Her mother, Nellie Trexler, was a member of the Assiniboine Tribe and her father, William Smith, was an Irish-American.
As a teenager, she attended a Native boarding school called the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California.
[3] In 1920, Akers moved to Washington D.C. to work as an interpreter for leaders of her tribe in their dealings with the federal government.
[1] In 1923, Cusker accompanied two tribal representatives, Bear Hill and Dave Johnson, to Washington, D.C., as a translator to lobby for school funding.
For example, in 1959, she was removed from the tribal council by a vote of 279 to 189 and "barred forever from holding office and representing the Fort Peck Sioux and Assiniboine tribes."
[1] Her belief in Indian autonomy led her to support the controversial policy of Termination, which advocated "terminating" the U.S. government's treaty obligations to tribes in order to encourage individual Indians to integrate into the larger Euro-American society.
Looking back on her career, she was most proud of successfully lobbying for a regulation permitting tribes to hire their own legal counsel and the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act,[2] which placed Native Americans under the constitution.