Author Joe Starita, professor of journalism and mass communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will read from his latest book, “A Warrior of the People: How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America’s First Indian Doctor,” at 4:30 p.m., Nov. 30, in the South Rare Book Room, McGoogan Library.
The book, published last year, is a riveting story of a 19th-century feminist and change agent. Susan La Flesche Picotte, M.D., an Omaha Native American doctor and reformer in the late 19th century, is widely acknowledged as the first Native American to earn a medical degree. She campaigned for public health and for the formal, legal allotment of land to members of the Omaha tribe.
At the age of 26, she received her degree from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania on March 14, 1889 – 31 years before women could vote and 35 years before Indians could become citizens in their own country.
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 an Indian 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.
All royalties from this book are donated to a college scholarship fund Starita has established for Native American high school graduates.
The event will be streamed on the library’s Facebook page.