Edith Emerald Johns

Edith Emerald Johns, also known as Edith Big Fire Johns and by the Winnebago name Patche-Ka-Danga, was an American nurse and community leader in the Chicago area in the middle of the twentieth century. She was born on 19 January 1915 on the Winnebago Reservation in Thurston County, Nebraska, to a Winnebago father and a Nez Perce mother, attended an American Indian boarding school from the age of eleven, and completed nursing school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1937 before moving to Chicago. She worked at several hospitals there, including Bethany Hospital and Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, spent a decade as a caseworker at St. Augustine's Center for the American Indian, and was a founder of the Chicago American Indian Center. She joined the founding staff of the Native American Educational Services College, where she taught a course on community health, and at the age of 65 she served as a nurse in Dominica with the Peace Corps. She died in Chicago on 10 June 1999 and had been inducted into the Chicago Women's Hall of Fame and the Chicago Senior Citizens Hall of Fame.