Henry Roe Cloud (1884–1950) and Elizabeth Bender Cloud (1887–1965) were part of an early twentieth-century movement of Indigenous intellectuals and political activists. Henry was one of the founding members of the Society of American Indians and served on what has become known as the Meriam Commission, a team that spent several years compiling information on the conditions of American Indians in the United States. Elizabeth was an activist in her own right, helping Henry run the college-preparatory American Indian Institute in the early twentieth century, working with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the National Congress of American Indians, and fighting against the mid-twentieth-century policy of termination. Despite their long careers and impacts on Native education and federal Indian policy, Renya Ramirez contends that the Clouds have been misunderstood, misrepresented, and understudied. In Standing Up to Colonial Power, Ramirez traces the personal and professional lives of the Clouds, from Henry’s Ho-Chunk childhood in Nebraska and Elizabeth’s Ojibwe upbringing in Minnesota, through their respective educations, and to their individual and collective efforts to support American Indian education and push back against restrictive federal Indian policies.
Ramirez has written this book from a unique position: not only is she an academic, but she is also the granddaughter of Henry and Elizabeth Cloud. Crafting what she calls a “family-tribal history,” Ramirez weaves together her own archival research with her family stories, understandings of Indigenous history, and earlier research from her relatives. In fact, one of the book’s most striking elements is Ramirez’s account of how it even came to be. The research started decades ago, when Elizabeth Bender Cloud and one of her daughters, Marion Cloud Hughes, started collecting materials in hopes of writing a book about Henry’s accomplishments. After Elizabeth and Marion passed, Ramirez’s mother, Anne Woesha Cloud North, was the next family member to pick up the research. After her mother’s death, the materials went to Ramirez. The loss of her mother was tied directly to the boxes that sat in Ramirez’s office, and it was years before she could open them. The passing of the materials from Elizabeth and Marion to Woesha to Renya—generations of Native women who traveled across the country to collect letters, newspaper articles, government reports, and other documents in order to tell this story—adds a beautiful layer of richness to Ramirez’s analysis. Ramirez’s children have contributed to related projects about the Clouds, creating an important collection of intergenerational scholarship.
The Clouds, like other influential Indigenous intellectuals, have often stymied scholars who have tried to unpack and understand their decisions and rationales. Ramirez’s goal, as she writes in the introduction, is to show how her grandparents defied the artificially created binaries that have often been used to compartmentalize American Indians as either “traditional” or “progressive.” The Clouds’ identity, for Ramirez, was “incredibly complicated, filled with contradictions and fluidity—both modern and traditional” (4). Henry and Elizabeth’s Christian faith played a large role in their personal and professional lives, leading some to argue that the Clouds promoted a wholly assimilationist agenda. Ramirez struggles—and allows us to see her struggle—as a Native feminist academic working through the writings of her grandparents. “I remembered that central to my work of decolonization,” she writes, “is confronting the hard truths of colonialization and discussing how my grandparents, at times, were complicit in settler colonialism” (96). However, she finds the agency and subversiveness in their writings where other scholars may not have found it, drawing on the nuances of their Indigenous upbringings in relation to their assimilationist educations and highlighting—rather than ignoring—these complex and complicated contestations of identity, politics, and power.
Ramirez also reclaims her grandfather and chooses to center his Ho-Chunk heritage, particularly through her insistence on calling him Henry Cloud. The name “Roe” came from Walter and Mary Roe, a white missionary couple who informally adopted Henry and offered him support and resources. Henry took their last name as his middle name and has generally been referred to as Henry Roe Cloud. For Ramirez, turning the focus back to Henry Cloud serves to highlight his Ho-Chunk identity. Ramirez also finds connections between the Clouds’ activism and her own earlier research, particularly in terms of the Clouds’ creation of Native “hubs.” She argues that Henry and Elizabeth, individually and collectively, purposefully worked to build both Indigenous spaces and spaces for Indigenous peoples in places where there had previously been none. The Clouds opened the American Indian Institute in 1915, creating a school for Native boys that focused on preparing them for college—a marked difference from the assimilationist model that pushed vocational training. The curriculum included what Ramirez calls “a radical approach to education,” exemplified by the school’s literary society comparing traditional tribal stories and Shakespeare’s plays (108).
Ramirez’s book is a loving tribute to her grandparents, and it also proves why Native American and Indigenous Studies is such a crucial field. Few people could have told the story of Henry and Elizabeth the way Ramirez does. Henry’s education at mission schools and his graduation from Yale, coupled with Elizabeth’s education at regional Minnesota schools and the Hampton Institute, built a cultural legacy that requires a deeper examination. In addition to his work on the Meriam Commission and pushing for better educational systems, Henry was an early advocate for Native fishing rights. Ramirez proudly notes that her mother and aunts continued the Cloud tradition of education and activism: Marion was the first Native graduate from Wellesley College, while Woesha was the first Native graduate from Vassar College. Woesha also taught at the Red Rock School during the Indians of All Tribes’ 1969–1971 occupation of Alcatraz. Rather than focusing solely on Henry and Elizabeth’s professional accolades, Ramirez’s combination of archival and familial research has created a book that offers a powerful reminder of the strength of twentieth-century Indigenous activists.
