In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • "There's still more digging to do"A Story in Honor of A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff
  • Malea Powell (bio)

This is a story.

When I started thinking about this story, I though it would be a pretty standard biographical summary of LaVonne's life as a scholar. As I sifted through some of the materials that LaVonne had sent me upon finding out we intended to devote this issue of SAIL to her, I found such a summary impossible to write. It was impossible not just because Lavonne's life, and her scholarship, has been complicated, extensive, and inspiring—though it has been. It just seemed strange to sit with that small stack of materials that she had provided to me and not think about all the other things that LaVonne has provided and made possible for me—for so many of us. I know that the simple fact that I am sitting here at this computer in my very comfortable university office, that I occupy a tenured position at a Research One university as a scholar of American Indian literatures and rhetorics, that I edit this journal, that I have been able to find a compelling and fulfilling scholarly life in archives and libraries, that I am a native woman scholar at all—all of these things are, at least partly, her doing. Many, many other scholars will testify to her influence and her significance in the following pages. My voice here is just one more attempt to echo that refrain.

A. LaVonne Brown was born in 1930 in Harvey, Illinois, to Oscar Brown and Laura Witters Brown. As a young man, Oscar Brown traveled, with his brother, Bert, to North Dakota to prove up land for farms. Oscar homesteaded eighty acres near present-day Halliday, North Dakota, from 1909 until 1913. During his time there he started, [End Page 5] and managed, a semi-professional Indian baseball team and made friendly acquaintance with his native neighbors. LaVonne remembers fondly sorting through her father's pictures of the team and his neighbors—her first interest in Indians—photos that were disposed of after his death in 1967, and whose absence she worries about with an archivist's sensibility: "I would have loved to have made copies and given the originals to the Fort Berthold tribe or to the North Dakota historical society." LaVonne graduated from high school in 1948 and started working at the publishing house where she would meet her first husband, Milford Prasher, a World War II veteran and Menominee. Her fourteen-year marriage to Prasher extended her previous interest in Indians to a full-fledged education in understanding the lives of native people in the United States and the position of American Indians in the imaginations of the non-Indian populace.

LaVonne now saw first-hand the consequences of federal policies like termination: "It was a disaster for the Menominee tribe" (qtd. in Marsh 20). During this same time period, she began studying at the University of Illinois branch at Navy Pier (a two-year institution that later became the University of Illinois at Chicago). She later applied at Northwestern despite much pressure from her friends to "continue to work to save money for a house and to have a family" (qtd. in Marsh 20). Her friends, and even her doctor, believed that college would be "too much for a married woman," but her grades were high enough to earn her a scholarship after the first quarter of her enrollment (qtd. in Marsh 20). She earned her bachelor's degree in secondary English education in 1953 and immediately went to work at University of Illinois–Navy Pier. While there she and her husband adopted two children—Stephen and Sharon, an Ojibwe girl. She and Prasher were divorced several years later. LaVonne had also returned to school during this time and earned her doctoral degree in 1966 in nineteenth-century English Romanticism and took a job at UIC, where she met Gene Ruoff. They were married a year later and now live in a gorgeously restored Victorian home in Oak Park, Illinois.

Meanwhile, LaVonne's school-aged children "weren't learning about American Indians in school. [The...

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