A Warrior of the People

How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America's First Indian Doctor

Joe Starita

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781250085344
• eBook ISBN: 9781250085351
• Subtopic: Medicine Biographies

"An important and riveting story of a 19th-century feminist and change agent . . . put[s] the reader inside the very thoughts and emotions of La Flesche." — Chicago Tribune
On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche Picotte received her medical degree—becoming the first Native American doctor in US history. She earned her degree thirty-one years before women could vote and thirty-five years before Native Americans could become citizens in their own country.
By age twenty-six, this fragile but indomitable Omaha 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 a Native American woman who effectively 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.
Joe Starita's A Warrior of the People is the moving biography of Susan La Flesche Picotte's inspirational life and dedication to public health, and it will finally shine a light on her numerous accomplishments.
"A layered, nuanced portrait of this country's first [Native American] doctor . . . La Flesche's story is moving and illuminating, and Starita has done it justice." ? Minneapolis Star Tribune

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Notice
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• 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
• Also by Joe Starita
• About the Author
• Newsletter Sign-up
• Contents
• Copyright