Dorothy Lonewolf Miller

Dorothy Miller RICHMOND, Calif. #45;- Dorothy Lonewolf Miller, 83, Richmond, died Friday, May 30, 2003, of pulmonary fibrosis at her home. Memorial services will be held at a later date. Memorials may be made to any American Indian organization. Born in West Liberty, she was part Blackfeet Indian. She was married twice. She participated in the Iowa Writers' Workshop at age 19 and later published several poems in national anthologies. Her lifelong interest in activism began in the 1940s, when she served as a union organizer in several Iowa factories. She earned her bachelor?s degree in sociology in 1955 and her master?s in social work in 1957 from the University of Iowa. She received her doctorate in social welfare from UC Berkeley in 1967. While studying at Berkeley, she worked as a psychiatric social worker and researcher at the California Department of Mental Hygiene, advocating for mental health patients to live at home and receive community mental health care rather than be institutionalized. She left the job in 1966 to found Scientific Analysis Corp., a San Francisco nonprofit research firm dedicated to social policy issues. There, she studied menta...[more]

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ealth, prison reform, children of alcoholics, runaway youth and urban American Indians. She served as its executive director until she retired three years ago. She was an American Indian activist who assisted Indians in their 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island. She hired staffers specifically to work on what she dubbed 'the Indian Desk', through which she provided communication and funneled charity contributions to the Native Americans who occupied Alcatraz. Shortly before her death, she donated a library of Indian books to the Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians, who in turn established the Lonewolf Reading Room at their community center in San Jacinto in Riverside County. Survivors include a daughter, Ann Metcalf of Kensington, Calif.; four grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. She was preceded in death by a daughter, Sherry Hillyer Sesko.