The WN book group will meet Sunday March 12 at 2pm at Penny Eccleston’s house.

We are reading “A Warrior of the People: How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America’s First Indian Doctor” by Joe Starita.The poignant and
moving biography of Susan La Flesche Picotte, the first Native American doctor in U.S. history.
On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche Picotte received her medical degree – becoming the first Native American doctor in U.S. history. She earned her degree thirty-one years before women could vote and thirty-five years before Indians could become citizens in their own country.

By age twenty-six, this fragile but indomitable Native woman became the doctor to her tribe. Overnight, she acquired 1,244 patients scattered across 1,350 square miles of rolling countryside with few roads. Her patients often were desperately poor and desperately sick – tuberculosis, small pox, measles, influenza – families scattered miles apart, whose last hope was a young woman who spoke their language and knew their customs.

This is the story of an Indian woman who effectively became the chief of an entrenched patriarchal tribe, the story of a woman who crashed through thick walls of ethnic, racial and gender prejudice, then spent the rest of her life using a unique bicultural identity to improve the lot of her people – physically, emotionally, politically, and spiritually.

Franny Hildabrand