Indigenous Nurses You Should Know About

Indigenous healing practices in North America predate Western medicine by hundreds of years, and many became the foundation of methods still used today, even after being erased from the history books.

Some of what Indigenous healers did:

• Used sharpened hollow bird bones as syringes and performed surgical procedures under sterile conditions, including draining fluid from the chest.
• Used anesthetics for pain relief and surgical anesthesia.
• Identified over 2,000 plant species to treat illness and prevent pregnancy.
• Isolated patients with contagious illnesses and built community-based sanitation.

European colonialism nearly destroyed the culture that produced those innovations. Florence Nightingale, revered as the founder of modern nursing, supported the colonial assimilation of Indigenous people in Canada, including the forced boarding schools where children lived in decrepit buildings, endured abuse, and became indentured servants. She called attention to the high death rate in those schools but did not oppose assimilation through schooling. The U.S. ran its own boarding schools and has a documented history of medical experimentation on Indigenous people and forced sterilization of Indigenous women. Canada did not begin dismantling its residential school system until 1969.

Indigenous nurses rose out of that system anyway. The following are some of the trailblazers, past and present, whose work advanced nursing and culturally sensitive care.

Rachel Radyk

Radyk, of Chippewa ancestry traced to Georgina Island, Ontario, was inspired to nurse by her mother. In 2021 she joined the Waterloo Immunization Team as a COVID navigator for the Indigenous community, and she works as an Indigenous patient navigator at the Southwest Ontario Aboriginal Health Access Center. As a student she founded an Indigenous Nurses and Allies Interest Group with the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario. The Canadian Indigenous Nurses Association named her Nurse of the Month in September 2020, and she won the Innov8 Award for Nursing Entrepreneurship in April 2021. She graduated with distinction as a registered practical nurse and was valedictorian of her BSN bridge program in 2021.

Misty Wilkie

Wilkie, Ph.D., is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota and a tenured professor at Bemidji State University with more than 17 years in higher education. She earned an ADN at Hibbing Community College in 1997, then a BSN and an MSN from the University of North Dakota by 2005. In 2009 she became the 14th Indigenous person in North America to earn a Ph.D. in nursing. In 2017 she won a $2 million HRSA Nursing Workforce Diversity grant to launch Niganawenimaanaanig (Ojibwemowin for "we take care of them"), which supports Indigenous nursing students. She has served as president of the National Alaska Native American Indian Nurses Association.

Michelle Kahn-John

A member of the Navajo Nation, Big Water Clan, Kahn-John grew up in Fort Defiance, Arizona, influenced by her mother, a medicine woman. She earned an ADN at the University of New Mexico in 1995, a BSN the next year, and an MSN from the University of Colorado in 2000. After two years as a public health nurse at Fort Defiance Indian Hospital, where she saw firsthand how depression and suicide affected her community, she pursued a Ph.D. in mental health. She weaves Navajo concepts of wellness into her patient care and research, has led million-dollar HRSA and Indian Health Service grants, and serves as a nurse practitioner and research associate at the University of Arizona College of Nursing.

Virginia Sneed Dixon

Virginia Rosebud Sneed Dixon, of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, was born in 1919 near the Great Smoky Mountains. She graduated from Cherokee High School in 1938 and Knoxville General Hospital School of Nursing in 1941, then joined the Army Nurse Corps. During World War II she became the first Cherokee nurse to serve overseas, assigned to a field hospital in the mountains of China. She later served in the Korean War in a North Korean hospital without water or electricity and worked near the demilitarized zone with the 8063rd Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, caring for soldiers with brain and spinal cord injuries. She died at age 101 in October 2021.

Marcella LeBeau

Born in 1919 in Promise, South Dakota, LeBeau was a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and graduated from St. Mary's Hospital nursing school in Pierre in 1942. She joined the Army Nurse Corps and served with the 76th General Hospital Unit in Belgium, France, and England during World War II, surviving the Battle of the Bulge and a bombing in Liege that killed 25. In 2004 France awarded her the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur. She served 31 years with the Indian Health Service and made the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation the first smoke-free community in South Dakota. A founding member of the North American Indian Women's Association, she remained politically active until her death in November 2021, weeks after her induction into the National Native American Hall of Fame.

Cora Elm

Born in 1891 on the Oneida reservation in Wisconsin, Elm had a grandmother who was a midwife. She entered the U.S. Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1906 and graduated from nursing school in 1916. When World War I began, she volunteered for the Nurse Corps and cared for over 9,000 patients at a base hospital in Nantes, France, from 1917 to 1918. In 1920 she served with the Red Cross in Russia, Latvia, and Lithuania. She died in 1949 and was buried with military honors.

