Google users across the United States will see a Doodle commemorating Native American human rights activist Barbara May Cameron when they access the search engine today.
Barbara May Cameron was a Native American human rights activist who advocated for and supported the LGBTQ+ community. Monday would be her 69th birthday and Google pays tribute to her with a Google Doodle.
Google honors what would have been artist and activist Barbara May Cameron's 69th birthday in a celebration of her advocacy for Indigenous and LGBTQ rights.
Copy Link
In 1963, when Barbara May Cameron was just 9 years old, she read an article about San Francisco. At the time, Cameron, a Hunkpapa Lakota, lived on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota with her grandparents. As soon as she read about the far-away California city, she confidently informed her grandmother that, one day, she would live there. “And save the world too,” she added.
Just over a decade later, Cameron made it to San Francisco and got to work. First, she co-founded Gay American Indians (GAI) alongside her friend Randy Burns. Cameron viewed GAI as both a support group for Native lesbians and gay men, and a means to carve out space for them within the wider (and whiter) LGBTQ+ community. Those pursuits carried over into her writing as well. Though she had originally trained as a photographer at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts, Cameron found her message was better conveyed through essays. Hers were personal and powerful, and became a loudsp