Bright Eyes

Omaha, April 30, 1879. For two days, the lawyers for both sides had made their arguments, and now, last to speak, stood Ponca Chief Standing Bear. Imprisoned by the Army, he was suing to regain his personal freedom and to stop the government from forcing him and his small band of followers to return to the reservation. The crowded courtroom grew silent as he made his dignified and impassioned plea to be treated as a free man and a human being in the eyes of the law.

Standing near him, a self-possessed young Indian woman from Bellevue carefully translated his words into English for the court. She had no way of knowing that her role in the courtroom that day would set her on a course fighting for better treatment of her fellow Native Americans and becoming an international celebrity before finally bringing her home.

The chief extended his hand toward the judge, and said, “That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. I am a man. God made us both.” Many in the courtroom wept.

Eloquently framing the chief’s words, the interpreter told how the government – in flagrant violation of its most recent treaty with the Ponca – had given the tribe’s homeland to the Sioux, moving the chief and his people 500 miles south in a brutal trek that came to be called the Ponca “Trail of Tears.” Using Standing Bear’s words and her own, the diminutive but confident orator described the degrading life on the reservation, where the ground was not arable, and the promised government supplies often were substandard, late in coming or nonexistent.

Within two years of the forced relocation, rampant malaria, extreme weather and abysmal conditions had killed nearly a third of the tribe, including Standing Bear’s last remaining son, Bear Shield. With pain in her voice the interpreter related how the chief – honoring his son’s dying wish – tried to take the boy’s body home to the tribal burial grounds on the banks of the Niobrara. Placing his son’s remains in a coffin in the back of a wagon, he led a handful of his followers on a grueling march back to Nebraska, only to be detained by the U.S. Army and imprisoned at Fort Omaha.

The Interpreter

The young interpreter was, in large measure, responsible for securing the chief’s day in court. Her given name was Susette La Flesche, and she was the daughter of a Ponca mother and the part-Anglo chief of the Omaha, Joseph “Iron Eye” La Flesche. She was born in Bellevue in 1854, the year the Omaha gave up their land for reservation life. She grew up in a traditional Omaha earth lodge and acquired a solid education. She first attended the reservation’s mission school, and then the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies, a private school in New Jersey. At 19 she returned to the reservation and became a teacher in the government school.

Over the next few years she developed the writing skills she eventually employed to seek justice for Standing Bear and his people. Working with Thomas Tibbles, a crusading writer and editor for the Omaha Daily Herald, she garnered enough public sympathy and support for the chief’s plight to secure him a high-profile, pro bono legal team for a lawsuit against the federal government.

The Court’s Decision

The government attorney’s case was simple: Indians were neither persons in the eyes of the law, nor citizens of the United States, and therefore could not bring suit against it. He argued that the Ponca were still living their traditional lifestyle and were completely dependent on the federal government, so they could not claim the privileges accorded to U.S. citizens. They were, he argued, non-persons.

In what would become a landmark civil rights case, Standing Bear’s attorneys argued that the tribe had adopted the ways of the whites, were trying to farm the poor soil of their reservation in Oklahoma and had eschewed tribal authority in deference to U.S. law. The tribe’s legal team argued they were entitled to equal treatment under that law as guaranteed by the recently approved 14th Amendment, which gave citizenship to all people born in the United States.

After all the evidence and arguments had been presented and court adjourned, Judge Elmer Dundy – his heavy law books opened before him – deliberated for 10 days before stunning the nation by ruling that “an Indian is a person within the meaning of the law,” and as such, has a right to sue the federal government. Dundy went considerably further, ruling that the Army had no right to remove them to Indian Territory. Dundy’s most far-reaching decision held that the Indians “have the inalienable right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ ” so long as they obeyed the law. He ordered that Standing Bear and his followers be released from custody immediately.

