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Minoka interned at the Woman's Clinic, a college adjunct service for the poor. at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1899. So after a year in a convent, when she was inspired to convert to Catholicism, she earned her M.D. Her father, however, felt that a woman with such a strong education should become a physician. Lillie Minoka decided to become a nurse after graduating from high school. Minoka-Hill recalled later in life, she felt strange upon arriving for school, describing herself as a "little wooden Indian who hardly dared look right or left." At age 5, she moved to Philadelphia where her father enrolled her in the Grahame Institute, a Quaker school for girls. After her mother died during childbirth, her father decided to allow her to grow up with her maternal relatives on the reservation until she was old enough to go to school. Her mother was Mohawk and her father was a Quaker physician from Philadelphia who had worked with Mohawks in New York for many years. Regis (now Akwesasne) Reservation in northern New York. Lillie Rosa Minoka was born in 1876 on the St. She also served as primary caregiver for an Oneida Indian community in Wisconsin. She used her professional status to help other American Indians, working at public clinics and dispensaries and at a school for American Indian children in Philadelphia. degree (Susan La Flesche Picotte was the first). Lillie Rosa Minoka-Hill earned her doctor of medicine degree at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1899, making her the second American Indian woman in the United States to hold an M.D.