THE RETURN OF THE EYE

By: Laila Schwin and Valery Warner

November 18, 2021

Susan La Flesche Picotte was the first Indigenous woman to earn and receive a medical degree. Throughout her life, she was known for encouraging public health, discouraging drinking within the Omaha tribe, and working to prevent and treat tuberculosis. She also advocated for the protection and allotment of land to the Omaha tribe and proper compensation for the land. 

Picotte was born on June 17, 1865, into the Omaha tribe, the daughter of the Chief-of-the tribe Joseph LaFlesche (Iron Eye). Her family came from a mix of different tribal backgrounds with her father being part Ponca and her mother being Omaha, Otoe, and Iowa. They lived on an Omaha reservation in eastern Nebraska. 

From a young age, Picotte was inspired to do medical work and to be a physician after witnessing another Indigenous person being refused life-saving medical attention from a white doctor. This ultimately led to the woman’s death, which spurred Picotte to become a doctor for her tribe.

Picotte started out attending a mission school on the Omaha reservation where she lived. The school was meant to teach the children how to assimilate into a white, European American society and to encourage them to give up their Indigenous languages, culture, and religions. She would later go on to study for two years at the Elizabeth Institute in Elizabeth, New Jersey. 

In 1882, she returned to the Omaha reservation and taught at a school there before leaving again to study at the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia. She remained there for two years from 1884 to 1886. She graduated as salutatorian and then went on to apply to medical school shortly after. 

She received admission at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania but was not able to afford tuition. She then campaigned to the Connecticut Indian Association to convince them to pay for her medical schooling. She proved that her mission was within the Victorian values that the group wanted to promote, so they paid for the majority of her schooling. 

She was valedictorian and graduated at the top of her class on March 14, 1889, following her three years of intense study.  In those years, she studied chemistry, anatomy, physiology, histology, pharmaceutical science, obstetrics, and general medicine.

Picotte began her medical practice in 1889, taking on her first job as a physician at the government boarding school. She was responsible for teaching the children about hygiene and staying healthy. While she was not obligated to take care of the members in her community, Picotte found herself caring for many members of the Omaha tribe as well as for the children of the school. She became widely-trusted for her medical knowledge.

Picotte also wanted to educate her community about preventive medicine and other public health issues like temperance. The Omaha reservation struggled with alcohol abuse. Picotte, as a reservation physician and a prominent member of the community, was well-aware of the damage that these practices caused. She went as far as supporting coercion and punishment to dissuade individuals from alcohol consumption within the Omaha community. Picotte continued to fight against alcohol for the rest of her life. 

The rest of Picotte’s medical career revolved around public health issues in the wider community, including school hygiene, food sanitation, and efforts to combat the spread of tuberculosis. In 1907, she served on the Thurston County health board along with serving as the chair of the state health committee of the Nebraska Federation of Women’s Clubs. All of this was in an effort to educate people about public health issues, believing that the key to fighting the disease was education.

For several years, she traveled around the reservation caring for patients until December of 1892 when she became ill and was forced to be bedridden for several weeks. Shortly after, she resigned in 1893 to take care of her dying mother. This led to a break in her medical career. During that break, in 1894, she married Henry Picotte, a member of the Sioux tribe. They had two sons together, Caryl and Pierre. After the birth of her children, Picotte returned to her medical practice. 

After a slew of legal battles following her husband’s death, Picotte began helping other members of her tribe to receive compensation for the land that they owned. She had struggled in selling her children’s land inheritance, so she taught others how to sell their land in the same way. She would go on to handle many inheritance issues within the community and campaign against the scams that businessmen would use to steal inheritance land without proper compensation to the members of the Omaha tribe. 

Picotte suffered from chronic illnesses throughout her life in various forms. Ultimately, her health conditions did not hold her back, although they did cause her to go deaf partway through her life. She eventually died on September 18, 1915, after suffering from bone cancer. Despite her death, her legacy has been greatly-honored throughout the years for her medical contributions. 

Picotte’s legacy will continue to live on along with her contributions to today’s medical field in terms of public health and disease education. Her achievement of being the first Indigenous woman to become a doctor was an inspiration to many within her tribe and will continue to be proof of what someone can do despite their circumstances.

{Information was retrieved from Changing the Face of Medicine, History.com, and Wikipedia.} 

By: Valery Warner and Laila Schwin

November 11, 2021

James (Jim) Francis Thorpe was the first Native American in the United States to win an Olympic gold medal. He was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, specifically a Sauk community, and lived on their native territory in what is now the state of Oklahoma. His given name at birth was Wa-Tho-Huk, which translates to “Bright Path”. Thorpe’s birth date is unknown as he never had a birth certificate, but it is widely believed that his birthday was either May 22 or 28, 1887. 

