Helen White Peterson

Helen Peterson (native name: Wa-Cinn-Ya-Win-Pi-Mi, August 3, 1915 – July 10, 2000) was a Cheyenne-Lakota activist and lobbyist. She was the first director of the Denver Commission on Human Relations. She was the second Native American woman to become director of the National Congress of American Indians at a time when the government wanted to discharge their treaty obligations to the tribes by eliminating their tribal governments through the Indian termination policy and forcing the tribe members to assimilate into the mainstream culture. She authored a resolution on Native American education, which was ratified at the second Inter-American Indian Conference, held in Cuzco, Peru. In 1986, Peterson was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame and the following year, her papers were donated to the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives and they are now held at the National Museum of the American Indian. Early life Helen Louise White was born on August 3, 1915, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Bennett County, South Dakota to Lucy (née Henderson) and Robert B. White. She was given the native name Wa-Cinn-Ya-Win-Pi-Mi, meaning "woman to trust and depend on". The family lived in northern Nebraska and White attended Hay Springs High School, graduating in 1932. She went on to further her education at Chadron State College, studying business education. On August 29, 1935, White married Richard F. Peterson in Garden County, Nebraska and she worked at the U.S. Land Use Resettlement Administration to pay their way through school. Richard enlisted in the war effort and Peterson had their only child, R. Max, soon after. In 1942, the couple divorced and Peterson moved with her mother to Denver. Career Peterson began work at the University of Denver as the executive director of the Rocky Mountain Council of Inter-American Affairs. In 1948, she was hired by the newly elected mayor, J. Quigg Newton, to work on the Commission on Community Telations. The mayor had a goal of desegregating the community and to do that, he needed voters willing to change the municipal charter. Working with Bernie Valdez, Director of the Denver Welfare Department, Peterson attempted to build bridges between the established Latin American citizens and the new migrant farm workers who had come to work on the beetroot farms. She went door to door in Hispanic neighborhoods, registering voters and organizing the community.