Montana State University Establishes Fund for Native Nursing Students in Honor of Crow Activist

Montana State University created the Susie Walking Bear Yellowtail Endowed Fund for Native American Nursing Students in 2026. The fund honors a registered nurse who spent decades campaigning for better health conditions on the Crow Reservation.

Walking Bear Yellowtail was born on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana on January 27, 1903. She attended Catholic mission schools in Pryor and Lodge Grass before becoming an orphan at age 12. An aunt raised her until a Baptist missionary, Frances Shaw, encouraged her to attend Bacone Indian School in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in 1919.

She later moved to Northfield, Massachusetts, to study at Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies. After facing racial bias and increasing household duties, she left to pursue nursing. With financial assistance, she enrolled at Franklin County Public School of Nursing in Greenfield, Massachusetts, in 1923. She completed her registered nursing degree from Boston City Hospital School of Nursing in 1927, becoming one of the first Native women to earn the credential.

Walking Bear Yellowtail joined the Indian Health Service and worked at the Fond du Lac Indian Hospital in Cloquet, Minnesota. In 1928, she became a supervising nurse at the Crow Agency Hospital. There, she observed racial discrimination and the forced sterilization of Native women without their consent. In 1929, she married Thomas Yellowtail and moved to a ranch in Wyola, Montana.

Her personal experience with hospital care deepened her resolve. After giving birth to two children, she had a third born at home in 1934. When she later required surgery to remove an ovarian cyst, a doctor sterilized her without consent. She stated that the physician told her three children were enough. She subsequently became a midwife, blending Western medical treatment with Crow healing customs.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed her to the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Indian Health. She served on the committee through the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. During this time, she visited reservations to investigate medical problems and recommend improvements. The American Indian Nurses Association awarded her the title Grandmother of American Indian Nurses in 1978.

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. Susie Walking Bear Yellowtail died at her home in Wyola, Montana, on December 25, 1981, at age 78.