CONTACT
Multicultural Center
Learning Resources Center - Room 110
Phone: 715-365-4434 or 1-800-544-3039 ext. 4434
Fax: 715-365-4594
Email: pgokey@nicoletcollege.edu
HOURS
Monday - Friday: 8:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Autumn Bonga was a member of the NATC student club called SAGED, Students Actively Gaining Ethnic Diversity (once known as The Native American Club). Autumn was a pre-nursing student at Nicolet Area Technical College. She passed away in January of 2004. In memory of Autumn, the SAGED club set up a scholarship fund and holds various fundraising activities each year to support the scholarship. The scholarship is open to all minority students that are attending Nicolet Area Technical College.
Verol Mae Ritchie grew up in Forest County on the Potawatomi Reservation in a house that her father, Val Ritchie, and grandfather, Henry Ritchie, built near Sugar Bush Hill. Her mother, Marie Ritchie, read to her children by kerosene lamp light. From those early days of her mother's reading, Verol and her siblings (Ruth, Henry, Wallace and Clarice) grew to adulthood with an anticipation of reading and education. Verol developed a knowledge of the world around her and her relationship to her tribe, her community and her family. She passed that knowledge along to her children.
When Verol graduated from Crandon High School in 1941 she wanted to be an attorney. There were no funds or programs to help her with that dream, but she saw an advertisement in the Bureau of Indian Affairs for Native American women to study nursing at the Jackson Park Hospital School of Nursing in Chicago. Her scholarship provided tuition, room and board and a monthly allowance of $5.00. Her family on the reservation could not help their daughter with money, but they sent the food that she loved. Verol got her nursing degree. She was recruited to be a military officer in the nursing cadet program and was stationed at Fort Benjamin Harrison near Indianapolis, Indiana. After the war she went to work at Hayward Indian Hospital in Hayward, Wisconsin and at the Fort Yates, North Dakota for the Indian Health Service and was an administrator and director of nursing at several facilities in Wisconsin and North Dakota. Her areas of nursing were many: private duty, geriatrics, intensive care, industrial, women's health and clinical nursing.
Verol worked for 41 years as a Registered Nurse, all the while maintaining a home and raising six children. She made trips back home to the Forest County Potawatomi Reservation, and in the final years of her career she worked (in the summer) at the Lac du Flambeau Reservation Clinic. She retired from nursing in 1983. She was grateful that her tribe was rising out of poverty, but her wish for the young people of our tribe was that they should have goals in addition to income. Her final nursing goal was that she might work in our beautiful clinic and serve her people. She was 80 years old at the time, but diabetes prevented her from doing that.
Verol Mae Ritchie died on May 21, 2006. A scholarship in her name, for Native Americans from Wisconsin to study nursing at Nicolet College, was founded by her children.