Tiger was the first Florida Seminole to learn to read and write English, and the first to graduate from high school and a nursing program.

When Betty Mae was five, some Seminole medicine men threatened to put her and her younger brother to death, because their father was white.

Her great-uncle resisted the men and moved the family to the Dania reservation in Broward County, where the government protected the children.

[2] At the time, her mother had to leave nearly 500 head of cattle; she sold some and offered others to the tribe for people who needed food.

Tiger decided to go to a federal Indian boarding school, and enrolled at one in Cherokee, North Carolina, along with her cousin Mary and younger brother.

She became the first formally educated Seminole of her tribe, as well as the first to read and write English; she graduated from high school in 1945.

[4] Betty Tiger enrolled in a nursing program at the Kiowa Indian Hospital in Oklahoma, which she completed the following year.

In 1967 Betty Mae Tiger Jumper was elected as the first female chairwoman, or chief, of the Seminole tribe, a decade after it gained federal recognition.

She founded the United South and Eastern Tribes (USET), a group to run health and education programs for its members; it also became a powerful lobby with the states and Congress.

After it was renamed as The Seminole Tribune, Tiger-Jumper served as editor for several years[1] and also became Communication Director for the Tribe.