University of Virginia Library

Susette La Flesche

Susette La Flesche was born in 1854 on the Nebraska Omaha Reservation to Joseph La Flesche, an Omaha chief, and Mary Gale La Flesche. Educated at a reservation mission school and, later, Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies in New Jersey , she taught school on the reservation from 1877 to 1879, when she was thrust into the public spotlight.

La Flesche became nationally known as a speaker and writer in the aftermath of removal of the Poncas, a kindred tribe among whom the La Flesches had close relatives. When Ponca chief Standing Bear returned with a small band of family and followers from Indian Territory to the Niobrara River in Nebraska in 1879, she became part of a small group of advocates who helped publicize the Poncas' plight and to establish Standing Bear's right to remain in his homeland. With Standing Bear, her brother, Francis La Flesche, and Thomas Tibbles, a local newspaper man, she toured the East, speaking in the Poncas' behalf, using her translated Omaha name, "Bright Eyes," on stage. During the tour, she became friends with a number of reformers, including Helen Hunt Jackson and Alice C. Fletcher, and in 1880 testified before Congress on the Ponca Removal.

La Flesche returned to the West, where she later married Tibbles. Though she continued to write occasionally on Indian affairs, her interests soon turned to politics. Her husband was actively involved in Populist politics, and her writing turned in that direction, too. In 1887, she and Tibbles went to England and Scotland , where she was deeply impressed by British economic and social conditions. In the mid-1890s, she worked in Washington, D. C., as a correspondent to the Populist newspaper The American Nonconformist at Indianapolis. Upon her return to Nebraska, she continued to write for her husband's paper, The Lincoln Independent.

She spent the rest of her life at or near what had been the Omaha Reservation, which had been broken up into allotments in the early 1880s. She dropped into relative obscurity in her later years and died on May 26, 1903.