Thorpe spent nearly his whole life boasting an extensive and successful athletic career in various sports. These sports included both college and professional football, basketball, baseball, and track and field. His most notable success was his participation in the 1912 Summer Olympics, during which he won gold medals for both the pentathlon and decathlon. 

Thorpe started out his lifetime of athletic achievements at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where in 1907, he joined the school’s track team. He later went on to join the football team at the school where he excelled. Between all of this, he also played baseball, lacrosse, and participated in competitive ballroom dancing. After his time in the Olympics, Thorpe signed with the New York Giants (now known as the San Francisco Giants) and played baseball on the team from 1913-1919. In 1915, he also joined the Canton Bulldogs football team, helping them win three championships. Later on, he would play with six different NFL teams. Throughout this, he continued to be a part of various different professional baseball teams such as the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Braves (now the Atlanta Braves). 

Thorpe’s athletic career hit a low point in January of 1913 when he was retroactively stripped of his amateur status and both of his Olympic medals. There were strict rules around the Olympics at the time, dictating that all athletes had to hold an amateur status, not having played on any professional or paid sports teams prior to the Olympics. The removal of his medals was widely considered to be a potential act of discrimination against Thorpe as the AAU and IOC broke their own rules to strip Thorpe of his medals. A formal protest had to be made within 30 days of the closing ceremony of the Olympics to hold any value. However, this was still used against Thorpe over six months after that deadline had passed. 

Thorpe eventually had his Olympic medals reinstated on January 18, 1983. Given that Thorpe passed away nearly 30 years before this, the medals were reinstated to two of his children, but he was recognized as a co-medalist for both events despite being the sole winner. 

Throughout his life, Thorpe was married three times and had a total of eight children. He married his first wife Iva Miller in 1913. They had four children: James, Gale, Charlotte, and Frances. Marriage number one ended in divorce in 1925. In 1926, Thorpe married his second wife, Freeda Verona Kirkpatrick. Together, they had four sons: Phillip, William, Richard, and John. Marriage number two ended in divorce in 1941. In 1945, Thorpe married Patricia Gladys Askew who he was with until his death in 1953.

Upon Thorpe’s death on March 28, 1953, his wife sold his remains to a small town in Pennsylvania in exchange for having the town renamed after Thorpe. The town is now known as Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, where his body still currently remains. Through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, there have been several legal battles, brought on by Thorpe’s children, throughout the years to allow Thorpe’s body to be brought back to his tribe and land in Oklahoma, although none have been successful thus far. 

Overall, Jim Thorpe has left a lasting legacy for both himself and his tribe through his outstanding athletic career and legacy that many consider to be the best, all-around athlete of the 20th century or perhaps of all time. 

{Information for this article was retrieved from Biography.com and Wikipedia.}

By: Laila Schwin and Valery Warner

November 5, 2021

November 1, 2021, marked the beginning of National Native American Heritage Month in the United States. November has been nationally-recognized as Native American Heritage Month by presidential decree since 1990, although the history of the month can be traced farther back to individual states and the efforts of many Indigenous people. 

This month is set to honor the contributions of all Indigenous people within the United States who have made major impacts within our country and have been so often forgotten. Their achievements have been overshadowed by discrimination with a near exclusion of their way of life. This month is also meant to highlight the struggles of Indigenous people in the present day and the fights for their rights that are still ongoing in terms of land sovereignty, access to necessities, and the prevalence of violence against their people. 

The history of observance for Native American Heritage Month is relatively-recent on the national scale with prior observances being within individual states and usually confined to a single day. The origins of the observance can be traced back to around 1915 when the Congress of the American Indian Association designated the second Saturday of May to be American Indian Day.

The fight for recognition and observance for Indigenous people continued within that year with Red Fox James, a member of the Blackfoot tribe, riding on horseback throughout the country to get state approval for a day to honor Indigenous people. He presented the White House with 24 state endorsements that he had gained during his travels, but his efforts fell on deaf ears. Other efforts toward gaining observance for this month occurred afterward but only to recognize single days on a state-by-state basis, starting in 1916 with New York. 

It took until 1990 for national recognition to be gained when President George W. Bush designated November of that year to be National American Indian Heritage Month. Nearly every year since then, November has been recognized by the president as some form of Indigenous heritage month. 

While there are many Indigenous people, both past and present, to be honored within the history of this country, a few notable and less recognized ones are as follows:

• Sequoyah
• John Herrington 
• Ben Nighthorse Campbell
• Susan La Flesche Picotte
• Wilma Mankiller
• Allan Houser
• Jim Thorpe

This is in no way a complete list and cannot encompass all of the influential, Indigenous people throughout history, but it is a starting point for recognizing the contributions that these people have made. 

Perhaps, we can all take some time this month to support and recognize Indigenous tribes and communities and reflect on the original owners of the land that we now stand upon. 

Information for this article can be found at Native American Heritage Month and United States Senate.