Elizabeth Sadoques Mason

Born in 1897 in New Hampshire, Mason was a member of the Abenaki tribe and the last of eight children of parents who had moved from the Odanak Reserve in Quebec. She graduated from Keene High School in 1916 and entered nursing at Mary's Free Hospital for Children in New York, graduating in 1919. Many consider her one of the first Indigenous nurses. She worked in Cheshire County for nearly 30 years until she retired in the late 1950s. She died in 1985, and in 2019 a mural honoring her was painted in Keene.

Lula Owl Gloyne

The eldest of 10 children, Gloyne was born to a Cherokee blacksmith and a Catawba basketmaker. After Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, she entered nursing at Chestnut Hill Hospital in Philadelphia and graduated in 1916 as the first Eastern Band Cherokee Indian registered nurse. By 1917 she had volunteered for the Army Nurse Corps as a second lieutenant, the only member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee to serve as an officer in World War I. Returning to the Qualla Boundary, she found an area with no hospital and no doctors and traveled to homes to deliver babies and treat the sick. After years of advocacy in Washington, the Bureau of Indian Affairs built a small hospital where she served as head nurse, buying a horse with her salary to reach patients. She retired in 1969 at 77 and was inducted posthumously into the North Carolina Nurses Hall of Fame in 2015. She died in 1985 at 93.

Jean Cuthand Goodwill

Born in 1928 on the Poundmaker Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, Cuthand Goodwill became one of the first Indigenous registered nurses in Canada after graduating from Holy Family Hospital in Prince Albert in 1954. Her career spanned nearly four decades. She worked as a midwife, served on the Indian Health Service's all-Indigenous nursing staff, co-edited the Indian Times, and helped create the University of Saskatchewan's Native Access Program to Nursing. In 1974 she cocreated the Indian and Inuit Nurses of Canada, now the Canadian Indigenous Nurses Association, which honors her with two annual $2,500 scholarships in her name. She became an officer in the Order of Canada.

Betty Mae Tiger Jumper

Born in Indiantown, Florida, Jumper could not attend local schools because of segregation and moved at 14 to the Cherokee Indian Boarding School in North Carolina. She became one of the first Seminole Indians to earn a high school diploma, vowing to "use it in the interest of my people." She worked as a travel nurse serving the Seminole community, became the first female chief of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and its first health director, and translated for Seminole patients navigating Western healthcare. In 1970 President Nixon named her chairperson of the National Council on Indian Opportunity, and Florida State University gave her an honorary doctorate in 1994. She died in 2011 at 88.

Edith Anderson Monture

Charlotte Edith Anderson Monture, born in 1890 on a Six Nations reserve in Ontario, attended nursing school in New York after facing discrimination in Canadian programs. At 27 she volunteered with American forces in World War I and became the only First Nations nurse to serve, working more than a year in France. She was the first First Nations woman to vote in a Canadian federal election, as an enlisted service member, and later opened her home as a polling site. She nursed into the 1960s and died days before her 106th birthday. Her daughter Helen Moses cofounded the Canadian Indigenous Nurses Association.

Margaret Moss

Moss lost her mother to diabetes, a sister to liver failure, and a brother to HIV/AIDS, and those losses shaped her advocacy. A member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, she is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia's School of Nursing and director of its First Nations House of Learning, and the only American Indian to hold a Ph.D., a juris doctorate, and an RN license. She wrote the American Indian Health and Nursing textbook to advance culturally sensitive care balancing spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical health. In 2021 she joined the Forbes "50 Over 50 Impact" list.

Susie Walking Bear Yellowtail

Called the "Grandmother of American Indian Nurses," Yellowtail was orphaned after her birth in 1903 and raised by a missionary foster family in Pryor, Oklahoma. She graduated from Boston City Hospital's School of Nursing in 1923, becoming the first RN from the Crow Nation. She returned to work at a Crow Agency hospital and consulted for the Public Health Service. After being sterilized without her permission following the birth of her third child, she became an advocate for patient rights. She worked as a midwife, incorporating cultural beliefs into birth, and died in 1981.

The Next Generation

These nurses earned a place in nursing history that was repeatedly denied. Their work to close equity gaps in Indigenous communities continues. The Indian Health Service runs the American Indians Into Nursing Program, which funds nursing schools to support Indigenous students in RN, nurse midwife, nurse anesthetist, and nurse practitioner programs, along with continuing education and scholarships. A more diverse nursing workforce improves healthcare access and outcomes, especially in these communities.