Vera Bauer Palmer from Niagara Falls, N.Y., a Cornell graduate student in the Department of English, has received a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship for Minorities. Bauer. Palmer is a member of the Tuscarora Nation of the Six Nations Iroquois, Grand River Band, and is in her second year of doctoral study.

Designed to increase minority presence in the arts and sciences on college and university faculties, the fellowships provide $14,000 per year over three years to members of racial and ethnic minorities, with an additional $6,000 provided by the student's university for tuition. Applicants must be college seniors, first-year graduate students or individuals at or near the beginning of their graduate studies.

She is particularly interested in Native American literature and cross-cultural studies and theory. She said her dissertation will examine "the value structures at work in romantic notions about American Indians and how these concepts validate and underwrite the title of conquest." Using archival and other recorded accounts, Palmer will consider the religious conversion stories of 17th-century Mohawk ascetic Kateri Tekakwitha and early 19th-century Cherokee convert Catherine Brown.

Bauer Palmer has been an active member of whatever college or community with which she has been affiliated. While pursuing her master's degree at Bryn Mawr College, she organized and led a group of students and scholars in one mission to Chippewa Indian reservations in northern Wisconsin and another on the Hopi and Navajo reservations in Arizona, to investigate and report on racism and injustices. Subsequently, she proposed and helped create the curriculum for Bryn Mawr's first course offering in Native American literature.

While living in Pennsylvania, she participated in the American Indian Inmate Support Program at Lewisburg Penitentiary. She now participates in a Native American Indian Cultural Program at Auburn Correctional Facility in Auburn, N.Y. She has served on the boards of the United American Indians of the Delaware Valley in Philadelphia and the North American Indian Project in Syracuse.

Bauer Palmer is no stranger to accolades and awards. Her previous honors include the Frances B. Allen Fellowship at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian at Chicago's Newberry Library; a "Women Who Make a Difference" award in the category of community service from the Philadelphia Mayor's Commission for Women; and Bryn Mawr's Sheelah Kilroy Memorial Writing Award.

"I knew when we were urging Vera to come to Cornell for graduate study that she was an extraordinary scholar," said Jane Mt. Pleasant, director of Cornell's American Indian Program (AIP). "Vera is one of the emerging Native intellectuals who are reshaping Native thought and discourse. All of us who know her in AIP are proud and delighted for her, but we're not surprised that her abilities have been recognized by so prestigious an award."