Author talks of first woman, Native American doctor

Joe Starita wanted to do a good job on his latest book. He really wanted to do a good job.

“I would lay in bed twitching because I knew I hadn’t done justice to what I’d written about her 12 hours earlier,” he told a group of about 40 people at the Seward County Historical Society Museum in Goehner Oct. 21.

Starita was talking about “A Warrior of the People,” his biography of Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte.

Picotte was a member of the Omaha tribe in Nebraska and was 24 when she earned her medical degree. She attended a college in Philadelphia, the only medical college in the world where women could study, Starita said. After earning her degree, Picotte returned to Nebraska and spent the rest of her life serving the Omaha people.

“She won’t allow self-pity,” Starita said.

Starita is a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Among his classes is narrative non-fiction, which is the use of a fiction writer’s tools to write nonfiction.

He told the crowd “A Warrior of the People” covers three main themes or pillars. First is changing the view of the American West.

“Our view is always shaped through a male lens,” he said. “It’s different through the eyes of a 24-year-old woman.”

Picotte’s practice covered 1,350 square miles of the reservation with no roads and included 1,244 patients. She chronicled her work and her life through her diaries, journals and letters.

“She was very clear about how often she would have panic or anxiety attacks,” Starita said. “She feared she would die all alone, without a husband or children.”

Picotte described a west that was more vulnerable and emotionally complex. She did get married and had two sons. When she stayed home, she felt she was being a great mom but not a great doctor. When she was making her rounds, she felt she was being a great doctor but not a great mother.

“She had no one she could turn to for advice,” Starita said.

Pillar two is the magnitude of Picotte’s achievements. She was both a woman and a Native American, two strikes against her, Starita said.

“White men insisted women shouldn’t go to college,” he said.

When Picotte finished college, the women in Philadelphia begged her to stay, he said. But the only reason she was there was “to care for her beloved Omaha people,” he said.

Not only was she a doctor, she railed against whisky and against the theft of native lands, she preached, she opened a library and she hosted concerts, bringing the outside world to the Omahas.

Pillar three is cultural identification, Starita said.

“Who gets to determine how we see ourselves?” he said. “What happens when a more powerful external force forbids your language, worship, ceremonies, music? How do you define yourself when all your cultural prompts are gone?”

Starita, who has been interested in Native American culture his whole life, is next working on a book on the largest mass execution in U.S. history. In 1862, 38 Dakota Sioux men were hanged in Minnesota.

“A Warrior of the People” is his second book about Native Americans. His first, “I Am A Man,” is about Chief Standing Bear and his trial in Omaha.

As a journalist for 20 years, Starita trained himself to look for stories.

“I came back to Nebraska because I wanted to write books,” he said. “Books are a literary marathon. You have to be passionate about what you’re writing about.”

He said all the proceeds from his books go to a scholarship fund he created four years ago for Native American students.

scroston@sewardindependent.com