Betty Mae Tiger Jumper was the first, and so far the only, female chairman of the Seminole Tribe of Florida. A nurse, she co-founded the tribe’s first newspaper in 1956, the Seminole News—later replaced by The Seminole Tribune, for which she served as editor.
She was the first Florida Seminole to formally learn to read and write English, and the first to graduate from high school and a nursing program. In addition to serving as editor of the newspaper, she was Communications Director for the tribe.
Born in a Seminole camp near Indiantown in 1923, she was the daughter of Ada Tiger, a Seminole woman of the Snake clan, and a French trapper. Her grandmother Mary Tiger picked her Seminole name of Potackee. Under the Seminole matrilineal kinship system, Betty Mae was given her mother’s surname.
The tribe so discouraged intermarriage with whites that sometimes they left half-breed children in the Everglades to die. When Betty Mae was five, some Seminole medicine men threatened to put her and her younger brother to death because their father was white. Her great-uncle resisted the men and moved the family to the Dania reservation in Broward County, where the government protected the children.
She decided she had to learn how to read and write. In the segregated school system of Florida, neither the white nor the black schools would accept Seminole children. So, she decided to go to a federal Indian boarding school in Cherokee, North Carolina.
In 1945, after graduating high school, Betty Mae enrolled in a nursing program in Oklahoma, returning to Florida to do field training. The Seminole then were still very traditional, and many would only accept care from Medicine Men.
She worked as a nurse for 40 years to improve health care in the Seminole community. She and her mother, who was a midwife, would work to persuade women to go to the hospital when needed, as they began to adapt to the new world.
In 1967, Betty Mae was elected as the first female chief of the Seminole. Thanks to her leadership, the Seminole Tribe went from near bankruptcy in 1967 to having $500,000 when she left office in 1971.
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