Viola Elizabeth Garcia Schneider
U.S. Army Nurse Corps First Lieutenant in World War II (of the Catawba Nation)
This story would not have been possible without the oral history archived by the Library of Congress and additional information provided by Minority Nurse.
Viola Elizabeth Garcia was born in 1919 in Colorado. Her parents were both members of the Catawba Nation of South Carolina. Growing up, she was the only Native American in her small town — “everyone was blonde except me. I only had Anglo friends, but everyone was nice.” During the Great Depression, high schools in small towns closed down. To continue her education, Viola applied to the Bureau of Indian Affairs Haskell Boarding School (which still exists today). She was not admitted until she was already 18 and completed a curriculum largely based on domestic skills. Although she was offered full employment on the Apache reservation as a cook’s assistant, she instead applied to nursing schools.
The Ganado Mission Nursing School, which was chronicled in the 2019 book Medicine Women: The Story of the First Native American Nursing School, was the only school to accept her. Some schools rejected her for fear her Native American features would be perceived as Japanese during strained relations with Japan ahead of World War II, while others rejected her for being “too old” at 21. Supplemental financial aid from the school helped her to fund the tuition, along with a full month of her brother’s wages, which helped her to buy the required watch with a “second hand sweep.” Located on the Navajo reservation of Arizona, Viola taught herself how to speak Diné Bizaad and became close with the Navajo people. She graduated as the class valedictorian in 1943 and was gifted a set of surgical instruments.
The Arizona nursing license at the time cost $75 and she did not have more money to take it again if she failed — in fact, she received the highest score in the entire state, but only knew she passed when a letter addressed to “Viola Garcia, R.N.” arrived. Her first job was working as a hospital surgical nurse in Colorado, but with World War II underway, surgical nurses in the state were being assigned numbers in the event of a nursing draft. Nurses were told voluntary sign up with the U.S. Army Nurse Corps would give them a chance of selection for their preferred practice and location. She enlisted in 1944, requesting no surgical and no overseas duty. She was initially assigned to Fort Carson transport center in Colorado Springs. where she was placed in surgery. When she stated she didn’t sign up for it, she was told “This is the military.” Her experience there was colored by the gravity of the war in the Pacific at that time:
We did mostly amputations morning to night that came from all over. At the end of the day we had big trash containers full of feet, arms, legs, ears, toes, and fingers…I can still smell it, I never got used to it.
Soon after, she was sent to California where she was told she would be going to Tokyo the next day. With 600 other nurses, she boarded the USAHS Marigold, which was the largest U.S. Army Hospital Ship at the time. Three hundred nurses departed in Hawaii, while the rest stayed on for Japan. During Viola’s oral history with the library of congress, she stated the atomic bomb was dropped while they were aboard the ship in the Pacific. When she arrived in Yokohama, she spent a few weeks helping to process American Japanese POWs from the islands who had ulcerated skin, infected wounds, and suffered from malnutrition. From there she went to Tokyo, to a thousand bed hospital.
It was a hard life, I thought it would never end...The first week was the hardest of my whole life, they just gave me an empty building and said here you are… there was nothing there, five operating suites with ampitheaters without tables or supplies, nothing to hold the IV poles, no books to learn, no one to help me, all dirty — our first week was scrubbing the walls. I didn’t know how to do it, but I did it…I think somebody up above helped me.
Although Viola had received the promotion of first lieutenant promotion, she didn’t have enough time in the U.S. Nurse Corps to become a captain, which was a requirement to become surgical charge nurse. In her oral history, Viola described that they brought an Anglo nurse with the needed credentials, but “she cried for two days and left.” This meant Viola served as the charge nurse (although she was never was promoted to captain). She had 6–7 nurses and 20 technicians working the operating rooms until the war ended. One technician, Herbert Schneider, went on to become her husband. Following the war, the Schneiders had three girls and lived in the states and Europe while he worked on his medical degree. During their five years in Washington, D.C., Viola worked as nurse at Providence and Sibley hopsitals. In her oral history, she stated “if I don’t breath and don’t move, I can still fit in my nurse military uniform.” Viola died in 2004, at the age of 83.
Further Resources
Listen to Viola’s oral history here.
Learn more about the Catawba tribe here.
Sources
The information for the above profile was sourced from Minority Nurse, Montgomery & Steward Funeral Directors, and the Library of Congress.
Learn More
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Know Your History
- Nursing CLIO to engage with historians and scholars committed to deep work around historical accuracy in healthcare and nursing.
- American Association for the History of Nursing to attend monthly webinars on topics of nursing history, view the calendar here.
Examine Bias
- NurseManifest to attend live zoom sessions with fellow nurses on nursing’s overdue reckoning on racism or to sign their pledge.
- Breaking Bias in Healthcare, an online course created by scientist Anu Gupta, to learn how bias is related to our brain’s neurobiology and can be mitigated with mindfulness.
- Revolutionary Love Learning Hub provides free tools for learners and educators to use love as fuel towards ourselves, our opponents, and to others so that we can embody a world where we see no strangers.
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- National Coalition for Ethnic Minority Nurse Association to stay engaged with topics relevant to nurses of color.
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