Melissa from Michigan, I work an extra part time job serving lunch at my child's school, but I still can't afford to put food on our table. Daniel from California, choosing whether to pay the rent or pay to fix the car to get to work doesn't leave us with much at all.

Now, we can't even pay for meals. Hunger is a story we can end end it at Feeding America dog brought to you by Feeding America and the Ad Council. Hi, I'm Robert Evans.

I'm Crystal. I'm Cody Johnston. When this year started, we were doing an election podcast, which is called Worst Year Ever, and it's a podcast that we do. But then this year became way worse than an election. And now there's a plague in a series of general uprisings and federal agents shooting us all in the street. And our podcast has turned into more of, you know, kind of a general survival guide for the apocalypse that we're all in the process of hopefully living through.

We don't just talk about things.

We also bring interesting people into to interview and answer our questions and shed light on stuff that we don't all normally talk about.

This is the worst year ever on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Happy Saturday, everybody.

Since this week's episodes had a medical theme, we thought we would continue that for our Saturday classics. So we have our November 14th twenty eighteen episode on Susanville Flesh Bercot, who was the first indigenous woman in the United States to earn an M.D..

We hope you enjoy the welcome to stuff you missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm qualified. Today, we are going to talk about Dr. Susan Le Flesche because she was the first Native American woman to earn a medical degree.

She also lived at a time when there was a lot of change happening in the United States as a whole and among Native Americans and the Omaha tribe that she was part of specifically. So in some ways, we're kind of looking at the history of this time through the story of her life. We're definitely not touching on everything, but there is a lot that affected tribal life that we're going to get into.

Susan Le Fleche was born on June 17th, 1865, in what is now Nebraska. Her father was Joseph La Fleche, also known as Ironi, and her mother was his first wife. Mary Gayle also called one woman. The Love Fleshes had four surviving daughters, Suzette, Susan, Rosalie and Marguerite. Joseph also had a son named Francis by another wife.

Both of Susan's grandmothers were native women. Her father's father was a French Canadian trader and her mother's father was a U.S. Army doctor. Susan's ancestors included people from multiple indigenous peoples, including the Omaha, Iowa and Ponca tribes, and her father had grown up among several different tribes and traveled extensively with his father when he was young as well. But the family was enrolled as Omaha. Joseph La Fleche had been adopted by Omaha chief Big Elk, who intended to name Joseph as his successor.

When Big Elk died in 1853, Joseph became one of the tribe's two principal chiefs and was ultimately its last traditional chief.

As I alluded to earlier, Susan grew up during a time of huge transition for the Omaha and for the other tribes and nations in that part of North America. First contact between the Omaha and Europeans was probably sometime in the Middle East. Seventeen hundreds. By 1854, after a series of epidemics, wars and treaties, the Omaha had ceded a lot of their territory to the United States. They were left with a reservation and what's now northeastern Nebraska. And that was further reduced in size in 1865, which was the year that Susan was born.

Susan's father believed that the only way the Omaha would survive in the face of all this was to selectively adapt to white society while still retaining as much Omaha culture and identity as possible. This outlook was why Big Elk had chosen him as his successor. He also thought that the Omaha would be wiped out if they didn't adapt. So Susan's parents believe strongly that she and her siblings needed to learn to live with and among white people so they could essentially form a bridge between the Omaha and the white world to that.

And Joseph and Mary Lou didn't give most of their children traditional Omaha names. Although Susan's oldest sister, Suzette, was known as Bright Eyes, they weren't given traditional tattoos or piercings either. And although Susan had been born in a teepee during the summer Buffalo Hunt, the family lived in a frame house rather than in the earth lodges that the Omaha had traditionally used since settling in the Missouri River region.

Those children also attended a Presbyterian mission school on the reservation. Their parents had no formal education themselves, and they didn't speak much English. But they both stressed how critical it was for Susan and all of her siblings to learn and do well. Their parents spoke to them in Omaha and French, but among each other, the siblings were expected to speak English.

