Standing Up to Colonial Power: The Lives of Henry Roe and Elizabeth Bender Cloud by Renya K. Ramirez (review)

Based upon archival materials and familial accounts, Renya K. Ramirez draws together an engaging historical account of the lives of her grandparents, Henry Roe Cloud (Ho-Chunk) and Elizabeth Bender Cloud (Ojibwe), two individuals who worked tirelessly during their lives to advocate for Native Americans in a variety of spheres, including educational, political, and social spheres. This narrative stretches from Henry and Elizabeth's childhoods in Nebraska and Minnesota, respectively, and takes the reader on a geographical journey alongside their life stories and careers, ranging from Henry's time at Yale, to the Clouds' involvement with the American Indian Institute in Wichita, to Haskell, and ending with their later lives in the Pacific Northwest. Ramirez also takes care to note the Clouds' individual involvement in important events in Native history, including Henry's involvement in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Meriam Report, and Elizabeth's deep involvement with initiatives to assist Native women.

One of the real strengths of Ramirez's work is the detailed description of the ways that the Clouds were forced to navigate often-contradictory roles as Native people and intellectuals within the settler colonial state. For example, much detail is given to the ways that Henry Roe Cloud worked to maintain his identity as Ho-Chunk even as he navigated through "white" spaces such as college preparatory school, his college education at Yale, and even in his later career in education and in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Elizabeth Bender Cloud, Ramirez writes, had to navigate similar spaces in her life. Ramirez invokes the idea of the "trickster" in both Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe cultural contexts, and applies it to how the Clouds were able to navigate these worlds; they were able to shift their identities and shift how those identities were expressed externally in a way that allowed them to be coded as "good Indians," while they were still able to hold onto their cultural teachings in their attempts to subvert and change the settler colonial structures that surrounded them. Notably, Ramirez also doesn't shy away from areas where the Clouds may have fallen short (although they did not often do so) in their work or aims—a brave and honest engagement, to be sure.

The themes that Ramirez presents in this book are of great relevance today to the ways in which we examine Indigenous resistance in the settler colonial state, making this book extremely useful and accessible to scholars in a variety of fields, from Indigenous studies, to anthropology, geography, and history.