Jean Yang:
November is Native American Heritage Month, a celebration of the traditions and languages of America’s indigenous communities. Tonight, the story of the first Native American to earn a medical degree. A pioneer at a time when she had few rights, whether as a woman or as an American Indian as a child.
On the 19th-century American frontier, Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte pioneered health care for Native Americans as they were relocated to Indian reservations, sometimes after brutal wars with the United States. soldiers.
She was the youngest daughter of Mary Gail and Joseph La Flesche, of French and Indian descent and the last recognized chief of Omaha.
She was born in 1865, more than a decade after her father signed a treaty with the government giving up much of the Omaha ancestral home. They had been transferred to a reservation in northeastern Nebraska.
As white settlers pushed the frontier further and further west, his father saw assimilation as the key to survival. Many in Omaha rejected the idea, but her children took it to heart. Embracing her heritage, Susan ventured into the world of white America, confronting prejudice along the way.
She graduated second in the class of 1886 at what is now Hampton University, a historically black school in Virginia. And at a time when women were considered unfit to become doctors, she enrolled at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, the nation’s first medical school for women.
She completed the three-year program in just two years and graduated at the top of her class. She was now a doctor, but as a woman she could not vote, and as a Native American, U.S. law did not consider her a citizen.
Then aged 24, she chose to return to the Omaha reservation, becoming the sole doctor for 1,200 people across more than 400 square miles, including the Winnebago reservation. With formal medical training, she pushed for better food hygiene and sanitation, including window screens to keep out disease-carrying flies.
She addressed the health disparities faced by Native Americans, including widespread disease, suicide, mental illness, and alcohol abuse. She led temperance campaigns persuading the government to ban the sale of alcohol on reservations.
Her own husband, Henry, a Sioux from Yankton, died in 1905 of tuberculosis, aggravated by alcoholism. In 1913, even as her health declined, she opened the first private hospital on a native reserve.
The facility in Walt Hill, Nebraska, cared for everyone in need, not just those on the reservation. The hospital closed in 1940 and the building is now a National Historic Landmark. More than a century after his death in 1915 at the age of 50, the modern fruits of his efforts can be seen in reservation health facilities.
But it’s also not hard to imagine him among those who complain about the U.S. Indian Health Service’s understaffing and funding. His determination is reflected in a bronze sculpture located in downtown Lincoln, Nebraska. And in his words written next to it, I will always fight well and hard, even if I have to fight alone.
