Dr. Susan Laflesche
Tonight, while I waited to check into a motel outside of Lincoln, the man waiting in front of me was listening to a beautiful Native American ceremony on his radio. Suddenly he ducked to the front of the motel, made a phone call, then returned to the line.
He resumed his place (without asking). I said, “that was beautiful chanting. What was it?”
He said, “That’s what we call the half-breed song. Like you.”
I was so amused that I didn’t flinch.
He continued. “The Omaha Nation’s dedicating a statue of my great-grandmother, Susan Laflesch, tomorrow morning at the capitol rotunda. She was a half-breed like you.”
Did you ever feel that a person was egging you on?
But I was terribly interested in what would come next. Also, I was glad that Dr. Laflesch was being honored at the Nebraska State Capitol and I’d gladly overlook her great- grandson’s peculiar outlook.
The term ‘half-breed’ originated among American Indians when land was being divided by the federal government for various tribal uses. Tribes in one region demanded a reservation set apart for the ‘half-breeds’ but the reservations themselves were to be open only to ‘pure-bloods’ or ‘bloods.’
I got checked in and went to my room, leaving the famous Dr. Susan Laflesch’s great- grandson making preparations in his. Through the open door, I noticed a woman dividing up food as I walked by.
I started thinking catty thoughts, wondering if he considered all Native American women like the braves of old supposedly did: women were property, fit for skinning hides and gathering berries, but nothing much beyond that. The braves of old, though, supplied the tribe, including single females, with fresh meat.
The warriors also protected the women of their band. All women would be safe from raids and attacks, when women could be stolen and enslaved. (Stealing and enslaving, then selling, women from other tribes was common, especially among the Plains Indians. European American -- non-tribal American -- slave dealers held auctions at local and larger markets, selling captive women as slaves.
Among the tribes, women were ranked, like every other member, with the young married women ranking ‘most,’ and the older, widowed or unwed women ranking ‘least.’ The women whom they’d captured, even those taken as captive wives, had no rank. I admitted to myself that the warriors of old might have felt insulted when any woman spoke to them as their equal.
Of course, the entire American Indian social structure was disrupted, first by the reservation system, then the attempts at ‘allotment’ (written into law by the Dawes Act). Small parcels of land were given to individual Indians for their personal use only.
Farming was encouraged, though tribal land was not uniformly suitable for growing crops and tools, like plows, and seed, were hard to come by, even by homesteaders and other settlers. For example, the ancient inhabitants of the great southwestern deserts, like the Pueblo and Hopi Indians, lived where farming was impossible for anyone.
In other regions, Indians were able to grow potatoes with success. (Potatoes were considered by settlers and Indians alike as filled with nutrients, and were valued for keeping away scurvy.) Other individual Indians worked hard and had good luck against the clouds of insects, the droughts, and the harsh weather that sent many homesteaders away.
Some Indians were discouraged by life on reservations, then economically stopped by the decision that individuals must be farmers. They’d grown up to expect nothing different from generations of their kinsmen. From boyhood they’d learned skills for hunting large mammals like buffalo, which was – when you consider it – dangerous and life-threatening. They learned how to ride their ponies and swing in front of charging buffaloes, or movements for confusing large animals while filling them with arrows or spears while riding.
As children, they’d learned how to make bows, string them from the same materials as their ancestors, to carve arrows from rocks; certain types of arrows would kill small game; they made others suitable for hunting buffalo or other large game.
The young warriors used certain wood for making the bows, and they learned to substitute other wood when their choice became too scarce. (I do not offer these facts as excuses, but as tidbits of Western history. I am unfit to judge anyone.)
The Dawes Act sought to enhance the federal government’s new project. Allotments of small tracts of land to individual Indians were to replace the reservations, which they’d given to tribes. This was to reduce/remove tribal life and to create individual farmers. It was written up as a charitable, humanitarian effort. Hundreds of hard-working organizations endorsed this effort to help the native population.
The land that wasn’t used as allotments to Indians was sold to people settling the land; the federal government received the profits. The effort toward creating individual allotments of land for Indians was discarded as a failure in the 20th century.
Then I remembered how truly great Dr. Susan Laflesch was. As I’ve mentioned before in Sweethearts of the West, Susan Laflesch was the first Native American medical doctor. She went to the University of Pennsylvania medical college during the post-civil war era.
Doctors in America could – and did -- practice openly with no medical training. Doctors abounded, opening clinics with no medical training whatsoever and no licensing. The University of Pennsylvania had one of the few accredited medical colleges.
Dr. Laflesch worked not only as a licensed medical doctor for the Omaha tribe. She worked constantly for simple people. For example, normal Indians who needed complicated paperwork filled out and sent through the government maze. Like others in her family, she felt that she should take advantage of her many blessings – like being educated -- for helping others. Her medical practice consisted of high payment to no payment.
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It’s three o’clock in the morning. I’m glad that my experience this evening led to my sharing these ideas with you. I’ll snap some photos of Dr. Laflesch’s statue and post them next month. She was a strong-willed, admirable and very pretty woman.
I suspect that she’d been called a half-breed, too. Only twice in my life have I been called a ‘half-breed.’ The first time, I was teaching at a university in Thailand. One of the Thai teachers said innocently, ‘Oh! You must be a half-breed!” I don’t remember what I said, but certainly nothing to hurt her. She spoke very little English, and I was sure she hadn’t meant this as a slur.
My encounter this evening? The Oto tribe has never been one of the flashier, publicized tribes. The Oto is much smaller than the Omaha tribe, and has been since diseases and famines swept across the nation. The Otoes resisted attempts to unite with other tribes, but finally joined with the Missouria. It had also been a larger, more powerful tribe, but numbers had simply decreased over the years.
My grandmother married an Irish merchant in Oklahoma. Her son, my father, was a handsome wild Oto. Like the strong hero in my last book – Thunder Hawk in Rescuing the Indian’s Bride -- it’s difficult to imagine a person ever calling him anything insulting.
American Indian women, though, were slandered to their faces by being sneered at as ‘squaws.’ Like most racist slurs, the word stood for many other things. Why should I feel slandered at being called ‘half-breed’ when I share the title with the great Dr. Susan Laflesch!
I hope you’ve forgiven me for my very late Sweethearts of the West blog post. I’d counted on internet in airports to send you my latest article; but as I learned, since the pandemic, airports simply don’t have that service. I spent hours waiting in airports, but without internet (or food or water).
I’m finally in my new apartment, but there's no phone or internet, so sending you this from the city library! I enjoyed looking at Dr. LaFlesch Picotte's statue. It's very popular, with many people stopping and looking carefully. Gardeners have planted sturdy Plains flowers and greenery as part of the arrangement.
Here's an article you might enjoy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_La_Flesche_Picotte
I’ll be on time in the future! Thank you again for your loyalty to me and to our great blog, Sweethearts of the West.
That's an interesting post. Imagine how difficult it must have been for Susan Laflesche to gain admission to medical school and how hard it must have been for males to accept her as a doctor. She must have been a very strong and determined woman.
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