Pride in Indian Country: Barbara Cameron

 Shiyo! This week we are wrapping up our Pride Month celebration by examining the life of Barbara Cameron, a Hunkpapa Lakota and Two Spirit organizer and leader in San Francisco. Cameron was born on May 22, 1954 in Fort Yates and grew up on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota. Raised by her grandparents, she was a multi-talented woman—working as a poet, a photographer, a powerful writer and, of course, as a tireless activist for Native American Two Spirit people. When Cameron was 9 years old, she read a news article about San Francisco. She told her grandmother that someday she would live there…“And save the world, too.” In 9^th grade, Cameron won an essay contest sponsored by Pepsi. The theme, “You’ve Got a Lot to Live,” in many ways foreshadowed her life’s work. She studied film at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Sante Fe, New Mexico, before moving to San Francisco in 1973. 

 

In 1975 Cameron founded the Gay American Indians organization with Randy Burns (Northern Paiute). GAI was a forerunner to groups like the Bay Area American Indian Two Spirits. Cameron founded the group because of her belief that “Native American gay people had different needs and struggles than the white gay community. Moreover, there was a general lack of support for people of color within the lesbian and gay community.” In 1981 Cameron contributed an essay to the seminal work This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. In 1983, she contributed to the foundational work A Gathering of Spirit: A Collection of Writing and Art by North American Indian Women. One of her most important essays was “Gee, You Don’t Seem Like An Indian From the Reservation.” The essay has been describedas “a searing snapshot of the struggle to survive marginalization.” Another essay, “Frybread in Berlin,” discussed the lack of visability of people of color within the LGBTQ+ community. It was said of Cameron, “[Her] refusal to be queer in one corner of her life, and native in another, is as radical and transformative now, as it was then.”

 

Cameron and her partner of 21 years, Linda Boyd, raised a son, Rhys Boyd-Farrell, and made San Francisco their home. She was the recipient of the Harvey Milk Award for Community Service in 1992 and was the inaugural recipient of the Bay Area Career Women Community Service Award in 1993. Cameron passed away at home on February 12, 2002, at the age of 47. In 2023, Google honored Cameron on her birthday with a Doodle. “In the end,” one journalist wrote, “Barbara Cameron’s passion, resilience and dedication allowed her not only to become a beacon and a voice for marginalized groups in the Bay Area, but also to act as a bridge between them.”

Barbara Cameron