Picotte, Susan LaFlesche, 1865-1915

Susan LaFlesche Picotte was an Omaha physician and public health reformer. She is recognized as the first Native American to earn a medical degree.

She was born on June 17, 1865, on the Omaha Reservation (now located mostly in eastern Nebraska on the Missouri River, with some areas in western Iowa, U.S.). Her parents were Joseph La Flesche (Iron Eye), chief of the Omaha, and Mary Gale (One Woman), daughter of an Iowa woman and a white man. She had several older siblings, including author and activist Susette La Flesche Tibbles, as well as stepsiblings and half siblings, including ethnologist Francis La Flesche. She was educated at a local mission school, at a school in New Jersey, and at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. An excellent student, she decided to study medicine at the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania. Encouraged by ethnographer Alice Fletcher, she also applied to the Connecticut Indian Association, a branch of the Women's National Indian Association, for financial aid. The association paid her medical school expenses, and she earned her medical degree in 1889.

She practiced medicine on the Omaha Reservation and in the town of Bancroft, Nebraska. She also campaigned against alcohol and advocated for other health reforms, including sanitation efforts to reduce the spread of tuberculosis. In addition, she raised money to build a hospital on the reservation.

In 1894 she married Henry Picotte, a Yankton Sioux man. They had two sons, Caryl and Pierre. After her husband died in 1905, she worked to ensure that she and her children inherited her husband's land. She also corresponded with the Office of Indian Affairs to defend Omaha land interests in general. She died on September 18, 1915, in Walthill, a small town on the Omaha Reservation.