Born in 1854 in a village of the Omaha tribe near present-day Bellevue, Nebraska, Susette La Flesche was the daughter of Iron Eye (Joseph La Flesche), the half-French chief of the Omahas. Her mother was the daughter of a Native American woman and a U.S. army surgeon. She attended the reservation school and the Elizabeth Institute in New Jersey, a private seminary from which she graduated in 1873. She then returned to the Omaha reservation as a teacher. In 1877 the federal government mistakenly assigned to the Sioux the traditional homeland of the Ponca Indians in the region of the Nebraska-Dakota border. The Poncas were then forcibly removed to the unfamiliar Indian Territory.
Within a couple of years a third of the Poncas sickened and died, and early in 1879 the Ponca chief, Standing Bear, led a band of 34 followers off the reservation and back to Nebraska. Military authorities captured the group and held them at Fort Omaha pending their return south. In April a habeas corpus hearing brought about at the instigation of Thomas H. Tibbles of the Omaha Herald resulted in the release of the Poncas and the establishment of a legal precedent in recognizing Native Americans as persons before the law. Tibbles then arranged a lecture tour of the East with Standing Bear, Susette La Flesche as interpreter, and her younger brother Francis La Flesche (later an ethnologist and protÄgÄ of Alice C. Fletcher). Susette La Flesche used her Indian name, Inshta Theumba or Bright Eyes, on the tour, and with her natural beauty and her native costume she made a deep impression on eastern audiences. The sympathy thus aroused in influential circles, led by such as Helen Hunt Jackson, Edward Everett Hale, Alice Fletcher, Wendell Phillips, and Mary L. Bonney, eventuated in the passage of the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887.
In July 1881 Susette La Flesche married Tibbles. She continued to lecture regularly and in 1886╨1887 toured England, where she attracted much attention. She also began contributing stories and articles to St. Nicholas and other magazines and newspapers, edited the anonymous Ploughed Under, The Story of an Indian Chief, 1881, and illustrated Fannie Reed Giffen╒s Oo-Mah-Ha Ta-Wa-Tha (Omaha City) 1898. She and her husband later lived in Washington, D.C., in Lincoln, Nebraska, and from 1902 on a farm near Bancroft, Nebraska, where she died on May 26, 1903.
