Cora Elm (February 18, 1891 – June 9, 1949) was an American nurse. She was a member of the

Oneida Nation The Oneida Nation is a federally recognized tribe of Oneida people in Wisconsin. The tribe's reservation spans parts of two counties west of the Green Bay metropolitan area. The reservation was established by treaty in 1838, and was allotted to ...

, and attended the

Carlisle Indian Industrial School The United States Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, generally known as Carlisle Indian Industrial School, was the flagship Indian boarding school in the United States from 1879 through 1918. It took over the historic Carlisle ...

from 1906 to 1913. She served as a

Red Cross The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is a Humanitarianism, humanitarian movement with approximately 97 million Volunteering, volunteers, members and staff worldwide. It was founded to protect human life and health, to ensure re ...

nurse in France during

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

Early life and education

Elm was born on the

Oneida Reservation The Oneida Indian Nation (OIN) or Oneida Nation is a federally recognized tribe of Oneida people in the United States. The tribe is headquartered in Verona, New York, where the tribe originated and held its historic territory long before European ...

in Wisconsin, one of eleven children born to Nicholas Elm and Jane Hill Elm. Her home language was

Oneida Oneida may refer to: Native American/First Nations * Oneida people, a Native American/First Nations people and one of the five founding nations of the Iroquois Confederacy * Oneida language * Oneida Indian Nation, based in New York * Oneida Na ...

. Her father was a farmer, born in Canada, and her grandmother was a midwife. Her grandfather Jacob Hill was a hereditary chief in the Oneida nation. She attended the Carlisle Indian School from 1906 to 1913, and trained as a nurse at the Episcopal Hospital School of Nursing in Philadelphia, graduating in 1916.

Career

Elm worked as supervisor of the wards at the Episcopal Hospital after she graduated. Elm participated in demonstration for

women's suffrage Women's suffrage is the right of women to vote in elections. Beginning in the start of the 18th century, some people sought to change voting laws to allow women to vote. Liberal political parties would go on to grant women the right to vot ...

at the

White House The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in 1800. ...

in 1917. In December 1917 Elm volunteered for overseas service and sailed to France, where she worked as a Red Cross nurse at the base hospital in

Nantes Nantes (, , ; Gallo: or ; ) is a city in Loire-Atlantique on the Loire, from the Atlantic coast. The city is the sixth largest in France, with a population of 314,138 in Nantes proper and a metropolitan area of nearly 1 million inhabita ...

. Elm wrote about her wartime experiences for the ''Carlisle Arrow'' magazine. "My life overseas was not very easy. Although I was in a base hospital, I saw a lot of the horrors of war. I nursed many a soldier with a leg cut off, or an arm", she later wrote. In 1920 she was sent by the Red Cross to do relief work in Russia, Latvia, and Lithuania. She was one of the two Native American nurses known to serve in Europe during the war (the other being Charlotte Edith Anderson Monture), though others served in stateside military hospitals. After marriage and motherhood, she was a ward supervisor at Fort Bayard in New Mexico, and at Wood Veterans Hospital in Milwaukee.

Personal life

Elm married James E. Sinnard in 1921. They had a son, James Jr., born in 1926, before they divorced. In 1934, she was charged with breaking her husband's car windows, and her brother and two other men were charged with assault against her husband, but the charges were dropped. Her son served in

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. She died in 1949, aged 58 years, at a veterans' hospital in North Carolina. She was buried with military honors, and her gravesite at Holy Apostles Church Cemetery in

includes a military headstone.

References

External links

* Thielel
"Biography"
''Voices from the Carlisle Indian School'' (May 15, 2017); a blogpost about Cora Elm Sinnard, including her 1917 passport photo {{DEFAULTSORT:Elm, Cora 1891 births 1949 deaths Oneida Nation of Wisconsin people American nurses American women in World War I Carlisle Indian Industrial School alumni American expatriates in France American women nurses 20th-century Native American women 20th-century Native Americans Native American people from Wisconsin