Susette"Bright Eyes"Tibbles formerly La Flesche
Daughter of Joseph E-sta-mah-za La Flesche and [mother unknown]
Sister of Francis La Flesche[half], Rosalie (La Flesche) Farley[half], Marguerite (La Flesche) Diddock[half], Susan (La Flesche) Picotte[half] and Carey La Flesche[half]
[children unknown]
Profile last modified | Created 10 May 2015
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Susette (La Flesche) Tibbles is Notable.
Susette was Omaha.
Susette, or Yosette, was called Bright Eyes-- In-shta-the-umba.
Susette was the daughter of Chief Joseph La Flesche, who was the son of a French trader and a Omaha or Ponca mother. Her sister Susan was the first Native American to graduate from American medical school.
She attended the Presbyterian Mission School on the Omaha Reservation, and through the interest of one of her instructors was sent to a private school in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she qualified as a teacher.
She came into prominence trying to help the Ponca tribe gain their freedom, and adopted the name Bright Eyes. After marrying Omaha Herald journalist Thomas Henry Tibbles, she cooperated with him in his editorial and political efforts to advocate for better of Native Americans by the federal government, and expose injustices. She traveled through the U.S., England, and Europe with Thomas Henry on lecture tours.
Susette illustrated a small book written by Fannie Reed Giffen, called Oo-Mah-Ha Ta-Wa-Tha (Omaha City), published in 1898 [1].
From "Great Women[2]
Susette La Flesche, an Omaha, campaigned tirelessly for Native American rights, becoming the first Native American lecturer and the first published Native American artist and writer. Daughter of Chief Joseph La Flesche, Chief of the Omahas, Susette La Flesche was a teacher on her reservation after completing her education at the Elizabeth Institute in New Jersey.
She generated national attention in 1879 when she accompanied newspaperman Thomas Tibbles of the Omaha Herald on a lecture tour to publicize wrongs against the Ponca Indians. The tribe had been brutally displaced and relocated to unfamiliar grounds, and more than a third had died. La Flesche, going by the English translation of her Native American name Inshta Theumba ("Bright Eyes"), was able to reach influential Easterners and brought about passage of the Dawes Act in 1887, at the time considered a progressive law of benefit to the tribes.
La Flesche married Tibbles in 1881 and continued to tour and lecture in America and England. She also became a writer, contributing regularly to a variety of magazines and newspapers. She anonymously edited Ploughed Under, The Story of an Indian Chief.
Bright Eyes (1854-26 May 1903), Indian rights advocate and author also known as Inshtatheamba or Susette La Flesche, was born on the Omaha Reservation near Bellevue, Nebraska, just south of present-day Omaha, the daughter of Joseph La Flesche, also known as Inshtamaza or Iron Eye, a chief of the Omaha, and his wife Mary Gale, a mixed-blood Omaha and Iowa whose Indian name was The One Woman. Susette's paternal grandparents were a Frenchman, also named Joseph, who was a trader and trapper for the Hudson's Bay Company in Canada, and either an Omaha or Ponca woman named Watunna. Because her husband often was away trading or trapping, Watunna left him and married a member of the Omaha tribe. For a while the younger Joseph La Flesche was raised by two aunts who spent part of their time among the Sioux. Later, when his father returned, the younger La Flesche joined him when he once again left on his trading expeditions.
Susette La Flesche's mother was the daughter of Nicomi or Voice of the Waters, a mixed-blood Omaha and Iowa, and John Gale, a surgeon assigned to Fort Atkinson on the Missouri River in present-day Nebraska. After Gale was transferred, Nicomi married Peter Sarpy, an official of the American Fur Company and the employer of the younger Joseph La Flesche. Mary Gale was educated in St. Louis, Missouri, from a fund her father had left with Sarpy. In 1843 she returned to Nebraska and married Joseph La Flesche. Later he took a second wife, Tainne. Eventually, in addition to Susette, Joseph La Flesche had three other daughters with Mary Gale, and a son and two daughters with Tainne.
As a leader of the Omaha, Chief Joseph La Flesche recognized that for the tribe to survive it would have to adapt to the encroaching non-Indian culture that was filling Nebraska with settlers; therefore he enrolled his daughter in the Presbyterian Mission School on the Omaha Reservation. Susette La Flesche was baptized a Catholic on 27 December 1850. La Flesche stepped on a nail and, because of the resulting infection, had his leg amputated below the knee; however, the operation was crudely done, and the infection eventually caused his death.
