Perseverance in Profile
SARAH DEER— ADVOCATE FOR NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN BY TOM CALARCO
When she was in the second grade, Sarah Deer came across an article in a children’s magazine about women’s suffrage. She noticed to her surprise that women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920.
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“strong women doing innovative things.” She was inspired by tales of the fi rst woman doctor, of the fi rst woman to fl y an air- plane, and more particularly, the story of Victoria Woodhull, a 19th-century political activist who ran for president. “She was a renegade,” Deer says, “more radical than
thought it was a typo, at the time,” she says. “I got angry and went to my mom. T is should be 1820 or 1720 or 1620, I thought. I have a very visceral memory of that moment, and I had diffi culty wrapping my head around the idea of a society in which women were treated less equal than men. I
began to think that maybe the world is not a very fair place, and this was disappointing to me.” It was the beginning of Deer’s devo-
tion to the cause of women’s rights. A professor at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, MN, Deer has written broadly about Native women’s history and rights and worked tirelessly to improve the administration of justice, despite battling potentially debilitating diagnoses of bipolar disor- der and breast cancer. Deer, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, sought out stories about
DIVERSITY & THE BAR® SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011
Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony. She didn’t think things were moving fast enough. She was really rock- ing the boat, and a brave woman.” T inking about these valiant pioneers allowed Deer to
summon the courage needed to work at a Wichita, Kansas, abortion clinic during high school. “I couldn’t understand why people wanted to interfere
in other’s healthcare,” she says. Given the passion she developed at an early age for
women’s causes, it was probably unsurprising that Deer would major in Women’s Studies at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, and became very active in women’s groups, belonging to the university’s women’s pro-choice group. T ere she became an activist for issues related to sexual assault and violence against women, and volunteered at the local Douglas County Rape-Victim Survivor Service. Her eff orts were recognized during her senior year, when she received the school’s Outstanding Woman Student in Community Service award. Deer’s father, who was a judge, encouraged her to
enter the legal profession, and she enrolled at her alma mater’s law school. In law school her interest continued to focus on violent crimes against women, and she became assistant director
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