Pacific Northwest Indigenous activist Shirley Williams has been a force in using the ancestral homelands of the San Juan Island National Historical Park as a site for community healing through preservation of the Straits Salish culture.
Dr. Chinn was the first African American woman to hold an internship at Harlem Hospital, the first woman to ride with the Harlem Hospital ambulance crew on emergency calls and the first African American woman to graduate from the University and Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1926.
Dr. Lillie Rosa Minoka-Hill earned her doctor of medicine degree at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1899, making her the second Native American woman in the United States to hold an M.D. degree (Susan La Flesche Picotte was the first). She used her professional status to help other Native Americans, working at public clinics and dispensaries and at a school for Native American children.
Dr. Linda Aranaydo, a Muscogee Creek Indian, Kialegee Tribal Town, Bear Clan, has devoted her life to serving her family and her community and is a role model for other women who wish to enter medicine.
Dr. Lori Arviso Alvord became the first Navajo woman to be board certified in surgery in 1994.
In 1997, Dr. Laura Williams became the first Native American woman physician to become a faculty member in the University of California system.
As a teenage mother, Laurie McLemore was told she would not be able to become a physician. Despite the lack of encouragement she received from academic advisors, and the challenges of raising a family whilst building a career, she went on to complete premedical training with honors and was offered a scholarship to attend medical school.
Dr. Judith S. Kaur has devoted her career to the improvement of survival rates for American Indians with cancer. Although she had planned to return to the reservation after medical school to practice medicine, she has instead devoted her career to scientific research. Fascinated with the study of cancer, she now makes her contribution to the health of American Indian populations at the forefront of medical science.
Dr. Kathleen Annette was the first woman in the Minnesota Ojibwe Nation to become a physician and the first woman in the Bemidji Indian Health Service to serve as an area director.
With a special interest in the benefits of a traditional American Indian diet, family practitioner Kathryn A. Morsea, M.D., incorporates traditional healing practices into her patient care as a practitioner of family medicine in Gallup, New Mexico.