Helen White Peterson

Helen Peterson
Native American Activist
1915 - 2000
Inducted 1986

Helen Peterson, an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux tribe was instrumental in organizing a national inter-tribal movement to protect Indian lands and rights.

Helen Peterson was born on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. During the 1950s Peterson served as the first female director of the National Congress of American Indians – the oldest national Indian rights organization. She traveled by car to remote Indian reservations throughout the nation to help them resist the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ policy of “termination,” which called for privatizing tribal land holdings. Peterson returned to Denver in 1962 to take the post of Executive Director of the city’s newly formed Commission on Community Relations, where she addressed poverty and discrimination in the city’s minority neighborhoods.

“I count the [voter] registration of minorities with bringing them into full participation, full recognition, full enjoyment of all the rights of citizenship.” — Helen Peterson