Francis La Flesche - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Francis La Flesche was the first professional Native American ethnologist; he worked with the Smithsonian Institution

Smithsonian Institution

The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...

, specializing first in his own Omaha

Omaha

Omaha may refer to:*Omaha , a Native American tribe that currently resides in the northeastern part of the U.S. state of Nebraska-Places:United States* Omaha, Nebraska* Omaha, Arkansas* Omaha, Georgia* Omaha, Illinois* Omaha, Texas...

culture, followed by that of the Osage

Osage Nation

The Osage Nation is a Native American Siouan-language tribe in the United States that originated in the Ohio River valley in present-day Kentucky. After years of war with invading Iroquois, the Osage migrated west of the Mississippi River to their historic lands in present-day Arkansas, Missouri,...

. Working closely as a translator and researcher with the anthropologist Alice C. Fletcher, La Flesche wrote several articles and a book on the Omaha, plus more numerous works on the Osage. He made valuable original recordings of their traditional songs and chants. Beginning in 1908 he collaborated with the composer Charles Wakefield Cadman

Charles Wakefield Cadman

Charles Wakefield Cadman was an American composer.Cadman’s musical education, unlike that of most of his American contemporaries, was completely American. Born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, he began piano lessons at 13...

to develop an opera, Da O Ma (1912), based on his stories of Omaha life. A collection of his stories was published in 1998.

Of Omaha, Ponca

Ponca

The Ponca are a Native American people of the Dhegihan branch of the Siouan-language group. There are two federally recognized Ponca tribes: the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska and the Ponca Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma...

, and French

French people

The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...

descent, La Flesche was the son of the Omaha chief Joseph LaFlesche

Joseph LaFlesche

Joseph LaFlesche, also known as E-sta-mah-za or Iron Eye , was the last recognized head chief of the Omaha tribe of Native Americans who was selected according to the traditional tribal rituals. The head chief Big Elk had adopted LaFlesche into the Omaha and designated him as his successor....

(also known as Iron Eye) and his second wife Ta-in-ne. He grew up on the Omaha Reservation

Omaha Reservation

The Omaha Reservation of the Omaha tribe is located mostly in Thurston County, Nebraska, with sections in neighboring Cuming County and Burt County, in addition to Monona County in Iowa. The tribal seat of government is in Macy, with the towns of Rosalie, Thurston, Pender and Walthill located in...

at a time of major transition for the tribe. Before the establishment of anthropology programs, he earned undergraduate and master's degrees at the National University Law School in Washington, DC. He made his professional life among European Americans.

Early life and education

Francis La Flesche was born in 1857 on the Omaha Reservation, the first child of his father Joseph LaFlesche

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

Iowa

Iowa is a state located in the Midwestern United States, an area often referred to as the "American Heartland". It derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many American Indian tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. Iowa was a part of the French colony of New...

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

Bellevue, Nebraska

Bellevue is a city in Sarpy County, Nebraska, United States. The population was 50,137 at the 2010 census. Eight miles south of Omaha, Bellevue is part of the Omaha-Council Bluffs metropolitan area. Originally settled in the 1830s, It was the first state capitol. Bellevue was incorporated in...

. 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

Métis

A Métis is a person born to parents who belong to different groups defined by visible physical differences, regarded as racial, or the descendant of such persons. The term is of French origin, and also is a cognate of mestizo in Spanish, mestiço in Portuguese, and mestee in English...

, of French and Ponca

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

Big Elk

Big Elk, also known as Ontopanga , was a principal chief of the Omaha tribe for many years on the upper Missouri River. He is notable for his oration delivered at the funeral of Black Buffalo in 1813....

, 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

Susette LaFlesche Tibbles

Susette LaFlesche Tibbles, also called Insta Theamba , was a well-known Native American writer, lecturer, interpreter and artist of the Omaha tribe in Nebraska. Susette LaFlesche was a progressive who was a spokesperson for Native American rights. She was of Ponca, Iowa, French and Anglo-American...

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

Susan La Flesche Picotte

Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte was the first American Indian woman to become a physician in the United States. She grew up with her parents on the Omaha Reservation. She went to college at the Hampton Institute and got her medical degree at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia...

was the first Native American woman to become a western-style doctor; she treated the Omaha for years.

