Jean Chaudhuri
Jean Chaudhuri, born Ella Jean Hill, was an American community leader, writer, and activist. She was born May 29, 1937, in Okemah, Oklahoma, and died February 17, 1997, in Tempe, Arizona. She was a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and spoke Creek as her first language. She graduated from Central High School in Tulsa in 1955 and attended Oklahoma City University, where she met her husband.
Chaudhuri led Native American programs in Oklahoma, Florida, and Arizona. She served as executive director of the Tucson Indian Center and as director of the Traditional Indian Alliance of Greater Tucson. Under her leadership, the Alliance helped start a health clinic in Tucson, and her sister organized local dance classes. In 1972 she ran for Tallahassee city commissioner but was not elected.
In Phoenix, she was president of the Arizona chapter of Indian Women in Progress and helped found the Native American Heritage Preservation Coalition. She supported preservation efforts for the Phoenix Indian School. She wrote and produced a musical comedy, Indians Discover Christopher Columbus, in 1992, and performed a one-woman play, Four Seasons of an Indian Woman's Life. She and her husband wrote A Sacred Path: the Way of the Muscogee Creeks, published in 2001 after her death.
Chaudhuri received the Jefferson Award in 1977. She was inducted into the Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame in 2013, posthumously. She married Joyotpaul Chaudhuri in 1957, and they had two sons, Joydev and Jonodev. She died from complications of diabetes in 1997 at age 59 in Tempe.
Her son Jonodev Osceola Chaudhuri later became chairman of the National Indian Gaming Commission in 2014 and, in 2019, ambassador for the Muscogee Nation in Washington, D.C.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 12:35 (CET).