Ada Deer, a member of the Menominee tribe in Wisconsin who was a leading figure in the movement for greater Native American sovereignty since the 1960s, a role she played both as a critic of the federal government and as a top official within it, died on Tuesday in Fitchburg, Wis., a suburb of Madison. She was 88.

Ben Wikler, her godson and the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, confirmed her death, in a hospital. She had been in hospice care since July.

Ms. Deer racked up a long list of firsts over the course of her life. She was the first member of her tribe to graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the first to receive a graduate degree; she was also the first woman to lead the Menominee and the first woman to lead the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs.

She came to prominence in the early 1970s, when she moved to Washington, D.C., to help steer the effort to overturn the federal government’s policy of “termination” — a series of laws that since the late 1940s had restricted and in some cases eliminated tribal sovereignty in favor of integration within the rest of American society.