Feminist to Know: Lorelei DeCora

Lorelei DeCora is an Indigenous activist, organizer, and nurse. As an active member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and a founding member of Women of All Red Nations, DeCora has spent her life advocating for Indigenous sovereignty and addressing the systemic inequities facing Indigenous people in the United States.

DeCora was born in Winnebago in 1954, and is a citizen of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska and a descendent of the Minnecojou Lakota Sioux. She began her activism as early as high school, where she identified and then protested against a racist book being used in classrooms throughout the state. Her campaign succeeded, and the book was ultimately cut from the curriculum. Later, at just 19, DeCora became one of the youngest members on the board of directors for AIM (the American Indian Movement, a grassroots activist movement addressing systemic issues facing Indigenous communities).

DeCora played a notable part in the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973. On February 27, 1973, two hundred Oglala Lakota members and AIM activists seized and occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Still only a teenager at the time, DeCora worked to establish a health clinic within the occupation, where she trained people in basic medical assistance procedures, and where she worked as a nurse herself.

Later, Lorelei DeCora helped to found Women of All Red Nations (WARN) with Madonna Thunder Hawk, Phyllis Young, and Janet McCloud. WARN viewed so-called “women’s issues” through an intersectional lens, working to correct the activism within AIM that had centered men. WARN addressed issues of forced sterilization, inadequate healthcare, and domestic violence in Indigenous communities while supporting Native-led education initiatives. Crucially, DeCora’s activism is, and has been, rooted in a decolonial, intersectional framework that directly critiques mainstream “feminist” narratives. WARN’s intervention is to situate decolonization firmly within its feminism. As DeCora has said:

“We are American Indian women, in that order. We are oppressed, first and foremost, as American Indians, as peoples colonized by the United States of America, not as women. As Indians, we can never forget that. Our survival, the survival of every one of us––man, woman and child––as Indians depends on it. Decolonization is the agenda, the whole agenda, and until it is accomplished, it is the only agenda that counts for American Indians.

You start to get the idea maybe all this feminism business is just another extension of the same old racist, colonialist mentality.”

Today, Lorelei DeCora continues her work as an activist and community organizer.