Elizabeth Bender Roe Cloud

Elizabeth Bender Roe Cloud (April 2, 1887 – September 16, 1965) was an Ojibwe activist and educator. She graduated in 1907 with teaching credentials from the Hampton Institute, a government native American boarding school in Virginia, and part of the U.S. government's attempt to civilize American Indians. After graduating from Hampton, Elizabeth continued in the teacher training program there and became a teacher for the Indian Service in Browning, Montana in 1908 and taught nationwide until 1916. She then joined her husband, Henry Roe Cloud, and helped administer the American Indian Institute of Wichita, Kansas for twenty-five years. In the 1940s, she founded the Oregon Trails Women's Club with tribe members from the Umatilla Indian Reservation. She served as the National Chair of Indian Welfare for the General Federation of Women's Clubs for eight years, the first American Indian to hold the post. Roe Cloud received the National Mother of the Year award in 1950 and in 1952, she was honored as the "Outstanding Indian" of the year by the American Indian Exposition of Anadarko, Oklahoma. She is noted for having used her influence as an educated indigenous woman to advocate for Native American self-determination.

Early life

Elizabeth Georgiana Bender (native name: Equay Zaince) was born on April 2, 1887 on the White Earth Indian Reservation in northwestern Minnesota to Pay show de o quay (Mary née Razor or Razier), of the Mississippi Chippewa band and Albertus Bliss Bender, a German immigrant. Her father was a logger and after he and Mary married, he lived on her allotment, continued to log, and also hunted and fished.