Early Life and Education
Francis La Flesche was born in 1857 on the Omaha Reservation, the first child of his father Joseph LaFlesche's second wife Ta-in-ne, and half-brother to his father's first five children. Their mother was Mary Gale, daughter of an American surgeon and his Iowa wife. After Mary's death, the widower Joseph (also known as Iron Eye) married Ta-in-ne, an Omaha woman. Francis attended the Presbyterian Mission School at Bellevue, Nebraska. Later he attended college and law school in Washington, DC.
By 1853, Iron Eye was a chief of the Omaha; he helped negotiate the 1854 treaty by which the tribe sold most of their land in Nebraska. He led the tribe as a head chief soon after their removal to a reservation and in the major transition to more sedentary lives. Joseph (Iron Eye) was Métis, of French and Ponca descent, and grew up mostly with the Omaha people. Working first as a fur trader, as an adult he had been adopted as a son by the chief Big Elk, who designated Iron Eyes as his successor.
Joseph emphasized education for all his children; several went to schools and colleges in the East. They were encouraged to contribute to their people. Francis' half-siblings became accomplished adults: Susette LaFlesche was an activist and nationally known speaker on issues of Indian rights and reform; Rosalie LaFlesche Farley was an activist and managed Omaha tribal financial affairs; and Susan La Flesche was the first Native American woman to become a western-style doctor; she treated the Omaha for years.
Read more about this topic: Francis La Flesche
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“So that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition, as a state of warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man militant upon earth,—both depending alike, not half so much upon the degrees of his WIT—as his RESISTANCE.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“An acquaintance with the muses, in the education of youth, contributes not a little to soften the manners. It gives a delicate turn to the imagination, and a kind of polish to the mind in severer studies.”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)