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Selma Kendrick ’69 founded two bone marrow transplant programs during her 48-year nursing career and held executive positions at large Phoenix hospitals. 

However, she never forgot what she witnessed going to school on the reservation at Eagle Butte, and that experience impacted the way she gave back through South ��ֱ���� State University later in her life. 

“I had an experience of going to school on the reservation at Eagle Butte. It was not a positive experience,” said Kendrick, who was born in Belle Fourche and lived all over South ��ֱ���� and Wyoming as well as parts of Montana while growing up in a large family whose breadwinner worked road construction. 

In 1965, she graduated from Rapid City High School, then the only high school in Rapid.  “I kind of called Rapid City home. We often ended up there in the winter when my father couldn’t do road construction,” said Kendrick, who now calls Mesa, Arizona, home. Her parents survived but lost their home in the 1972 Rapid City flood. 

The 10-year construction of the Oahe Dam was completed in 1958, and damming the water along the Missouri River took place over the next four years. That meant Native American communities upriver needed to move. Many settled in Eagle Butte, which had been a small, predominately white community. 

In 1959, the administrative headquarters of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe moved to Eagle Butte, and the town’s demographics changed. 

Kendrick was in elementary school then. She spent one year in Eagle Butte. “I always felt very badly how the Native American students were treated” at the public school they shared. 

While the family’s transient lifestyle meant that Kendrick wasn’t exposed to that demeaning behavior for long, its impression was long lasting. 

Scholarship open to tribal members 

Six years ago, she established the Selma Kendrick Scholarship in the College of Nursing at SDSU. An endowed award, in the past year it yielded enough funds to provide two scholarships of nearly $5,000 each to a registered member of a South ��ֱ���� tribe. 

In addition, she has been a donor to the Native American Nursing Education Center in Rapid City, which is used for socializing, mentoring and programming for the college’s Native American students. 

The overall vision of NANEC is to provide a place where Native American students achieve their dreams and aspirations of entering and transitioning to professional nursing roles, poised to promote the health and well-being of Native people. Currently, the Native American Nursing Education Center program supports 30 to 35 Native American nursing students. 

Kendrick first started giving to the college in 1986, when she donated through the nursing phon-a-thon, and has been a consistent giver for more than 25 years. Another one of Kendrick’s philanthropic passions is the Rural Nursing Fellow program in which senior nursing students complete a preceptorship experience in a rural health care facility. 

Need rises to educate rural nurses 

“For the majority of my career, I worked in a large tertiary facilities that could provide care to anyone; they had the facilities, they had the people. Many of the patients that required care got transferred in from rural facilities, where they didn’t have the skills to serve those patients. But then they would get transferred back and still required a high level of care. 

“While I was employed, we worked at providing education to rural nurses. We would go to rural areas and do a one- or two-day seminar to provide specialized knowledge on follow-up care. 

“The SDSU rural nursing program is designed around getting people to not go to only Sioux Falls or Rapid City and still have a high level of knowledge,” said Kendrick, who began supporting the program in 2022. 

She added that as the number of rural hospitals shrink, there will be a greater needed for well-educated nurses at the clinic level. 

Ed journey started with $400 scholarship 

Kendrick’s own education journey after graduating from Rapid City High School was heavily influenced by a one-year, $400 scholarship. She admitted she wanted to go to the University of Wyoming, but there was no way she could afford out-of-state tuition. 

In fact, “I absolutely would not have been able to go (to SDSU) without the scholarship,” Kendrick said. That $400 was enough for much of her freshman year, where she lived in the brand-new Pierson Hall. She also washed dishes in the Jungle, the student cafeteria in Pugsley Student Union, for $1 per hour. 

As a senior, she supervised the nursing lab, where young nursing students would come to “practice giving a shot, making a bed and taking blood pressure,” Kendrick said. That also paid $1 per hour.  

During school breaks, she worked as a long-distance operator for Mountain Bell in Rapid City, where she was able to earn union wages without paying dues and learned how to calm down a caller when calling to report a heart attack in those pre-911 days. 

Oversaw transplant programs 

After graduation, Kendrick practiced at University of Minnesota Hospital and then became an instructor at a Naeve Hospital in Albert Lea, Minnesota, for one year before moving to Arizona in 1973. Because she had worked in oncology at the University of Minnesota, Kendrick easily got a job in oncology in Phoenix, eventually adding bone marrow transplant and critical care duties at the 700-bed hospital. 

The transplant program was its own limited liability corporation with its own budget and board of directors. 

“It was very fun to run a business inside a business with a budget of $150 million,” said Kendrick, who continued to serve as head of critical care and oncology at the main hospital. She held the dual positions for 10 years and in 2011 started a transplant program at another facility. She retired in 2017. 

Today she still connects socially with fellow oncology nurses, particularly at their annual fall tamale-making gathering, and seeks ways to help future SDSU nursing students find success. 

“I need to pay it forward for some other person to have the same opportunity I did.”