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Six women wearing all-white nurses uniforms pose for a graduation photo. The three women in the front sit with their legs crossed.
Bear (center, top) graduated from Boston City Hospital’s nursing school (1923). (Photo: Montana Historical Society)

Suzie Walking Bear Yellow Tail (Crow) incorporates Indigenous healing traditions with Western medicine.

1920s

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Bear (center, top) graduated from Boston City Hospital’s nursing school (1923). (Photo: Montana Historical Society)

Up to this point, there are few Native nurses. During the boarding school period, however, Western medical careers become another method of encouraging Indigenous assimilation away from cultural forms of care.

Yellow Tail and others resist this by working to incorporate traditional healing practices with Western methods. She begins working at the Crow Agency, a government hospital, in the 1920s. Yellow Tail also becomes a midwife, continuing to work with others to integrate traditional knowledge into Western medical practices. She will later be forcibly sterilized.