SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN WOMEN'S HISTORY MUSEUM
How Susan and Rosalie La Flesche Made Omaha History
Better known as becoming the first Native American woman to receive a medical degree, Susan La Flesche, along with her sister Rosalie, made significant contributions to the anthropological study and preservation of Omaha tribal history.
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Throughout the fall of 1905, a lantern illuminated the front window of a house in Bancroft, Nebraska. Its warm glow signaled that Susan La Flesche Picotte was at home. Inside, Susan treated her fellow Omaha tribal members for illnesses ranging from the flu to tuberculosis. As a trained doctor, she prescribed medicine or nourishing meals for her patients. But the care she provided wasn’t always medical.
“They need help of all kinds from anyone who can give it,” Susan once reflected (1). Tribal members sought her advice on politics and business – and particularly on how they could retain claims to their land as settlers pushed into the territories surrounding the Omaha reservation.
After a long day of offering guidance, medical and otherwise, Susan spent time with her mother Mary Gale, who lived with her in Bancroft. Mary Gale La Flesche was around eighty-two years old at the time, and the Omaha community knew her as Hinnaugsnew, or Old Woman (2).
As Mary Gale grew up, she saw the surge of farmers and businessmen who settled on Omaha ancestral land. She saw her Omaha community uprooted by an 1854 treaty when the tribe ceded its homelands east of the Missouri River. Though the U.S. government did not deliver the payment or protection the treaty promised, Mary Gale and the rest of the tribe trekked northward to a reservation near Decatur, Nebraska, where the tribe is still located today.
Once the tribe reached the reservation, missionaries redoubled assimilation efforts by attempting to compel tribal members to adopt the social practices of white society. All of Mary Gale’s four daughters, Susan, Rosalie, Marguerite, and Susette, attended Christian schools that punished Indigenous students for practicing traditional tribal customs. Mary Gale’s husband Joseph encouraged his children to learn English and white social norms at school (3). He hoped their education would enable them to become leaders, adept at managing interactions with settlers and capable of defending Omaha land in the future. However, he did not represent the feelings of every tribal member. Continuous debates about how to approach assimilation shaped U.S. policy and life on the Omaha reservation.
Throughout Mary Gale’s lifetime, Omaha peoples fought to retain not only their land, but their traditions. By telling stories, Mary Gale passed on her own life story and her knowledge of Omaha tradition to future generations.
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How Stories and Silence Shaped Historical Records
In October 1905, Susan recorded her mother’s account of an artistic tradition and translated it from Omaha to English. Susan described the detailed the process of quillwork from the moment a woman plucked the quill off a porcupine to its embroidery in a moccasin.
Since 1905, the La Flesche sisters have gained notoriety for their roles as leaders in the Omaha tribe – and Susan, especially, for her status as the first Indigenous woman in the U.S. to receive a medical degree. Today, her translation is stored at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives (NAA). Records at the NAA reveal an underrepresented dimension of the La Flesche sisters’ work: their contributions to anthropology.
After Susan wrote down her translation, she sent it to her half-brother, Francis La Flesche. As an employee of the Smithsonian Institution, Francis had spent decades collaborating with anthropologist Alice Fletcher to write a book. Published in 1911, The Omaha Tribe would become the definitive source that scholars used throughout the 1900s to learn about Omaha history and culture. The anthropologists included many of Mary Gale’s stories in The Omaha Tribe. Some passages are nearly identical to Susan’s translation.
Throughout the drafting process, Alice Fletcher and Francis La Flesche sought Mary Gale’s community-based expertise on Omaha traditions. Because Mary Gale preferred to speak Omaha, the anthropologists relied on two of her daughters, Susan and Rosalie, to translate their mother’s knowledge.
Rosalie was well-known in the Omaha community as a manager of the tribe’s business affairs. As the anthropologists worked on their book, they sent her questions to ask her mother. Sometimes Mary Gale’s answers were brief; other times she would recount rituals step by step. By deciding which details to offer or withhold, she protected the Omaha tribe’s private rituals and controlled the knowledge that the anthropologists could access.
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Recognizing the Contributions of Tribal Collaborators
Throughout the 1800 and 1900s, researchers gathered information from Native American nations across the United States and published what they learned, with or often without tribal consent. Most anthropologists thought that Native Americans rested on the brink of extinction. They scrambled to preserve records of tribal culture, believing that these materials would soon disappear alongside tribal members themselves. This assumption impacted their research. Anthropologists often produced misrepresentative studies that portrayed Indigenous peoples themselves as relics of the past and overlooked how tribal nations pushed to protect their futures.