Susan started attending the mission school when she was only three, but she was there for a year before it was closed down in the wake of Ulysses S. Grant peace policy. This peace policy essentially replaced Indian agents with Christian missionaries. The policy was based on the mindset that missionary work would be less prone to corruption than the previous Indian agent system. So when the Presbyterian Mission School was replaced with a Quaker day school, the children attended that school instead. Joseph La Flushers decisions about how the Omaha could survive were deeply controversial.

The Omaha were divided into what was known as the Young Men's Party, which supported the idea of selective assimilation. And then the Chiefs party instead advocated maintaining Omaha culture and traditions as much as possible. The neighborhood that Joseph established on their reservation, dominated by frame houses and individual farms, was nicknamed the village of Make Believe White Men. When Susan was eight, she had an experience that led to her desire to become a doctor. She was helping to care for an Omaha woman who was very ill, and they had asked the agency doctor who was white to come and see her.

But after four messages sent to him, he still had not arrived. So Susan sat with this woman as she died, and later she said, quote, It was only an Indian. And it. Did not matter, the doctor preferred hunting for prairie chickens rather than visiting the poor suffering humanity. Of course, this was not the only time she saw a need for better health care on the reservation. As another example, her father had a leg amputated after an untreated injury, but it was what she kept returning to when she talked about wanting to become a doctor.

In 1875, when Susan was 10, her older sister, Suzette, returned home from studying at the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies in Elizabeth, New Jersey. She wanted a job teaching at the reservation school, but at first she was told that she wasn't eligible. This started an uphill battle in which Suzette unearthed a handbook saying that native teachers were preferred, got permission to leave the reservation to take an exam for a teaching certificate, and was finally hired as the first native teacher to be employed on the Omaha reservation.

Suzette moved into a house near the school and her sisters moved in with her so they could all be closer to the school rather than walking about three miles each way every day.

Suzette was a huge influence on Susan's life as a sister, a teacher and an advocate for native peoples rights. When Susan was 12, Susan, that became an interpreter for Standing Bear. He was the chief of the Ponca tribe, and that is when Suzette became more widely known as Bright Eyes.

The Ponga had been guaranteed reservation land in what is now Minnesota and South Dakota. But in 1868, this territory became part of the Great Sioux Reservation. Instead, in 1877, the Polke were forced into Indian territory in what's now Oklahoma, where they arrived in 1878. This forced relocation was devastating, and nearly a third of the ponga died, including Standing Bear Sun.

In January of 1879, Standing Bear left the reservation in Indian territory without permission, intending to take his son's body back to the Ponca homelands to be buried. He and the people who went with him were arrested and this went to trial and standing Bear versus Krook, the court found in standing Bear's favor and ruled that he had, quote, the same inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as the more fortunate white race. This was a landmark ruling that established that Native Americans were considered persons under the law.

After this court ruling, Standing Bear went on a speaking tour of the eastern United States to campaign for native peoples rights. And it was on this tour that bright eyes acted as his interpreter and began her lifelong work advocating for native peoples rights in 1879 when she was 14.

Susan left left the Omaha reservation with her younger sister, Marguerite, to attend the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies Wear Bright Eyes had also studied. Three years later, she returned home again, following in her older sisters footsteps to teach, this time at the Presbyterian Mission School on the reservation, which had reopened while she was away.

That year, 1882 brought more major changes to the Omaha. And we are going to talk all about that after we first have a sponsor break.

Ever wondered why there are two ways to spell doughnut's or why some people think you can find water underground just by wandering around with a stick? Believe it or not, this is stuff you should know. You know the podcast with over a billion listeners. It's now for your eyes so you can read it. Stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things covers everything from the origin of the Murphy bed to why people get lost preorder at stuff you should know dotcom or wherever books are sold.

