Susie Walking Bear Yellowtail

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Graduating in September 1927, she returned briefly to the Public Hospital in Greenfield before taking a position in a private nursing facility in Oklahoma. Later she did home health nursing among the Chippewa of Minnesota, before returning to the Crow reservation. In 1929, Walking Bear married Thomas Yellowtail, who would become a spiritual leader in their tribe. Her first assignment in Montana was at the Indian Health Service's Hospital at the Crow Agency. For two years, she worked on the reservation to modernize the health services offered to her tribe and fight the forced sterilization of Native American women.

Between 1930 and 1960, Yellowtail served as a consultant, traveling throughout the country and documenting problems in the Indian Health Service (IHS), like inadequate numbers of facilities, inability of non-native nurses to speak with their patients from a culturally sensitive perspective or in their native language, unsanitary living conditions, barriers to help from traditional healers, health care only being available from IHS to Indians living on reservations and many other concerns. Bureaucrats in Washington were aware of the failures of the IHS and from the early 1940s relied on Yellowtail's assessments of both the needs and challenges of the system. She served on an advisory committee for the Division of Indian Health (DIH) to assist sanitation engineers in relaying to tribal members the importance of hygiene and sanitation in combating disease. DIH projects provided water supply, sewage disposal and garbage disposal for homes and it was the committee member's job to interface with homeowners and explain the importance of maintaining the systems as well as the benefits of them.

During this time, Yellowtail was also active with several cultural events. She was a dancer in a troupe, the Crow Indian Ceremonial Dancers, led by Donald Deernose. Other members, besides Yellowtail and her husband and Deernose and his wife Agnes, were Lloyd Littlehawk, Henry and Stella Old Coyote, Henry Rides the Horse, and Fred Two Warriors. The group began a European tour in 1953, performing in Algeria, Denmark, England, Holland, Israel, Luxembourg, Morocco, and Turkey. Yellowtail and the other dancers toured in Belgium, Finland, France, Italy, Norway, Spain and Sweden and spent an entire month in Paris performing to sold-out houses in 1954. Returning from the tour in 1955, the troupe performed at a benefit of the Montana Institute of the Arts for the Montana Historical Society. Yellowtail also served as the official chaperone for Miss Indian America from its inception into the 1970s.

Yellowtail was awarded the President’s Award for Outstanding Nursing by President John F. Kennedy in 1962. In 1965, she was named Mrs. American Indian at the American Indian Youth Conference held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1968, she was appointed to serve a four-year term on the Public Health Service's Advisory Committee on Indian Health. In 1970, she was one of five featured speakers in a Health, Education and Welfare documentary concerning the services provided to indigenous communities by the Indian Health Service. That same year, at the All-American Indian Days festival in Sheridan, Wyoming, Yellowtail and her husband were honored as the "Outstanding Indian of the Year" for their leadership and public services to the Native American Community.

In 1972, Yellowtail was reappointed by Governor Forrest H. Anderson to serve on the State Advisory Council for Vocational Education. She stressed the need for native education so that Indians could compete for jobs. She also voiced concern that native people needed to train for service sector jobs, like lawyers, doctors, nurses, and teachers so that children and adults had access to help from people who understood their culture. Yellowtail also served on the National Alcohol and Drug Abuse Committee and was appointed by President Richard Nixon to serve on the Council on Indian Health, Education and Welfare and the federal Indian Health Advisory Committee. She founded the first professional association of Native American nurses and in 1978, was honored by the American Indian Nurses Association as the "Grandmother of American Indian Nurses".

Yellowtail died on Christmas Day, 1981 at her home in Wyola, Montana. Posthumously, in 1987 she was inducted into the Montana Hall of Fame and in 2002 to the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame as the first Native American inductee.

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