A warrior of the people : how Susan La Flesche overcame racial and gender inequality to become America's first Indian doctor

A warrior of the people How Susan La Flesche overcame racial and gender inequality to become America's first Indian doctor

Joe Starita

Book - 2016

" On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche received her medical degree becoming the first Native American doctor in U.S. history. She earned her degree thirty-one years before women could vote and thirty-five years before Indians could become citizens in their own country. By age twenty-six, this fragile but indomitable Indian woman became the doctor to her tribe. Overnight, she acquired 1,244 patients scattered across 1,350 square miles of rolling countryside with few roads. Her patients often were desperately poor and desperately sick tuberculosis, small pox, measles, influenza families scattered miles apart, whose last hope was a young woman who spoke their language and knew their customs. This is the story of an Indian woman who effecti...vely became the chief of an entrenched patriarchal tribe, the story of a woman who crashed through thick walls of ethnic, racial and gender prejudice, then spent the rest of her life using a unique bicultural identity to improve the lot of her people physically, emotionally, politically, and spiritually. A Warrior of the People is the moving biography of Susan La Flesche's inspirational life, and it will finally shine a light on her numerous accomplishments. The author will donate all royalties from this book to a college scholarship fund he has established for Native American high school graduates. "--

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Location Call Number   Status
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Subjects
Picotte, Susan LaFlesche, > 1865-1915.
Indigenous women physicians > Nebraska > Biography.
Omaha women > Biography.
Biographies.
Genres
Biographies
Published
New York : St. Martin's Press 2016.
Language
English
Main Author
Joe Starita (author)
Physical Description
xiv, 304 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-285) and index.
ISBN
9781250085344
  • Acknowledgments
  • Author's Note
  • 1. The Arrow
  • 2. The Village of the Make-Believe White Men
  • 3. An Indian Schoolgirl and the Harvard Scholar
  • 4. Can Black Children and Red Children Become White Citizens?
  • 5. The Sisterhood of Second Mothers
  • 6. Dr. Sue
  • 7. Going Home
  • 8. The Light in the Window
  • 9. A Warrior of the People
  • 10. A Beginning and an End
  • Bibliography
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

This well-researched biographical portrait of Omaha tribeswoman Dr. Susan La Flesche (1865-1915) is constructed within a network of social, cultural, political, religious, ethnological, professional, and regional histories. Investigative reporter and journalism professor Starita (Univ. of Nebraska), author of two previous books about Plains Indians, attends closely to the demands of red and white womanhood that defined La Flesche's personal odyssey. Fueled by her focused determination, inspired by proselytizing missionary educators, and imbued with a family ethos of "adapt or perish," La Flesche harnessed the support of sympathetic East Coast women activists and academics, graduating in 1889 as valedictorian from the rigorous Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. America's first Indian woman physician, La Flesche worked at the government's Omaha agency and in scattered reservation dwellings, launching an insistent public health and hygiene crusade while battling tuberculosis, alcoholism, other diseases of poverty, malnutrition, despair, and dislocation. A woman of deep loyalties, she nurtured her large extended family and doctored local whites. In her last years, despite recurrent debilitating illness and stymied by internal tribal tensions and federal duplicity, she founded a reservation hospital and became a tribal political activist and spokeswoman around land-rights issues. Summing Up: Recommended. General and undergraduate collections; practitioners. --Sandra W. Moss, independent scholar

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Starita opens his thoroughly researched biography of the first Native American doctor in January 1892, as La Flesche began living her dream of caring for 1,244 members of her Omaha band living on 1,350 square miles of northeast Nebraska. Raised by a father who stressed education as the key value to adopt from the white man, La Flesche and her sister attended a private girls' school in New Jersey; then, in 1884, they enrolled in Hampton School in Virginia, where one-sixth of the school population were Native Americans from 19 different tribes. With the aid of a scholarship, La Flesche enrolled in the Medical College of Pennsylvania, and in 1889, she graduated first in her class. But as Starita points out, it would be 31 years before she could vote and 35 years before she and other Native Americans could become U.S. citizens. Besides serving as the sole doctor for her tribe, La Flesche undertook religious and educational projects. Starita's biography of this remarkable woman is both heartening and enlightening.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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