Did you know the original Mr. Potato Head was an actual potato? Did you know that all tequila's are miskell but not all mesoscale? There's tequila. Did you know some goats climb trees? Did you know there really was a Jones family that everyone in New York was trying to keep up with or that Pablo Picasso was a child prodigy who could draw before he could talk? You will stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. Preorder now.

It's stuff you should know, dotcom or wherever books are sold from 1880 to to 1884.

Susan Le Flesche was a teacher on the Omaha Reservation. And during that time, as I alluded to before the break, once again the tribe underwent some major changes relating to tribal lands.

We talked before the break about how the Ponga had been forced out of reservation land that was supposed to be theirs. This was mainly due to a combination of mismanagement, error and bureaucracy. But it had raised concerns that something similar could happen to the Omaha, especially in the face of the ongoing land rush in that part of North America. And that became one of the motivations for a system of land allotment among the Omaha. The basic idea was that the reservation land would be.

Divided up and apportioned to individual families and individual people, instead of being held collectively by the Omaha tribe we use, individual allotments would be held in trust for 25 years. And during that time, the people who had received them were supposed to demonstrate that they had the means to keep up with it and to support themselves. Then after 25 years, if they had demonstrated that they were competent and that was the term that was used to describe this ability to keep up with the land and to basically function, then the land would be theirs to do with as they wished.

In theory, this would keep the Omaha from losing their land because it would be owned by individual tribal members rather than subject to treaties with the U.S. government, which did not have the greatest history of being fair or being upheld fairly. And it would also continue to encourage assimilation with white American culture and with the greater United States economy, which was one of the goals of the Bureau of Indian Affairs policy at that point, and also to maybe a lesser extent, one of the goals of tribal leadership at this point, like we said earlier, and the idea of selective assimilation as a means for survival.

So this whole idea was put into practice in the Omaha Allotment Act of 1882, and that made the Omaha one of the first indigenous tribes in the United States to receive individual allotments of land. And this was once again extremely controversial within the tribe. About a third of the tribe were very vocally opposed to it. I mean, this was a total shift in how they approached the idea of the land that they were on Joseph Fireflash was in favor of.

It was a huge advocate for it, and about a quarter of the tribes supported him. Another advocate of this idea of individual land apportionment was Alice Cunningham Fletcher of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Fletcher had been living with and studying the Omaha. Susan's half brother, Francis, had initially been one of her informants during her ethnology work with the tribe, later becoming her collaborator and an ethnologist in his own right. The two of them wrote The Omaha Tribe Together, which was published in 1911 and continues to be regarded as one of the most important and comprehensive works on Omaha history and culture.

Ultimately, Francis left was something of an adopted son to Alice Fletcher that they have the whole other story.

That's beyond the scope of this podcast. But the point is that there were advocates of this whole system among the Omaha and among people who had lived and worked with the Omaha. They genuinely thought that this was going to be good for the tribe and that it was for the best. But there were definitely also other people advocating this whole system who were motivated by greed and frankly, racism. Once the reservation land had been divided up and allotted out to the Omaha, the unlighted land, basically land that was left over would be up for sale to anybody.

Regardless of the motivation, though, this whole system of apportionment turned out to be just disastrous for the Omaha. Some of the allotments were more conducive to farming than others. A lot of people leased their allotted land rather than farming it themselves, but they didn't ever earn enough in rent to do much more than just subsist. Leasing land often became the first step to losing it. Once the land came out of trust, community ties broke down as work that had been done collaboratively at one point was instead supposed to be done by each individual farmer on their individual farm.

All of this combined with changes to laws regulating alcohol and as a consequence, alcoholism surged on the reservation. This whole process would be repeated on a much greater scale involving many more tribes with the Dogs Act of 1887, which had similarly devastating results in July of 1883.

As this whole shift was happening, Alice cutting him, Fletcher became very ill with what was described as inflammatory rheumatism. And Susan Reflash was one of the people who took care of her while she was sick after being cared for by Susan Fletcher, encouraged her to go back to school and study medicine.

