Susie Walking Bear Yellowtail was a trained nurse when she discovered what government doctors were doing to Native American women. Some patients had been sterilized without their knowledge. Others learned only years later why they could no longer have children.Susie knew the medical system from the inside. She had worked in its hospitals. She had also experienced its abuses herself.
Born in 1903 on Montana’s Crow Reservation, Susie lost both parents by age twelve. Missionaries sent her to schools in Oklahoma and Massachusetts, where Native children were pressured to abandon their languages and traditions.
She refused to abandon her identity.
In 1927, she became the first registered nurse of Apsáalooke (Crow) descent, one of the earliest Native American women to achieve that qualification.
Returning to Montana, she worked at the government hospital at Crow Agency. What she encountered would shape the rest of her life.
Native women reported undergoing medical procedures without understanding what had been done. Some had been sterilized following childbirth. Susie herself later alleged that a government physician sterilized her without consent during gynecological surgery.
Women who could not understand their doctors’ explanations were particularly vulnerable. Some sought Susie’s help when they discovered they could no longer become pregnant.
She began documenting abuses and challenging the federal medical system responsible for Native health care.
Her investigations extended beyond reproductive rights. On the Navajo Reservation, she encountered critically ill children whose mothers had carried them enormous distances seeking treatment.
Susie spent decades demanding better hospitals, culturally competent care and respect for traditional Native healing practices.
The scale of the sterilization problem eventually reached Congress. In 1976, federal investigators documented 3,406 sterilizations in four Indian Health Service areas over three years, finding serious failures in consent procedures.
Susie had been raising these concerns long before that investigation.
In 1978, the American Indian Nurses Association honored her as the “Grandmother of American Indian Nurses.”
She died in 1981, having spent much of her life confronting the institutions that were supposed to protect her people.
Provided by Women In World History
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