Virginia Sneed Dixon
World War II and Korean War Veteran
Thank you to Phoebe Ann Pollitt, PhD, RN for letting us know about this nurse.
Virginia Sneed Dixon was born in 1919 on the Qualla Boundary (57,000 acres of land belonging to the Eastern Band Cherokee Indians near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina). She attended a Cherokee Boarding School through 6th grade and graduated from Cherokee High School in 1938. She graduated from Knoxville General Hospital School of Nursing in Tennessee in 1941 and went on to join the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in World War II.
After requesting overseas duty, she became the first Cherokee nurse to serve overseas during the war, where she assigned to a field hospital on the Burma Road in the mountains of China to help Chinese people resist the Japanese occupation.
It took me two weeks or more to get there … these planes from India would fly to China and you’d have to go way up above the Himalaya Mountains … It took us several hours across the hump, where the mountains are just covered in snow … and the plane weren’t pressurized … when you got up to about 28,000 feet, the oxygen mask would drop down so you’d have to wear oxygen because it was that high. And ice was freezing on the wings of the plane.
She then went on to serve in the Korean War, working in a North Korean hospital without water or electricity. During a Chinese invasion, they were told to flee. After working briefly in a U.S. military hospital in Japan, she moved to a more dangerous assignment working for the 8063rd Mobile Army Surgical Hospital near Korea’s demilitarized zone, where she provided emergency care for soldiers with brain and spinal cord injuries until they could be transported to a hospital. When she returned home, she married and raised a family, and worked as a nurse at a rehabilitation center in Black Mountain, NC. She died on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2021 at the North Carolina State Veterans Home in Black Mountain at the age of 101 years old.
Further Resources
Learn about the role of boarding schools in Native American history and the nursing profession.
Support the National Alaska Native American Indian Nurses Association.
Sources
The information for the above biography was sourced from North Carolina Nursing History and Cherokee One Feather.
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.
Support & Advocate
- National Coalition for Ethnic Minority Nurse Association to stay engaged with topics relevant to nurses of color.
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