La Flesche, Francis, 1857-1932

Francis La Flesche was born on the Omaha Reservation in Nebraska and was of Omaha, Ponca, and French descent. He was the son of Omaha chief Joseph LaFlesche (also known as Iron Eye) and his second wife Ta-in-ne (Omaha). He attended the Presbyterian Mission School on the Omaha Reservation from 1865 until 1869. He later earned undergraduate and master's degrees at the George Washington University Law School in Washington, DC. In the late 1870s, he acted as interpreter and informant for ethnologist James Owen Dorsey. He also interpreted for Alice C. Fletcher, who studied the Omaha tribe and with whom he collaborated to collect Omaha and Sioux artifacts for Harvard’s Peabody Museum. He was an ethnologist for the Bureau of American Ethnology from 1910 until his retirement in 1929. In 1911 he joined the Society of American Indians and published The Omaha Tribe, which he co-wrote with Fletcher. Beginning in 1908, he collaborated with American composer Charles Wakefield Cadman to develop an opera, Da O Ma (1912), based on his stories of Omaha life, but it was never produced. La Flesche also studied the Osages, and published some of his findings in The Osage Tribe in the Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology between 1922 and 1930. He made valuable original recordings of Osage traditional songs and chants. In addition to his ethnographic works, he published The Middle Five, an autobiographical account of his experiences at the Presbyterian Mission School in 1900, as well as essays and short stories in boarding school newspapers.