Cecilia Fire Thunder

Cecilia Fire Thunder, born Cecilia Apple in 1946 on the Pine Ridge Reservation, is a nurse, community health planner and tribal leader of the Oglala Sioux. After her family moved to Los Angeles in 1963 under a federal relocation program, a social worker helped her into a nursing program, and she founded community-based health clinics in Los Angeles and San Diego, persuading university doctors to donate time. Returning to Pine Ridge in 1986 she worked at the Bennett County Hospital, helped found the Oglala Lakota Women Society, encouraged preventive care for women at risk of fetal alcohol harm, serves on the advisory board of the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and worked with a domestic violence shelter. In 2004 she became the first woman elected president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and she was impeached in 2006 over her plan for a Planned Parenthood clinic on the reservation.