Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte (June 17, 1865 - September 18, 1915) was the first American Indian woman to become a physician in the United States. She grew up with her parents on the Omaha Reservation. She went to college at the Hampton Institute and got her medical degree at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP) in Philadelphia. Of Ponca, Iowa, French and Anglo-American descent, she was the first person to receive federal aid for higher education.
LaFlesche Picotte worked in Nebraska, providing health care to her Omaha people for much of her career. In private practice after 1894, she also had European-American patients. In 1913 she founded a hospital on the Omaha Reservation at Walthill, Nebraska, the first on any reservation to be privately funded. After LaFlesche Picotte died two years later, the hospital as renamed in her honor. Later it was designated as a National Historic Landmark. Today it serves as a museum featuring her work and the history of the Omaha and Ho-Chunk tribes, and also has a center for the care of children.
Contents |
Susan LaFlesche was one of five children born to Chief Joseph LaFlesche (Insta Maza, Iron Eye) and his wife Mary (née Gale), also called Hinnuagsnun (One Woman), on the Omaha Reservation in northeastern Nebraska. (Each was of half-European ancestry, French on her father's side and Anglo-American on her mother's.) Joseph was Métis, son of a French fur trapper (also named Joseph LaFlesche) and his Ponca wife Waoowinchtcha; he was adopted into the Omaha tribe by the chief Big Elk. In 1854 Big Elk designated LaFlesche as the principal chief of the Omaha. His wife Mary Gale was the mixed-race daughter of Dr. John Gale, a surgeon at Fort Atkinson and Ni-co-ma, his Iowa wife.[1] The LaFlesche family was "prominent, educated, and acculturated."[2]
Their parents ensured that Susan and her older siblings, Louis, Susette, Rosalie, and Marguerite, became educated.[3] They made notable contributions in their fields, and included the reformer Susette LaFlesche Tibbles; Rosalie LaFlesche Farley, who served as a financial manager for the Omaha tribe; and Marguerite LaFlesche Picotte, who worked as a teacher. Their half-brother Francis La Flesche, son of Ta-in-ne, their father's second wife, became an ethnologist at the Smithsonian Institution.[3]
Susan attended school in northeastern Nebraska until age fourteen. Her father encouraged his children and tribe to seek education and build relationships with European-American reform groups. La Flesche and her sister Marguerite went to New Jersey to attend the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies, as had their older sister Susette.[3]
Susan returned home at age 17 in 1882; she taught for two years at the Quaker Mission School on the Omaha Reservation. While teaching, La Flesche cared for the health of the anthropologist Alice Fletcher, who was studying the Omaha. Fletcher returned repeatedly for research, and Francis La dsFlesche became interested in pursuing studies in the field. He later worked with her at the Smithsonian Institution, where the two developed a close professional partnership. They wrote a book together on the Omaha.
At Fletcher's urging, Susan La Flesche and her sister Marguerite returned to the East for college. Susan went on to earn a medical degree. Both she and Marguerite did their undergraduate work at the Hampton Institute, a prominent historically black college (HBCU) that also educated Native American students. The resident physician, Martha Waldron, was a graduate of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP) and encouraged LaFlesche to apply there.
Alice Fletcher helped Susan La Flesche by securing scholarship funds for her medical school from the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs and the Connecticut Indian Association, a branch of the Women's National Indian Association. After completing the normally 3-year program at WMCP in 2 years, Susan La Flesche graduated in 1889 at the top of her class. She remained in Philadelphia to complete her internship. She returned to Nebraska to provide health care to the Omaha, mostly young persons at the government boarding school. There LaFlesche was responsible for some 1200 people.
In 1906 LaFlesche Picotte led a delegation to Washington, D.C., to lobby for the prohibition of alcohol on the Omaha Reservation.
In 1913, two years before her death, LaFlesche Picotte fulfilled a dream by founding a hospital on the reservation in Walthill, Nebraska.[4] She secured the services of the prominent architect William L. Steele and raised private funds from various sources. Hers was the first hospital on any American Indian reservation that was funded by private rather than federal government money.[5]
In 1894 Susan La Flesche married Henry Picotte, a Yankton Sioux. (Her sister Marguerite married his brother Charles and moved to the Yankton Sioux Reservation with him to teach.[3]) After their marriage, Susan and Henry Picotte moved to Bancroft, Nebraska, where she set up a private practice serving both European-American and Native American patients. Along with maintaining a busy practice, La Flesche Picotte raised their two sons. She nursed her husband through a terminal illness.
Susan LaFlesche Picotte died at age 50 from undetermined causes.