Since the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies was more of a finishing school than preparation for college, Susan's first step was to enroll at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. The Hampton Institute had been founded in 1868 by General Samuel Armstrong. It was initially created to educate formerly enslaved people after the Civil War. It began also enrolling native students in 1878 with a goal of, quote, civilizing and assimilating native students. It's going to come up again later in the episode.

But we have a two part podcast about the system of boarding schools that was used to similar purpose. And this was basically the same idea, but for adults. And Suzanne arrived there in 1884 at the age of 19, she graduated second in her class on May 20th of 1886 and was also awarded the Demarest Gold Medal for Academic Achievement.

Hampton Institute's resident physician Martha Waldron had encouraged to study medicine at the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, which had been established in 1850. She applied and was accepted, but it turned out that the school's scholarship fund had already been allocated for the year and she did not have the money to pay for her tuition. Alice Coningham Fletcher helped get funding to attend medical school. One source of funds was the Connecticut Indian Association, which was a branch of the Women's National Indian Association.

This association had originally been formed as the Indian Committee of the Women's Hall Mission Society, and it had been formed in response to the removal of the Ponca Tribe to Indian territory that we talked about earlier in the show. Many of the organization's members were former abolitionists, and their original mission was to advocate for the United States to respect and uphold its treaties with native peoples, as well as, quote, protection for Indians and their lands from the robberies and horrors of enforced removals.

By the time the flesh was trying to get funding for medical school, the Connecticut Indian Association's mission had shifted a little bit. Their overall goal was the recognition of native people as having full and equal human rights, but also in such a way that they would ultimately be Christianized and assimilated into white society. They did a lot of petitioning, holding public meetings and lectures, distributing educational materials and establishing missions. When it came to fleshes education, the Connecticut Indian Association raised funds among its members.

They also appealed for donations through the Hartford Courant. The current printed several letters related to this fundraising effort. One was from General Armstrong, and that letter described the flesh as, quote, a level headed, earnest, capable Christian woman, quite equal to medical studies. Another letter was from La Fleche herself, and it said in part, quote, I feel that as a physician, I can do a great deal more than as a mere teacher. For the home is the foundation of all things for the Indians.

And my work, I hope, will be chiefly in the homes of my people.

These funds were supplemented with money from the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs, the office granted to 167 dollars a year the same amount that it subsidized for students at one of the Indian boarding schools. As Tracy mentioned earlier, we talked about these schools in our our four shot two parter that, again, was meant to Christianize native students and get them away instead from their native culture. And this funding from the Office of Indian Affairs made the first student to receive federal aid to go to college.

The started medical school in October of 1886, and her relationship with the Connecticut Indian Association continued throughout that time. And after her time in med school, she referred to them as her second Connecticut mother's. Loffler enjoyed and excelled at her medical studies, and she persevered after the death of her father on September twenty third of 1888. She graduated as valedictorian on March 14th of 1889, making her the first Native American woman to earn a medical degree in the United States.

She went on a speaking tour of several other branches of the National Women's Indian Association, basically to recruit other women to the same cause as her Connecticut mothers. And then, after spending a few months finishing an internship in Philadelphia, she returned home to the Omaha Reservation to begin working as a doctor. We will talk about her time as a doctor after a sponsor break.

Hey, Caitlin Durante. Yeah, Jamie Loftus.

Don't you wish there were a podcast that examined some of everyone's favorite movies using an intersectional feminist lens? Why, yes, I do. Well, good news. It exists. And it's our podcast. What? How did I not know? I know the broadcast is a weekly show where we invite our favorite comics, writers and film critics to bring one of their favorite movies and tear it to shreds with us using the Bechdel test as a jumping off point for discussion.

Oh, like how Indiana Jones and consent is not great or how Tangerine is one of the greatest romps of all time, or how the Cheetah Girls are feminist icons with a streak of trouble in capitalism.

Recent episodes cover Space Jam.