Career

In 1879, Judge Elmer Dundy

Elmer Scipio Dundy

Elmer Scipio Dundy was a Nebraskan judge best known as the namesake of Dundy County, Nebraska. He was born in Trumbull County, Ohio on March 5, 1830. He passed the bar and set up practice in both Clearfield, Pennsylvania and Falls City, Nebraska from 1853 to 1858, and from 1862 to 1863...

of the US District Court made a landmark civil rights

Civil rights

Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...

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

Standing Bear

Standing Bear was a Ponca Native American chief who successfully argued in U.S...

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

Thomas Tibbles

Thomas Henry Tibbles was a journalist and author from Omaha, Nebraska who became an activist for Native American rights in the United States during the late nineteenth century.- Life :Born in Ohio, he moved to Illinois with his parents...

accompanied Alice C. Fletcher, an anthropologist, on her unprecedented trip to live with and study Sioux

Sioux

The Sioux are Native American and First Nations people in North America. The term can refer to any ethnic group within the Great Sioux Nation or any of the nation's many language dialects...

women on the Rosebud Indian Reservation

Rosebud Indian Reservation

The Rosebud Indian Reservation is an Indian reservation in South Dakota, United States. It is the home of the federally recognized Sicangu Oyate, also known as Sicangu Lakota, the Upper Brulé Sioux Nation, and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe , a branch of the Lakota people...

. 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

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

Osage Nation

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

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

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

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
Dead Sea scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents found between 1947 and 1956 on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name...

.

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

Bureau of American Ethnology

The Bureau of American Ethnology was established in 1879 by an act of Congress for the purpose of transferring archives, records and materials relating to the Indians of North America from the Interior Department to the Smithsonian Institution...

. This marked the second part of his career, as his focus changed with his independent research on the music and religion of the Osage

Osage Nation

, 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.

Marriage and family

La Flesche married Alice Mitchell in June 1877, but she died the next year. In 1879 he married a young Omaha woman Rosa Bourassa, about the time of his tour in 1879-1880 with his sister and Standing Bear, but they separated shortly before he began working in Washington in 1881 and divorced in 1884.

For most of his years in Washington, La Flesche shared a house on Capitol Hill with Alice Fletcher, with whom he worked closely, and Jane Gay. Fletcher and La Flesche kept the nature of their relationship private. She willed money to him at her death.

Legacy and honors

1922, La Flesche was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences
United States National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
1922-23, he was elected as president of the Anthropological Society of Washington
1926, awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Nebraska
Because of the close working relationship between Fletcher and La Flesche, the Smithsonian Institution has collected their papers in a joint archive.

Works

1900, The Middle Five: Indian Boys at School (memoir)
1911, The Omaha Tribe, with Alice Cunningham Fletcher
Alice Cunningham Fletcher
Alice Cunningham Fletcher was an American ethnologist who studied and documented American Indian culture.-Biography:...
1912, Da O Ma (unpublished)
1914/-1915/1921, The Osage Tribe: Rite of Chiefs
1917-1918/1925, The Osage Tribe: the Rite of Vigil
1925-1926/1928, The Osage Tribe: Two Versions of the Child-Naming Rite
1927-1928/1930, The Osage Tribe: Rite of the Waxo'be
1932, Dictionary of the Osage Language (linguistics)
1939, War Ceremony and Peace Ceremony of the Osage Indians, published posthumously
1999, The Osage and the Invisible World, edited by Garrick A. Bailey
1998 Ke-ma-ha: The Omaha Stories of Francis La Flesche, edited by Daniel Littlefield and James Parins, Nebraska University Press, previously unpublished work

External links

"Francis La Flesche", American Memory, Library of Congress
Omaha Indian Music, Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

. Recordings of traditional Omaha music by Francis La Flesche
Francis La Flesche
Francis La Flesche was the first professional Native American ethnologist; he worked with the Smithsonian Institution, specializing first in his own Omaha culture, followed by that of the Osage. Working closely as a translator and researcher with the anthropologist Alice C...

from the 1890s, as well as recordings and photographs from the late 20th century.
"Register to the Papers of Alice Cunningham Fletcher and Francis La Flesche", National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
LaFlesche Family Papers, Nebraska State Historical Society

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Early life and education

Career

Marriage and family

Legacy and honors

Works

Further reading

External links