Susan La Flesche Picotte (June 17, 1865 – September 18, 1915, Omaha) was a Native American doctor and reformer in the late 19th century. She is widely acknowledged as one of the first Indigenous peoples, and the first Indigenous woman, to earn a medical degree. She campaigned for public health and for the formal, legal allotment of land to members of the Omaha tribe. Picotte was an active social reformer as well as a physician. She worked to discourage drinking on the reservation where she worked as the physician, as part of the temperance movement of the 19th century. Picotte also campaigned to prevent and treat tuberculosis, which then had no cure, as part of a public health campaign. She also worked to help other Omaha navigate the bureaucracy of the Office of Indian Affairs and receive the money owed to them for the sale of their land. Early life Susan La Flesche was born in June 1865 on the Omaha Reservation in eastern Nebraska. Her parents were culturally Omaha with European and Indigenous ancestry and had lived for periods of time beyond the borders of the reservation. They married sometime in 1845–1846. Susan’s father, Joseph La Flesche also called Iron Eye, was of Ponca and some French Canadian ancestry. He was educated in St. Louis, Missouri, but returned to the reservation as a young man. He identified culturally as Omaha. In 1853 he was adopted by Chief Big Elk, who chose him as his successor, and La Flesche became the principal leader of the Omaha tribe around 1855. Iron Eye sought to help his people by encouraging a certain amount of assimilation, particularly through the policy of land allotment, which caused some friction among the Omaha. Susan’s mother, Mary Gale, was the daughter of Dr. John Gale, a white United States Army surgeon stationed at Fort Atkinson, and Nicomi, a woman of Omaha/Otoe/Iowa heritage. Gale was also the stepdaughter of prominent Nebraska fur trader and statesman Peter A. Sarpy. Like her husband, Mary Gale was identified as Omaha. Although she understood French and English, she refused to speak any language other than Omaha. Susan was the youngest of four girls, including her sisters Susette (1854–1903), Rosalie (1861–1900), and Marguerite (1862–1945). Her older half-brother Francis La Flesche, born in 1857 to her father's second wife, later became renowned as an ethnologist, anthropologist and musicologist (or ethnomusicologist), who focused on the