Harriet the Spy Set It Off The Witch and Little Miss Sunshine with amazing guests like Sasheer Zamata, Jenna Ashgar with Lindsay Ellis and more new episodes of The Beckton has come out every Thursday.

Listen on the I Heart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, this whole ad passed the final test. Well, except for Indiana Jones. Wow. He ruined everything.

Welcome to Beyond the Beauty, a podcast from My Heart Radio, I'm your host, Bobby Brown. I've been in the beauty industry for a long time and I've learned a lot. I have watched makeup, skincare and beauty change more than I ever could have imagined. This season on Beyond the Beauty, I'm exploring the beauty industry past and present. I'm reflecting on my own experiences and I'm talking to some of the biggest and brightest names in beauty today. From celebrity makeup artists to brand founders, we have the household names and the up and comers who are changing the game today.

Listen to the brand new season of Beyond the Beauty on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast. Wherever you listen to your favorite shows, join me as we all learn about the real meaning of beauty. When Susan a Flash returned to the Omaha reservation, she was initially hired as the doctor for the reservation's boarding school, she was paid a salary of five hundred dollars, which was a fraction of what male doctors in similar positions were being paid by the Connecticut Indian Association, supplemented this by also making her their medical missionary.

So they paid her an additional two hundred and fifty dollars a year, and they also bought her surgical tools for her.

At first, some of her patients didn't entirely trust her. She spoke English and she had spent years away from the reservation being educated by and with white people. She had also been a devout Christian since her early years at a mission school on the reservation. But she quickly demonstrated that she was a competent, capable, compassionate and dedicated doctor. Soon, she was known as Dr. Sue and adult patients were asking to see her, even though she was only supposed to be treating the children at the school.

In January of 1890, the Omaha agency's white doctor resigned, in part because all of his patients were asking to see Dr. Sue. Instead, BFW was appointed as the official Bureau of Indian Affairs physician for the entire Omahaw agency, and this made her the first woman to be appointed to one of these positions and one of the first native people. She was responsible for the health and wellness of more than twelve hundred people for the next four years. They were spread out over more than 3500 square miles, or 3300 square kilometers of territory.

She was only 24. She did exactly as she said she hoped to do. In that letter that had been published in the Hartford Courant, she visited patients in their homes, seeing to their health and wellness. She treated illnesses and injuries, assisted with complicated deliveries and counseled people on their health and hygiene. In the fall and winter of 1891 to 1890, to an influenza epidemic struck and she saw more than 600 patients often traveling on foot or by horse and buggy in temperatures that were well below zero degrees Fahrenheit.

That's minus 18 Celsius.

She also campaigned aggressively for temperance over her lifetime. Laws related to the sale of alcohol on reservations or to native people changed a number of times. Her father had also campaigned for temperance before she was born and while she was young, including establishing an Omaha police force to try to cut down on bootlegging, she really saw alcoholism as a huge, huge problem on the reservation. And she campaigned stridently for prohibition.

She also did a lot of work that wasn't strictly related to medicine. She settled disputes, she offered financial advice, and she just generally counseled people. She helped patients who didn't read or write English with correspondence and legal matters. And when people didn't understand the terms of their land allotment, she helped to explain it. She was part doctor, part teacher, part social worker and part mediator, something that continued the whole time she practiced medicine. A lot of people describe her as having sort of one foot in each world where she was able to make all of these connections with people on the reservation because she spoke Omahaw fluently.

She spoke other native languages as well while also speaking English. And she was able to do what her father had wanted for his children to do, which was to form this bridge. But then in 1893, well, fleshless mother got seriously ill. Susan had been struggling with her own health. She had a series of chronic and sometimes severe illnesses. She had ongoing issues with neck pain, earaches and headaches, which might have been caused by osteomyelitis. Susan made several requests to be allowed time off to take care of her mother, and these were repeatedly denied.

And she finally resigned as the agency doctor said that she could take care of her mother on October 20th of 1893.

