Helen W. Peterson; American Indian Activist in Pivotal Years

Helen W. Peterson, 84, an American Indian activist who lobbied Congress for reform in the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Pine Ridge, S.D., on Aug. 2, 1915, Peterson, an Oglala Sioux, held positions of power at a time when it wasn’t common for either women or American Indians to do so. From 1954 to 1962, she was executive director of the National Congress of the American Indian, a lobbying organization formed by tribal leaders. She later served as one of the highest-ranking officials in the federal Indian Affairs Commission, a forerunner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Her efforts were needed most in the 1950s, when Congress passed a bill aimed at disbanding all the nation’s tribes and selling their reservation lands. Peterson organized tribal leaders to fight the policy, planning voting drives to elect Democrats sympathetic to the tribes’ cause. The policy was reversed, and many tribes regained federal recognition in the 1970s and 1980s. Peterson, who retired in 1985 from the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Portland, Ore., founded the Church of the Four Winds, an ecumenical Christian ministry for urban Indians. On July 10 in Vancouver, Wash., of Parkinson’s disease.