LaDonna Harris
A Lifelong Fight for Equality
LaDonna Harris, president
of Americans for Indian
Opportunity (AIO), has
never been one to shy
away from a fight. Indeed,
fighting for equality has been her
life’s calling as a member of the
Comanche tribe and a leader in
the civil-rights movement.
“I was raised by my Comanche
grandparents in the Comanche
culture, but when I was growing
up, there were things that were
dehumanizing and made us feel
bad,” says Harris. “At home we
spoke Comanche, but at school,
the teacher would tell us that in
order to become educated, we had
to give up our language. In order
for us to become Christian, we
have to give up music, dance—our
whole belief system. It crippled
people emotionally.”
Her grandparents provided
Harris with a sense of stability that
offered a firm foundation from
which she was comfortable enough
to question her teachers. “My
grandparents had pride in who they
were and there was no disagreement among them regarding what
was right or wrong,” she says.
“It made me question [teachers’]
knowledge. You should never try to
change people’s religion; it’s hurtful
to them. Both gave me balance to
deal with it, allowed me to question
what was in textbooks. At 12 or 14,
I realized [my teachers] didn’t know
what they were talking about.”
Harris carried that healthy
sense of skepticism into her adult
years at the onset of the civil-rights
movement, when the struggle
for equality for Black people also
shined a light on the plight of
American Indians. “During [the
civil-rights movement], we started
paying attention to what was happening to ourselves, and we said
we’re not going to let it happen
anymore,” Harris says. “My work in
civil rights helped me see I ought
to do something different.”
Her marriage to Sen. Fred R.
Harris, D-Okla., took her to Wash-
ington, D.C., where she was able to
further her quest for American Indian rights. “Indian education was
probably the largest [issue], then
housing. But the biggest success
was [the formation of the] Council
of Energy Resource Tribes,” she
says. “We were having a discussion
that there was going to be a shortage of food and fuel, and we asked,
‘Why are we the poorest people
when we have land and resources?’
We looked it up, and it was surprising how little the Department
of the Interior had on what we
owned. So we sent some interns to
do some research, took what they
brought back and made sense of
it, and realized we were the largest
private owners of coal and other
energy resources [in the nation],
yet we received the least amount
of money for our coal and gas than
any other country in the world.
“We showed [that the Bureau
of Indian Affairs] had no
competency—they were not wise
and were up against lawyers for
energy companies,” Harris adds.
“So we changed the policy—U.S.
companies could [no longer] make
decisions on energy without us
getting involved. We realized we
could do that. That was one of our
biggest successes.”
