Born in 1923, Betty Mae Tiger Jumper became the first Chairwoman of the Seminole Tribe of Florida when she was elected in 1967. She spent her early life with her parents, Ada Tiger and Abe Partan, at the Seminole camp in Indiantown, but tribal medicine men threatened to put her to death because her father was white. To protect their children, the family relocated to the reservation in Dania. Because segregation laws barred Seminoles from attending Florida schools, at age 14 she was sent to an Indian boarding school in Cherokee, North Carolina. She became the first Florida Seminole to learn to read and write English and the first to graduate from high school. After graduating from nursing school in Oklahoma in 1946, she spent 40 years improving and modernizing healthcare for the Seminole community. In 1956 she co-founded the Seminole News, the Tribe's first newspaper. Florida State University awarded her an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters in 1994. A gifted Tribal storyteller, she authored And With the Wagon Came God's Word, Legends of the Seminole, and, with Patsy West, the memoir A Seminole Legend. She died in 2011 at age 88, leaving an enduring legacy.