In honor of Women's History Month, we are profiling some of the extraordinary women who conceived and shaped our current community development, social justice and anti-racist movements. Their stories may not be widely known, but their intelligence, insight, passion and unrelenting efforts blazed the path we walk today.
Susan La Flesche Picotte was born in 1865 in a tipi made of hide, and died in 1915 in the sun-splashed Victorian house she’d built on a town lot in Walthill, NE. Though it lasted only 50 years, her life was an epic, as sweeping and rolling as the Nebraska Plains that were her home.
The youngest of four daughters born to parents of mixed ancestry, she always identified as an Omaha Indian. Her father, Joseph La Flesche, was an Omaha chief who, observing the inexorable flood of white people coming from the East, urged the Omaha to learn their ways as a means of survival. He pressed on his children the need to straddle worlds and accomplish greatly in all of them.
For Susan this meant journeying East by train to New Jersey at 14 to attend the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies. In 1884 she went on to Virginia’s Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, where she and other Indians were educated alongside Black students whose parents, in some cases, had been enslaved (Booker T. Washington attended a decade earlier). Finally Picotte studied medicine for three years in bustling Philadelphia, graduating in 1889 as valedictorian from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.
Her cultural understandings, by this point, recalled words of the poet Walt Whitman, who was roughly her contemporary: “I contain multitudes.” She knew the art and literature of European Americans and the stories, customs, and dances of her Native people. She spoke English, French, Omaha, and Otoe. She could handle horses and rake hay with the best of them—“men’s work”—and also cook, launder, and sew to exacting standards.
She was the country’s first American Indian physician—a woman doctor, no less, when these were exceedingly rare and encountered disrespect from a white male establishment that deemed women constitutionally unfit for the job.
But the heart of Susan La Flesche Picotte’s life accomplishment was this: She took all her talents and abilities back to the reservation in northeast Nebraska and for the next 16 years ministered, with cultural competence and the tenderest care, to some 1,200 Omaha spread out across 1,350 square miles.
She remembered well how, as a child, she’d sat vigil with an old woman as she struggled through a painful death, unattended by the white physician who’d been summoned in vain. “It was only an Indian,” Picotte ruefully observed, “and it did not matter.” To her, these lives, mattered deeply. First, as a government doctor connected to the Omaha Agency Indian School and later in private practice, Picotte delivered babies and held the hands of the dying. She treated tuberculosis, flu, and cholera, assorted infections and fevers and injuries.
She also addressed what today are known as social determinants of health. Often Picotte would procure and prepare nutritious meals for a patient whose hunger was a contributing cause of illness. She advised on business matters and home economics, needing no instruction in the connection between family wealth and wellness. She waged public health campaigns for hygiene practices to stem contagion, and tirelessly (but mostly unavailingly) battled against the sale of the alcohol she saw damaging the health and safety of individuals and community.
It was grueling work. To reach her patients, Picotte often had to drive her horse-drawn buggy many miles through the prairie’s blistering heat or driving snow. “When I realize all the work that God has given me to do, it almost takes my breath away to think how little justice I can do it,” she wrote Sara Kinney, head of the Connecticut Indian Association, which had supported her medical education. “But it is a comfort to turn and do the next thing to relieve some poor soul’s trouble.”
In 1894, she married Henry Picotte, a Yankton Sioux who had performed in the era’s Wild West shows. He was a loving and beloved partner who often cared for their two small boys while she was off on her arduous rounds. But weakened by tuberculosis and drink, he died young in 1905.
In her last years, while suffering from what would be diagnosed as a terminal bone cancer that caused debilitating head, neck, and back pain, Susan La Flesche Picotte worked as a Presbyterian missionary, pastoring the Omaha in their own language. In 1913, she fulfilled a longtime aspiration: a hospital opened on the reservation, the first on Indian land built with privately raised funds, fitted out with two general wards, five private wards, a maternity ward, operating room, kitchen, reception room, and two bathrooms. It served all local people; in 1915, the year of Picotte’s death, the community hospital admitted 448 patients, 126 of them Indians.
Today, a campaign is underway to complete restoration of the building as a community center and wellness clinic for the Omaha Tribe and people of greater Walthill, NE. A groundbreaking took place September 2020.
A century after her death, Picotte’s epic story is being told and celebrated, notably in a 2016 book by Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and Nebraska native Joe Starita, A Warrior of the People: How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America’s First Indian Doctor. The book, like its subject, travels many places and meets a diverse set of characters, but begins and ends on the wide earth of the Great Plains, where Picotte made her unprecedented and lasting mark.