000
Ada Elizabeth Deer led the fight that restored the Menominee Nation after federal termination, then became the first woman to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Late in life she lived in Fitchburg, served on the city’s Commission on Aging and pushed its rename to Commission on Aging Well, and died there on August 15, 2023, at eighty-eight—eight days after the governor proclaimed Ada Deer Day on her birthday. She grew up the oldest of five surviving children—four other Deer children died in infancy—in a one-room log cabin on the Wolf River at Keshena, with no running water and no electricity. Mother Constance Wood Deer, a Philadelphia Quaker nurse from a well-to-do family, had worked in Appalachia and at Rosebud before marrying Joseph Deer, a Menominee mill worker. Constance took Ada to tribal council meetings at four. Ada attended Shawano High School and Badger Girls State. In 1957 she became the first Menominee to graduate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison; in 1961 she was the first Native American to earn a social-work master’s at Columbia. Peace Corps training in Puerto Rico followed. Then came DRUMS and the Menominee Restoration Act, signed by Richard Nixon on December 22, 1973, after a House vote she later recalled as 404–3. She became the first woman to chair the tribe. President Clinton put her in Interior from 1993 to 1997 as the first woman to run the BIA. She had already run for Wisconsin secretary of state and for Congress, sat on Common Cause and Girl Scouts national boards, and later taught social work and American Indian studies at Wisconsin. Fitchburg’s mayor wrote that she “called Fitchburg home,” and an alder said she stayed keyed into the city’s legislative fights. She grew up on the Menominee reservation at Keshena; Fitchburg was where she spent her final years and did local civic work.