Standing Up to Colonial Power focuses on the lives, activism, and
intellectual contributions of Henry Cloud (1884–1950), a Ho-Chunk,
and Elizabeth Bender Cloud (1887–1965), an Ojibwe, both of whom
grew up amid settler colonialism that attempted to break their
connection to Native land, treaty rights, and tribal
identities. Mastering ways of behaving and speaking in
different social settings and to divergent audiences, including
other Natives, white missionaries, and Bureau of Indian Affairs
officials, Elizabeth and Henry relied on flexible and fluid notions
of gender, identity, culture, community, and belonging as they
traveled Indian Country and within white environments to fight for
Native rights. Elizabeth fought against termination as part of her
role in the National Congress of American Indians and General
Federation of Women's Clubs, while Henry was one of the most
important Native policy makers of the early twentieth
century. He documented the horrible abuse within the federal
boarding schools and co-wrote the Meriam Report of 1928, which laid
the foundation for the Indian Reorganization Act of
1934. Together they ran an early college preparatory Christian
high school, the American Indian Institute. Standing Up to
Colonial Power shows how the Clouds combined Native warrior and
modern identities as a creative strategy to challenge settler
colonialism, to become full members of the U.S. nation-state, and
to fight for tribal sovereignty. Renya K. Ramirez uses her dual
position as a scholar and as the granddaughter of Elizabeth and
Henry Cloud to weave together this ethnography and family-tribal
history.