Susan La Flesche Picotte (June 17, 1865 – September 18, 1915, Omaha) was a Native American medical doctor and reformer and member of the Omaha tribe. She is widely acknowledged as one of the first Indigenous people, and the first Indigenous woman, to earn a medical degree. She campaigned for public health and for the formal, legal allotment of land to members of the Omaha tribe.
Picotte was an active social reformer as well as a physician. She worked to discourage the consumption of alcohol on the reservation where she worked as the physician, as part of the temperance movement. Picotte also campaigned for the prevention and treatment of tuberculosis, which then had no cure, as part of a public health campaign. She also worked to help other Omaha navigate the bureaucracy of the Office of Indian Affairs and receive the money owed to them for the sale of their land.
Early life
Susan La Flesche was born in June 1865 on the Omaha Reservation in eastern Nebraska. Her parents were culturally Omaha with European and Indigenous ancestry and had lived for periods of time beyond the borders of the reservation. They married in either 1845 or 1846.
La Fesche's father, Joseph La Flesche (also called Iron Eye), was of Ponca and some French Canadian ancestry. He was educated in St. Louis, Missouri, but returned to the reservation as a young man. He identified culturally as Omaha. In 1853, he was adopted by Chief Big Elk, who chose him as his successor, and La Flesche became the principal leader of the Omaha tribe around 1855. Iron Eye encouraged a certain amount of assimilation, particularly through the policy of land allotment, which caused some friction among the Omaha.
La Fesche's mother, Mary Gale, was the daughter of Dr. John Gale, a white United States Army surgeon stationed at Fort Atkinson, and Nicomi, a woman of Omaha, Otoe, and Iowa heritage. Gale was also the stepdaughter of prominent Nebraska fur trader and statesman Peter A. Sarpy. Like her husband, Mary Gale identified as Omaha. Although she understood French and English, she reportedly refused to speak any language other than Omaha.
La Fesche was the youngest of four girls, including her sisters Susette (1854–1903), Rosalie (1861–1900), and Marguerite (1862–1945). Her older half-brother Francis La Flesche, born in 1857 to her father's second wife, later became renowned as an ethnologist, anthropologist and musicologist (or ethnomusicologist), who specialized in the study of the Omaha and Osage cultures. As she grew, La Flesche learned the traditions of her heritage, but her parents felt certain rituals would be detrimental in the white world. They did not give La Flesche an Omaha name and prevented her from receiving traditional tattoos across her forehead. She spoke Omaha with her parents (especially her mother), but her father and oldest sister Susette encouraged her to speak English with her sisters, so that she would be fluent in both languages.
As a child, LaFlesche witnessed a sick Indian woman die after a white doctor refused to treat her. She later credited this tragedy as her inspiration to train as a physician, so she could provide care for the people with whom she lived on the Omaha Reservation.
Education
Early education
As a child, La Flesche was educated at the mission school on the Omaha reservation. It was run first by Presbyterians and then by Quakers, after the enactment of President Ulysses S. Grant'sPeace Policy in 1869. The reservation school was a boarding school where Native children were taught the practices of European Americans to assimilate them into white society.
After several years at the mission school, La Flesche left the reservation for Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she studied at the Elizabeth Institute for two and a half years. She returned to the reservation in 1882 and taught at the agency school. She left again to study at the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, from 1884 to 1886. It had been established as an historically black college after the American Civil War, but also educated Native American students.