Dr. Mary H. Roessel was the first person in her Diné (Navajo) community to attend medical school and become a doctor (1987) and the first woman Diné (Navajo) psychiatrist to provide Indian Health Service clinical care in New Mexico.
Cristina Pérez Martínez’s poetry has been published in the books “Yisimtak ts’unubil, semilla y raices” and “Buch’u Shainoj li vitse ¿Quién habita esta montaña?.”
Adriana del Carmen López Sántiz is a Tseltal poet from the community of Chanam del Carmen in Ocosingo, Chiapas.
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.
Geraldine Kenui Bell, better known as Geri, was the first Native Hawaiian woman to be superintendent of a National Park Service (NPS) unit – in fact, she oversaw the operation of two different parks in Hawai‘i simultaneously.
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.