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While at the National Native American Bar Association’s fiftieth anniversary celebration last year, Mary Smith (BA ’84) recounted that a young Native American lawyer approached her during the event. “She told me she used to think that the American Bar Association (ABA) had nothing for her. But seeing me in this role, she began to think maybe there were things in the ABA that mattered to her,” Smith says. “That’s why representation, diversity, and inclusion matter.”
Smith is the president of the American Bar Association, and she is the first Native American woman to serve in that position.
“The ABA represents the nation’s legal profession, advocating for both the profession and the rule of law,” Smith says. “I hope that my position as the first Native American woman president serves as an inspiration to young people, that they should follow their dreams and that barriers are being broken down.”
While the ABA has a mandate to weigh in on contemporary matters of consequence, “the ABA has a long history of addressing not just the most important legal issues of our time, but also the most important issues of our time, because law touches everything in society,“ says Smith.
“I hope that my position as the first Native American woman president serves as an inspiration to young people, that they should follow their dreams and that barriers are being broken down.”
— Mary Smith, American Bar Association president
With scholars of authoritarianism like Yale’s Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat of New York University sounding the alarm about the rise of antidemocratic rhetoric and sympathies in the United States, Smith recently created the ABA Task Force for American Democracy, which is studying ways to preserve and strengthen democracy in the country.
Headed by co-chairs J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge, and Jeh Johnson, former Secretary of Homeland Security, the task force boasts a membership that’s a who’s who of law, politics, and media.
In discussing the task force, Smith recalled an indelible experience she had while studying at Loyola that demonstrated the dangers of autocracy. “I took a course on the intersection of film and literature during the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Nazism,” Smith recalls. “Viewing films depicting the effects of the concentration camps in Germany and the aftereffects of the nuclear bomb and Hiroshima affected me deeply, and I think about that class often with respect to the rise of autocracy.”
Smith has devoted much of her career to public service. Her grandmother grew up in the town of Westville, Oklahoma, on the Arkansas border. She was one of 16 children, only 10 of whom lived past the age of 3, in large part due to inadequate health care. “That’s one of the reasons I took the job of CEO of the Indian Health Service,” says Smith, who served as CEO of the federal organization until 2017.
To increase the number of Native American women in STEM fields, Smith founded and is the president and chair of the Caroline and Ora Smith Foundation. The foundation is named for Smith’s mother and her grandmother. “I wanted to honor them, and lift up Native American communities,” Smith says. “The goal is to empower the next generation of Native American women.”
