By Pat Edmonson

This year's Women's Day, March 8, 2022, campaign theme is #BreakTheBias. Whether deliberate or unconscious, bias makes it difficult for women to move ahead. Knowing that bias exists isn't enough; action is needed to level the playing field.

The United Nations officially celebrated International Women’s Day on March 9, 1975. Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973. Since that time, there has been challenge after challenge to the law that gave women agency over their reproductive health. Until the ERA is passed, #BreakTheBias works for some women, but not all. As you will see with FL Women’s Hall of Fame inductee, Betty Mae Tiger Jumper bias took a backseat to survival.

Betty Mae Tiger Jumper was born in a Seminole camp near Indiantown, Florida. Betty Mae’s mother, Ada Tiger, was Seminole, and her father was Irish. The tribal medicine men threatened to kill Jumper because her father was white, so the family relocated to the Seminole reservation in Dania. Because of Florida’s segregationist policies, at 14, Betty Mae Tiger Jumper left home to attend boarding school at the Cherokee Indian School in North Carolina. In 1949, she became the first Seminole to earn a high school diploma.

Chief Betty Mae Tiger Jumper was the first and only female chief of the Seminole Tribe of Florida. She was a nurse and newspaper editor and was the first Florida Seminole to learn to read and write English. Her first languages were Mikasuki and Creek. In the segregated Florida of her childhood, Seminoles were not permitted to attend white or black schools.

Elected to head the Seminoles in 1967, she was a founder of the United South and Eastern Tribes (USET), one of the most powerful lobbies in Indian Country. In 1970, she was one of two women appointed by President Nixon to the National Congress on Indian Opportunity. Jumper was the Seminoles’ first Health Director and is known as the tribal storyteller. She edited the Seminole Tribune, is the author of two books: And With the Wagon – Came God’s Word and Legends of the Seminoles, and narrated a video, The Corn Lady. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Florida State University in 1994 for her years of dedication to improving the Seminole people's health, education, cultural and economic conditions.

Betty Mae Tiger Jumper was a true Florida woman. She lived on this unforgiving land, virtually invisible, uneducated, with little or no healthcare. But Betty Mae was as tough as Florida sawgrass; she had a vision and kept going toward it. Betty Mae Tiger Jumper knew that life could be better for her people, and she made it so.