biography
| name: |
Tibbles, Susette La Flesche
|
| |
originally Inshtatheumba (‘Bright Eyes’)
|
| sex:
| female
|
| lived:
| (1854–1903)
|
| biography:
| Omaha reformer, writer, and illustrator, born in present-day Nebraska, USA, the sister of Susan La Flesche Picotte. Both her grandfathers were Caucasians, both grandmothers were Native Americans; her father was an Omaha chief, her mother was more involved with the world of whites. After studying at a girls school in Elizabeth, NJ, she returned to the reservation and became a teacher in a government school. In an infamous affair in its day, the Ponca Indians were forcibly removed from their lands in 1877, and in the national protest that followed she travelled to the East as translator for the Ponca chief, Standing Bear, on a lecture tour organized by an Omaha newspaperman, Thomas Tibbles. (She co-wrote with Standing Bear, Ploughed Under: The Story of an Indian Chief, 1882.) She and Tibbles were married (1881), and their crusade led to the passage of the Dawes Act of 1887. The couple also travelled to England to present the case for Native Americans' claims to their land. Thereafter she lectured occasionally, wrote various articles, and gained a minor reputation as an artist-illustrator. She and her husband lived most of their years in Nebraska, where she died on her native land. |
|
|
