Memorable World History/Authors

Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte

Susan LaFlesche Picotte (June 17, 1865 – September 18, 1915) was an Omaha Native American doctor and reformer in the late 19th century. She is widely acknowledged as the first Native American 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 drinking on the reservation where she worked as the physician, as part of the temperance movement of the 19th century. Picotte also campaigned to prevent and treat tuberculosis, which then had no cure, as part of a public health campaign on the reservation. 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 LaFlesche was born in June 1865 on the Omaha Reservation in eastern Nebraska. Her parents were both biracial and had lived for periods of time beyond the borders of the reservation. They married sometime in 1845–1846.

Her father, Joseph LaFlesche, also called Iron Eye, was of Ponca and French Canadian ancestry. He was educated in St. Louis, but returned to the reservation as a young man and identified culturally as Omaha. He was adopted by Chief Young Elk in 1853, which chose him as his successor, and LaFlesche became the principal leader of the Omaha tribe around 1855. Iron Eye sought to help his people by encouraging assimilation, particularly through the policy of land allotment, which caused some friction among the Omaha.

Her mother, Mary Gale, was the daughter of Dr. John Gale, an Army surgeon stationed at Fort Atkinson, and Nicomi, a woman of mixed Omaha-Oto-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, and though she understood French and English, she refused to speak any language other than Omaha.

Susan was the youngest of four girls, including her sisters Susette (1854–1903), Rosalie (1861–1900), and Marguerite (1862–1945). Her older half-brother Francis LaFlesche later became renowned as an ethnologist, anthropologist and musicologist, who focused on the Omaha and Osage cultures. As she grew, La Flesche learned the traditions of her heritage, but her parents felt that certain native rituals would be detrimental in the white world; they kept their youngest daughter from receiving an Omaha name or traditional tattoos across her forehead. She spoke Omaha with her parents, but her father and oldest sister Susette encouraged her to speak English with her sisters.

As a child, LaFlesche saw a sick Indian woman die due to a white doctor refusing to treat her, which may have motivated her to pursue medicine.

Education

Early education

LaFlesche's education began early, at the mission school on the reservation, which was run first by the Presbyterians and then by the Quakers after the enactment of President Ulysses S. Grant's "Peace Policy" in 1869. The reservation school was a boarding school where whites took LaFlesche and other Native children away from their families and taught them the habits of white people in hopes of assimilating them into white society.

After several years at the mission school, LaFlesche 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 before leaving again for more education, this time at the Hampton Institute at Hampton, Virginia, from 1884 to 1886. It had been established as a historically black college after the American Civil War, but had become a destination also for Native American students.