Born in 1923, Betty Mae Tiger Jumper was the first Chairwoman of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, elected in 1967. She spent her early life with parents, Ada Tiger and Abe Partan, at a Seminole camp in Indiantown. Tribal medicine men threatened to put Jumper to death because her father was white. “I was a half breed. An evil one,” she explained. To protect their children, the family relocated to a reservation in Dania. Segregation laws barred Seminoles from attending Florida schools. At age fourteen, Jumper was sent to an Indian boarding school in Cherokee, North Carolina. She was the first Florida Seminole to learn to read and write English, and the first to graduate from high school. She graduated from nursing school in Oklahoma in 1946, and spent 40 years improving and modernizing healthcare for the Seminole community. She cofounded the Seminole News in 1956, the Tribe's first newspaper. In 1994, Florida State University awarded Jumper an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters. A gifted Tribal storyteller, Jumper authored And With the Wagon Came God’s Word, Legends of the Seminole, and a memoir with Patsy West, A Seminole Legend. In 2011, at age 88, Betty Mae Tiger Jumper walked on, leaving an enduring legacy.
Slide toward Today to fade the historical sheet and see the modern map underneath.