After moving to their reservation, the Omaha people experienced a period of “intense ethnographic examination” (4). Alice Fletcher and Francis La Flesche were key contributors to research on the tribe. Both worked on the margins of anthropology, a field dominated by non-Native men. Critical of the existing studies by white researchers, Fletcher and Francis relied exclusively on stories from Omaha people. They aimed “to make so far as possible the Omaha his own interpreter.”
Throughout the 1900s, more researchers saw the value of relying on Indigenous knowledge to guide anthropological study, but when The Omaha Tribe was published, Fletcher and Francis’s peers dismissed their work. “The Indian as his own interpreter is not an unbiased witness,” one critic scoffed. Anthropologists tended to think of their research in terms of a rigid binary: Indigenous peoples provided information, and white researchers analyzed it. Because of this binary, tribal members who collaborated with anthropologists struggled to gain recognition for their work, if they wanted it.
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Before the publication of The Omaha Tribe, Francis La Flesche had spent decades contributing to Alice Fletcher’s interpretations of Omaha life. He connected her with tribal members, translated their knowledge, and contributed his own research to her published works. But throughout these years, Fletcher and her colleagues did not consider him an anthropologist. His peers did not credit him for this work until the Smithsonian officially hired him as an anthropologist in 1910.
Going on the Record of Omaha History
At the same time as many anthropologists relied on Indigenous women's knowledge, scholarship often displaced them—shuffling them off to footnotes, or off the page entirely. Mary Gale’s influence would not be clear from only reading The Omaha Tribe, as her name does not appear in the text. Understanding her contribution requires turning to archival sources at the NAA. However, these records are limited, and they likely represent only a fraction of the stories Mary Gale told. The questions that the anthropologists asked, in part, determined the written records that remain from her life.
These records do, however, reveal how the La Flesche sisters and their mother interpreted Omaha history. As Mary Gale explained her understanding of tribal traditions, her analysis shaped the information that the anthropologists included in their book. When her daughters translated their mother’s stories, they weighed how to convey the meanings of Omaha history in English.
Alice Fletcher and Francis La Flesche clearly benefited when the women shared their knowledge. But what did Mary Gale and her daughters stand to gain? Their motivations were likely complex. By sharing her mother’s stories, Susan might have strengthened her relationship with Alice Fletcher. As an influential reformer based in Washington, DC, Fletcher swayed legislators’ policies on Omaha land distribution.
In the years before the publication of The Omaha Tribe, Susan focused her attention on two central concerns: providing medical care to the Omaha tribe and managing their land claims. She helped tribal members navigate the fallout of allotment policies that made it difficult for them to retain their land or access profits from lands they leased.
Susan found power in writing. In her own publications, she narrated the challenges that faced the Omaha tribe in the past and present. Addressing audiences of reformers and policymakers, Susan authored a vision of what her community had been and what they could become. It’s possible that Susan hoped to extend this power to her mother. By writing down her mother’s knowledge, she offered Mary Gale a forum to shape the narrative of tribal life.
As Mary Gale shared stories with her daughters, she made Omaha history.
Notes
- Susan La Flesche Picotte, “My Work as a Physician Among My People,” Southern Workman, August, 1892, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hngblm.
- Sources vary on Mary Gale’s age. Benson Tong includes the birth year 1822 in his biography of Susan La Flesche Picotte. Benson Tong, Susan La Flesche Picotte, M.D.: Omaha Indian Leader and Reformer (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 23.
- Joseph La Flesche, served as chief of the Elk clan within the Omaha tribe from 1855 to 1866. He remained a political leader until his death in 1888, championing the “Young Men’s Party” also known as the progressives. The progressive party, opposed by the traditionalist party, promoted balancing some elements of assimilation to white American culture with tribal tradition, arguing that this strategy offered the most effective means of protecting Omaha sovereignty. Throughout his lifetime, Joseph La Flesche confronted the limitations of Americanization, which did not ultimately prevent settlement on Omaha land.
- Mark Awakuni-Swetland,The Omaha Language and the Omaha Way: An Introduction to Omaha Language and Culture (Lincoln: Nebraska, 2018), 1.
Further Reading
Valerie Sherer Mathes. “Susan La Flesche Picotte: Nebraska’s Indian Physician, 1865-1915.” Nebraska History 63, no. 4 (1982): 502-530.
Annette Angela Portillo. Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories: Native American Women's Autobiography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017.
Joanna Cohan Scherer. "Partnership with a Native American Family: Alice C. Fletcher, Francis La Flesche, and The Omaha Tribe (1911)." In Ethnographers Before Malinowski: Lost Chapters in the History of Anthropology. Rosa, Frederico Delgado and Vermeulen, Han F., editors. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022.