Medicine Women: The Story of the First Native American Nursing School by Jim Kristofic (review)

Jim Kristofic’s Medicine Women offers an in-depth and engaging narrative detailing the history of the Ganado Presbyterian Mission, its impact on the surrounding Navajo community, and the missionaries, students, and nurses who lived there. Kristofic traces the Arizona mission’s development from its foundation in the late nineteenth century as a small religious space to an expansive campus best known for its premier Native American nursing school. He centers this narrative around missionary efforts to convert and Americanize Navajo communities and the mission’s nursing students who graduated from the program, adapted to the western medical landscape, and contended with maintaining cultural ties.

Missionary physician Dr. Clarence Salsbury cultivated the nursing school and oversaw its development, utilizing the training program to better appeal to the local Navajo community and reduce stigma against the mission’s Sage Memorial Hospital. Nursing students, the so-called “red women in white,” promoted western medicine within their respective communities. Salsbury viewed the nursing program as an integral part of Presbyterian conversion efforts. He envisioned Navajo nurses as leaders who could “sway the ‘jackrabbits’ in the distant country to adopt the Presbyterian Way, who could communicate with patients in their native language and take the Christian life into the mesas and hoghans” (p. 128). He further touted the program as an extraordinary opportunity that defied contemporary Navajo stereotypes and produced graduates who served across the nation and in the military. Salsbury’s role in this vision was as both a stern mentor to his students and a showman who promoted the mission and its graduates. Ganado Mission, according to him, was a verdant garden of education, religious conversion, and health that stood out in the harsh desert landscape.

Kristofic utilizes descriptive storytelling to weave archival research about Ganado into a cohesive narrative. He synthesizes a wide array of sources—memoirs, institutional records, letters and related correspondence, and archived and author-conducted oral histories—to detail the significance and motivations of the various historical actors. The narrative delves into tensions of authority between medical professionals at the hospital and Navajo medicine men and disagreements on how to best operate the hospital and nursing program. Simultaneously, Kristofic addresses broader themes of Native American history, including “vanishing Indian” myths, the rise and fall of government boarding schools, and varying attempts to restructure the Navajo Nation. Kristofic’s personal connection to Ganado as someone who grew up on the Navajo Reservation bookends Medicine Women and further emphasizes the story’s significance.

The bulk of Medicine Women covers the day-to-day operation and experience of people at the mission. It traces Ganado’s expansion, fundraising efforts, and its growth in popularity across the nation. Over the course of thirty-five chapters, Kristofic delves into its history from Ganado’s start as a small, five-room adobe building to a sprawling campus too big to maintain its operation. The work of missionaries like Dr. Salsbury guide this structure, with each chapter focused on a striking anecdote or new development at the mission site. The in-depth biographies of particular nursing students and the school’s staff are the most intriguing aspect of this history. Throughout, Kristofic details and inter-weaves the careers of individual women into the institutional history of the mission. Students like Charlotte Adele Slivers come to the forefront as representative of what Salsbury hoped to achieve. Slivers was the daughter of a local Navajo medicine man and grew up at the Hubbell Trading Post. She attended school at Ganado Mission, graduated from the Ganado nursing school, and worked as a surgical nurse at Ganado’s Sage Memorial Hospital. While she would eventually leave this position due to overwork, Salsbury saw women like Slivers as key to convincing Navajo communities to adopt western medical practices. Slivers, and the other nursing graduates, were “on the front lines between modern medicine and Navajo tradition” (p.139).

Nursing graduates, however, did...