Ironically, although Standing Bear and his companions won in court, their new status as American citizens now precluded them from living on a reservation as wards of the government or occupying land set aside for other tribes. Because the Sioux were still living on land formerly held by the Ponca, Standing Bear’s small band was restricted to making a home on three small islands in the Niobrara River. The chief’s victory proved bittersweet.

Becoming “Bright Eyes”

After the trial, Tibbles scheduled a speaking tour for La Flesche and Standing Bear to publicize the plight of the Ponca. They traveled throughout the East, winning support from such luminaries and reformers as Edward Everett Hale, Wendell Phillips and Helen Hunt Jackson. Resplendent in traditional Omaha deerskin garb, La Flesche was billed as “Bright Eyes,” the English translation of her Indian name, Inshata-Theumba. She made a vivid impression with both her appearance and her words. In 1880, she testified before a congressional committee looking into the Ponca removal.

In 1881, in large part due to La Flesche’s tireless efforts, the federal government returned to the Northern Ponca some 26,000 acres of their former lands – which originally stretched more than 200 miles – and awarded them $165,000 in restitution. The following year, La Flesche and Tibbles married on restored Ponca land and eventually took their speaking tour to Great Britain, lecturing before the nobility and literary giants of England and Scotland. On returning home, they continued their crusade. In 1891, the Army’s massacre of the Lakota at Wounded Knee drew them to South Dakota, where they conducted inquiries and publicized the poor conditions on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

La Flesche wrote for the Populist newspaper The American Nonconformist while living briefly in Washington, D.C., but soon moved home to Nebraska. Her health had long been failing, and in May 1903, she died at age 49 at her home near Bancroft. Eulogized by the U.S. Senate, the soft-spoken, self-assured Omaha woman had won international respect and acclaim as the first Native American lecturer and published writer, a pioneer teacher, activist and feminist, and an indomitable advocate for Indian rights. Her greatest claim to fame, however, was the dramatic role she played in helping a small band of Ponca gain recognition as human beings before the white man’s law. In 1983, Susette La Flesche Tibbles – Bright Eyes – was inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame.

In 1879, Susette “Bright Eyes” La Flesche took the stand in a federal courtroom and helped secure a groundbreaking legal victory. Her voice helped establish that Native Americans were people under the law. Her sister, Susan La Flesche Picotte, carried that same sense of purpose into medicine.

Born in 1865 and raised on the Omaha Reservation in northeast Nebraska, Susan saw what happened when Native people were denied care. One moment never left her: a sick elder left to die after a white doctor refused treatment. “It was only an Indian,” he said. “It did not matter.”

Susan decided it did. In 1889, she graduated valedictorian from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, becoming the first Native American physician in the United States. She returned to Nebraska determined to care for all – Native or white.

She installed clean water systems, championed sanitation, made house calls at all hours and advocated for laws that would protect public health. In 1913, she opened her own hospital in Walthill – a space built by and for her people.

After years of restoration, the Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte Center reopened in June 2025. Today, the building she envisioned is once again a place of healing and hope. It houses a behavioral health clinic, artist co-op, museum, educational programs, a community garden and a maker space for regalia and beadwork.

“Dr. Susan’s past has built our future,” said Elizabeth Lovejoy Brown, the center’s executive director and a member of the Inkesabe Clan of the Omaha Tribe. “The community told us what they needed. So, we listened.”

That story continues far beyond Walthill. Claire Marsh and Meredith Wortmann – two cousins from Crofton’s St. Rose of Lima School – spent nine months researching Susan’s life for a National History Day performance. They built sets, visited the hospital and stood in the very halls where she once walked.

“Being a Nebraska woman, it’s inspiring to see how she cared for her people and her community,” Claire said. “She treated everyone equally, regardless of race or gender.”

Their work earned them a spot at the national competition in Washington, D.C., where they shared Susan’s story at the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. “The more we researched, the more I felt like we knew her personally,” Meredith said. “She’s become a part of us.”

She once walked dirt roads with a lantern in hand. Today, her light burns on – in every patient helped, every story told and every young woman who follows her lead.