Francis La Flesche - Career

Career

In 1879, Judge Elmer Dundy of the US District Court made a landmark civil rights decision affirming the rights of American Indians as citizens under the Constitution. In Standing Bear v. Crook, Dundy had ruled that "an Indian is a person" under the Fourteenth Amendment. Susette "Bright Eyes" La Flesche had been involved as an interpreter for the chief Standing Bear and an expert witness on Indian issues. She invited Francis to accompany her with Standing Bear on a lecture tour of the eastern United States during 1879-1880. They took turns acting as interpreter for the chief.

In 1881 Susette and the journalist Thomas Tibbles accompanied Alice C. Fletcher, an anthropologist, on her unprecedented trip to live with and study Sioux women on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. Susette acted as her interpreter. Francis La Flesche also met and assisted Fletcher at this time, and they started a lifelong professional partnership.

Nearly 20 years older than he, Fletcher encouraged his education to become a professional anthropologist. He started working with her in Washington, DC about 1881. After the lecture tour on American Indian issues, in 1881, La Flesche went to Washington, DC, where he worked as an interpreter for the US Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.

La Flesche gained a position with the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution, with which Fletcher collaborated on her research. He served as a copyist, translator and interpreter. At the beginning, he helped classify Omaha and Osage artifacts, but he went on to do professional-level research with her, and acted as a translator and interpreter. He graduated from the National University Law School in 1892 and earned a master's degree there in 1893. In 1891 she informally adopted the 34-year-old La Flesche.

With their joint book and articles on the Omaha, La Flesche followed the anthropological approach of describing rituals and practices in detail. During his regular visits to the Omaha and Osage, and study of their rituals, La Flesche also made recordings (now invaluable) of their songs, as well as documenting them in writing. The young composer Charles Wakefield Cadman was interested in American Indian music and influenced by La Flesche's work. Cadman spent time on the Omaha reservation to learn many songs and how to use the traditional instruments.

La Flesche's recordings are held by the Library of Congress and some are available online. Contemporary Osage tribal members have compared the impact of hearing the recordings of their traditional rituals to that of Western scholars reading the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls.

In 1908 La Flesche proposed a collaboration with Cadman and Nelle Richmond Eberhart, to create an opera based on his Omaha stories. Eberhart had written lyrics for Cadman's Four American Indian Songs, as well as other of his songs. The team worked for four years on Da O Ma, which was changed to feature Sioux characters. Each approached the collaboration from a different point of view, and the opera was never published or performed.

Beginning in 1910, La Flesche gained a professional position as an anthropologist in the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology. This marked the second part of his career, as his focus changed with his independent research on the music and religion of the Osage, who are closely related to the Omaha.

"His primary objective was to explain Osage ideas, beliefs, and concepts. He wanted his readers to see the world of the Osages for what it was in reality-not the world of simple "children of nature" but a highly complex world reflecting an intellectual tradition as sophisticated and imaginative as that of any Old World people."

La Flesche worked on the professional staff of the Smithsonian from 1910 until 1929, and wrote and lectured extensively on his research. He wrote and published most of his works during this time.