Oral History Archive
LTC Brenda Finnicum, USA NC (Ret.)
US Army Nurse Corps, 1978-82 and 1985-98
US Army Nurse Corps Reserve, 1983-85 and 1998-2000

	LTC Brenda Finnicum in 1979 at the time of her promotion to 1st lieutenant.

LTC Brenda Finnicum, a member of the Lumbee nation, was born in West Virginia and raised in Ohio where her grandparents had migrated from North Carolina during the 1930s in order to earn a living. She holds a Bachelor of Science from Ohio State University, Masters of Science in Nursing from University of Texas at San Antonio and a Masters of Science from the Texas Wesleyan College/Army Anesthesia Program.

LTC Finnicum's mother was born in Ohio and was the only child in her family who did not attend an Indian school. She came from a military tradition. Several uncles served in the military during World War II and one of them was a prisoner of war. He later served in Korea and was killed in Vietnam. Finnicum told her interviewer, “I always knew I wanted to be a nurse and [my uncles] kind of inspired me to go into the military. And there was the travel, adventure, leaving home. ... It seemed that going into the military was the way to go.”

Did your uncles and father talk about the military a lot while you were growing up?

One of my mother’s brothers was very interesting. He was in WWII and after he came home, he began to display signs of post-traumatic stress syndrome. That’s not what they called it then … the stories are that he was violent and so he was committed into the VA system not too long after WWII and he was hospitalized or in a group home until he died in the 1980s. The interesting thing about him was that in those days you had to have a commitment hearing and so my grandmother and grandfather went to the court house. It was a white judge, of course, and his comment to them was, 'He is not fit to walk the streets.' And I’ve always wondered if he would have said that if my uncle had not been Indian. This was just after WWII, and my uncle had actually fought in the Aleutians, and it seems to me–would he have said that if he’d been a white man? That story has lived with me for a long time. Evidently, my grandmother–who is [very] tiny–just tore into this authoritarian judge.

His is one of those stories ... that sort of got me into the military. Here is a man who fought for his country but was treated poorly when he got back. I suspect some of this had to do with racism.

Is your family traditional?

My grandmother, who was Lumbee, was traditional. ... She was a spirited woman when she was young. She could not read or write and that had mostly to do with the segregation laws in the south in the early part of the 1910s and 1920s. … She lived the history of the Lumbee people during that time frame: the segregation, the inability to go to the schools you wanted to. … Many people understand segregation in terms of black and white, but in North Carolina there was a third racial category and that was the Indian people. They would literally have a drinking fountain for blacks, a drinking fountain for whites and then there was the drinking fountain for Indian people. ... Those stories were told to me early on. …

One of the traditions of the Lumbee people is to go back and visit and keep in contact with the family. … She would go down with my mother and they would take the bus … back down to North Carolina and they would get off at a stop and the people would go in to eat, and she and grandma would stay on the bus because they were not allowed to go in and eat. People would bring food out to them. … To my mother this was just a fact of life. I say, 'Don’t you realize what was happening?' She says, 'At the time, no. That’s just the way it was. Now I realize we weren’t allowed to go into those places.' ... My grandmother always missed North Carolina. Many Lumbee people always go back or they just never leave. She called it getting back home. Those are the kind of things we call traditional.

We’ve lost our language, a lot of the pre-European traditions are gone, but there is a community sense that is still very much part of the tradition. And that was instilled into me. Some of the stories, the struggle of the Lumbee people–that’s really our history–mostly struggle, and standing up to oppression … which is part of that story of my grandmother facing that white judge and tearing into him in spite of the fact he had all this power and she had none. That’s typical Lumbee tradition: no matter what the odds are, you stand up for yourself and fight. The story is told with pride because it’s about my little, illiterate grandmother standing up to this white judge. That’s the way she was.

... But because I didn’t grow up in North Carolina, there were a lot of things I missed.

What was your parents' view when you decided you wanted to join the military?

My mother kind of always prepared me for a nontraditional woman’s role. She made sure that I went to school and that I did my homework and that I aspired for more than she did. She knew I was not content to be a stay-at-home person. That I wanted to go, that I wanted to travel. That I had dreams.

In one respect, that’s not unlike traditional Lumbee thinking. There was great struggle, especially at the end of the 1800s when we developed our own school system, to attain, to pull yourself up and do better, get your children to do better than you did. I am two generations from illiteracy and no schooling. Right now we have a lot of doctors, a lot of lawyers within the nation. Within the last two generations, we’ve made educational strides. In that sense, she was making sure her kids did better than she did. …

She always supported the military [for me], but it was less supported among my uncles who had been in the military. I think that had more to do with a man’s view of the world. … My father was very proud. But it was my uncles who seemed to be, 'Oh, she’ll never do this. You’ll get married and all this stuff.' They actually have negated my military experience over the years.

My male cousins who have been in the military–and in fact, I’m the only officer in the family–their service seemed to be more valid than mine, in spite of the fact they were lower ranking and some of them did not stay in for 20 years or whatever. There was never validation of my military experience–in fact, when I came home, no one ever spoke of it except my mother who bragged to everybody as mothers do.

I always found that interesting. … I certainly never let that get in my way.

Do you think gender policy affected you in the military?

I never wanted to move away from patient care. I only wanted to be able to go into my operating room, do my anesthesia, and do my best for the patients. I was so intent on nursing. I was very focused. Gender policy didn't affect me as a nurse, but it would've been relevant if I'd been in other specialties. I would've been bothered to see my male counterparts do things I wasn't allowed to do.