Born in 1903 and educated in Indian boarding schools in Montana and Oklahoma, Yellowtail enrolled in an East Coast nursing program through the assistance of Baptist sponsors. The prominence of boarding schools and missionaries in her story places her experiences squarely within the assimilationist context of the early twentieth century. In these years, social reformers, federal officials, and reservation employees strove to assimilate – or Americanize – Native peoples, depriving them of markers of indigeneity and preparing them for American citizenship as individuals rather than as tribal members.
Proponents of assimilation had long viewed health and medicine as key sites in the transformation they envisioned, and some recognized that Native women could potentially facilitate their people’s assimilation through nursing, while also providing the basic care that many communities urgently needed. Boarding schools often provided female students with rudimentary training, and a Presbyterian hospital on the Navajo Nation inaugurated an accredited registered nursing program a few years after Yellowtail’s graduation. Soon after that, the federal government founded its own nurse-training program at an Indian hospital in Oklahoma, although this program lacked accreditation.
Susie Yellowtail was very much a trailblazer in the 1920s, but in other ways she continued the legacy of so many Crow and Native women before her in advancing the health and well-being of her family and community. In many Native cultures, women as well as men played important roles as healers in their communities. A woman might have been highly regarded for her knowledge of plant-based medicines and/or her supernatural powers, for example, and women performed vital work as midwives and pediatric specialists.
Generally speaking, the federal government viewed this healing work as entirely distinct from – and inferior to – Western nursing practices. In the decades prior to Yellowtail’s graduation, government employees disparaged Native women’s healing knowledge, while criminalizing the work of male healers. But Yellowtail and other Native nurses did not necessarily perceive or abide by the same rigid separation of medical practice and sometimes used their positions to promote a more pluralistic approach to health and medicine. During her brief tenure in the government hospital at Crow Agency in the late 1920s, for example, Yellowtail looked the other way when patients brought elements of Indigenous healing practices, including peyote, into the institution. Throughout the twentieth century, Native nurses would be at the forefront of efforts to incorporate Indigenous healers and medicines into hospital and other clinical settings.