In 1868 Susette La Flesche started school at the agency school in Nebraska. Later she was sent to a private finishing school, Elizabeth Institute, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. In 1875, after fulfilling the requirements to be a teacher, she returned to the Omaha Reservation and taught in the government school.
In 1877 Susette La Flesche witnessed the forced removal of the Ponca tribe from its homeland in South Dakota to a reservation in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). The suffering of the Ponca, who were closely allied with the Omaha, deeply affected her, and in 1878, along with her father, she visited them on their new reservation among the Quapaw in Indian Territory, where they had temporarily settled pending the assignment of a permanent reservation. After returning to Nebraska, Susette La Flesche became an outspoken opponent of the government's treatment of the Ponca.
Her partner in this was her future husband, Thomas Henry Tibbles. A "crusader," He helped form what often was called the Indian Ring, a group that advocated fair treatment for Native Americans.
Susette La Flesche quickly became involved in the movement and, apparently at Tibbles's suggestion, took the name Bright Eyes. Along with her brother, Francis La Flesche, and Standing Bear, Bright Eyes undertook a speaking tour of such eastern cities as Boston in an effort to end the government's policy of forced removal of the northern tribes to Indian Territory.
Traveling widely with Tibbles, including one visit to Europe, Bright Eyes continued to be a proponent of Indian rights during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. She believed that the effort to assimilate Native Americans into American culture was a mistake and that the greatest error in government Indian policy was to treat the Indians as wards, incapable of caring for themselves. She also advocated American citizenship for Native Americans and continually pressured federal officials for equitable treatment for Indians.
At Tibbles's urging she discovered her talent for writing--a means of communication that allowed them to expand dramatically their audience. In 1881 Bright Eyes published Ploughed Under, the Story of an Indian Chief, telling of the struggle of the Native American to adapt in a changing world. Her brother also became active in Native American affairs as an ethnologist and joined with Alice Cunningham Fletcher, a friend of Bright Eyes, to publish The Omaha Tribe (Twenty-seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1905-1906).
Bright Eyes spent much of her later years on the Omaha Reservation. She also maintained a residence in Lincoln, Nebraska. She died near Bancroft on the Omaha Reservation.
Susette La Flesche Tibbles was inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame on 1 March 1984, for her involvement in the Ponca Indian court proceeding that resulted in the ruling that an Indian is a person in the eyes of the law. Mrs. Tibbles, a 19th century writer and artist, fought for Indian rights and was Ponca Indian Chief Standing Bear's interpreter during his travels to Europe and in the US [3]. She died in 1903. There is a bust in the Lincoln Statehouse of Susette, by Deborah Wagner-Ashton[4].
The La Flesche family papers are in the Nebraska State Historical Society in Lincoln. The best biography of Susette La Flesche is Dorothy Clarke Wilson, Bright Eyes: The Story of Susette La Flesche, an Omaha Indian (1957).
Additional information may be found in Thomas H. Tibbles, Buckskin and Blanket Days: Memoirs of a Friend of the Indians Written in 1905 (1957), and "Bright Eyes," Frank Leslie's Journal, 3 Jan. 1880.
Family lore has it that Susette was the inspiration for Longfellow's Minihaha. But the poem was written some 20 years before Susette became well known. The lore must be based on the following: from the book, Susette La Flesche-Voice of the Omaha Indians by Margaret Crary:
"One day in late November (1879) Tibbles received a letter from Henry Houghton, the book publisher. He requested permission to give a dinner reception at his Cambridge home for the purpose of allowing Mr. Henry Longfellow to meet Miss Bright Eyes.
"Not the poet Longfellow ! Not Henry Wadsworth Longfellow !" Susette exclaimed.
"The Same.
"Why would he want to meet me?" she asked.
"It is enough that he does. It is a great honor," Tibbles told her.
"On the night of the dinner they found a line of carriages drawn up for blocks around the Houghton home. They were obliged to leave the hack and go on foot down the street and up the long front walk. As they reached the steps, the door was flung open. Susette guessed that the white-haired gentleman standing there was Henry Longfellow. Tibbles Gave her a gentle nudge, then stepped back. Susette mounted the steps alone. Mr. Longfellow took both of her hands in his. He looked searchingly into her face. Then he nodded and said, "Yes, this is my Minnehaha."
Find A Grave: Memorial #54038294 Susette Tibbles
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