Montana state university names fund for nurses

One of the first Native women to earn a registered nursing degree, Susie Walking Bear Yellowtail now has her name attached to a financial resource at Montana State University. The school established the Susie Walking Bear Yellowtail Endowed Fund for Native American Nursing Students in 2026.

The fund recognizes a career that began on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Born in 1903, Walking Bear attended mission schools before orphaning at age 12. A Baptist missionary named Frances Shaw identified her potential and sent her to Bacone Indian School in Oklahoma in 1919. Shaw later brought her to Northfield, Massachusetts, for seminary, but Walking Bear left the arrangement after facing racial bias and increased labor. She then received financial help to enter nursing school in 1923. She completed her degree from Boston City Hospital School of Nursing in 1927.

Walking Bear joined the Indian Health Service and returned to her home region. By 1928, she served as a supervising nurse at the Crow Agency Hospital. There she observed racial discrimination and the practice of sterilizing Native women without their consent. She married Thomas Yellowtail in 1929. They moved to a ranch in Wyola, Montana, where she became a midwife. She combined Western medical techniques with Crow healing customs to assist other women during childbirth.

The practice of non-consensual sterilization became personal in 1934. Yellowtail had planned to deliver her third child at home. Severe abdominal pain forced her to the Crow hospital for surgery to remove an ovarian cyst. A White doctor sterilized her during the procedure. He later told her that three children were enough. Her brother-in-law, Robert Yellowtail, who became reservation superintendent that same year, supported her push for health reforms. He attempted to appoint her as a reservation field nurse, but White officials rejected her, calling her a troublemaker.

She continued her advocacy work through the mid-20th century. President John F. Kennedy appointed her to the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Indian Health in 1961. She served on the committee under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. During this time, she visited reservations to investigate medical issues. She also received the President’s Award for Outstanding Nursing Health Care in 1962. She was inducted into the Montana Hall of Fame in 1987 and the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 2002.

The American Indian Nurses Association honored her with the title of Grandmother of American Indian Nurses in 1978. Yellowtail died at her home in Wyola on Dec. 25, 1981. She was 78. Her husband, Thomas, died in 1993.

Montana State University created the endowment to support future Native nursing students. The fund stands as a permanent recognition of her contributions to healthcare and her fight for autonomy.