And while caring for her mother, Susan LeFleur met Henry Picart. His brother Charles had married her sister Marguerite, and Henry had come to help on their farm. While Charles was sick and dying, Susan and Henry started a relationship and they got married on June 30th, 1894.

This was a surprise to a lot of people in Susan's life and not necessarily a welcome one to all of them. She had often called herself an old maid. When the Connecticut Indian Association had agreed to help pay for her medical education, she had promised them that she would put off marriage and dedicate herself to her medical practice. And even before she had accepted their help with tuition, she had really felt that marriage would get in the way of her plans to become a doctor and returned to her community to practice medicine.

This had led her to break off a relationship with a young man named Thomas Kinney Copy or T'ai who she had met at Hampton Institute. Susan and Henry were also very different. Susan was the daughter of an Omaha chief and a doctor. Henry was Yankton Sioux and he had very little. Formal education and a limited ability to read and write, but Susan had fallen in love with him and in the face of her mother's illness and the deaths of t'ai and her sister's husband, she seems to have just decided that life was simply too short.

The Connecticut Indian Association responded to the news of her engagement and her wedding with concerned kind of an air quotes letters along with a write up in their newsletter that read in part, quote, Since her health and home restrictions do not permit her longer engagement and actual medical practice, we must bury any regret at our loss and trust that her bright, intelligent spirit will shed its light upon the new life and surroundings opening before her. But Susan La Picot did not stay away from medical practice for long.

She and her mother both recovered, and she and Henry moved to an allotment of land they secured in Bancroft, Nebraska. Susan set up a medical office in their home and she left a lantern in the window at night so patients could find her whenever they needed her. She also became the Omaha Reservation Field Matron, which was a Bureau of Indian Affairs position, sort of like a mobile home economics teacher. Field matrons, who also included both Anglo and native women, were part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs efforts to assimilate the native population.

So they taught Victorian so-called civilized methods of homemaking to women in native communities. Susan and Henry had two children together, Peter and Carol, and when they were babies, Susan took them on house calls with her because by this point, many of her patients refused to see any other doctor. When the children got older, she sent them to Nebraska Military Academy because she wanted them to have the same sort of education that she did, which she thought would allow them to live in the white world during her time in private practice, but not spent as much time advocating for public health on the Omaha reservation as she did treating individual patients.

She campaigned for tuberculosis prevention, temperance, housefly control and getting rid of common cups at pumps and other water sources. Health reformers elsewhere in the United States were also campaigning for these basic things. But Picot was doing this basically all by herself. She was really at the forefront of the idea of public health among native communities.

In 1983, Susan's sister Suzette, now Suzette La Tibbles, died, and then in 1995, Henry Picart died. At the age of 45, he had tuberculosis, which was worsened by alcoholism. Susan was just 40 before her husband's death.

Susan, the flashbacks that had typically worked from the assumption that the federal government and its Indian agents were at least trying to operate with native peoples best interests in mind. I mean, you can tell from what she's done in her life so far that she agreed with her father and the idea that there needed to be some selective assimilation. And she seems to have just sort of thought that people were trying to work with everyone's best interests. But that opinion really started to shift after her husband's death.

One reason was that he had left their children an inheritance, but government officials were trying to give a distant male relative control over it while trying to get control of her son's money. She wrote a letter saying, quote, It is strange that I, a mother and one who has worked hard to support herself and children and bitterly opposed to wisky in any form, should be denied the right to care for her children's money. And it should be given into the care of a man who is a hard drinker and who has seen these children only once in his life and who resides in another state.

Some of her other opinions were shifting as well. As we said earlier, Susan was a devout Christian and her father had converted to Christianity during his time as chief as well. Joseph Flesche had made it a point not to proselytize and not to discourage traditional Omahaw ceremonies. That observance is like he wanted the Omaha to retain as much of their cultural identity as possible, and Susan had mostly done the same. But she had definitely talked about things like temperance from a very Christian viewpoint.

So when the religious use of peyote started to become more popular among the Omaha, at first Picart was vocally against it. But that changed after her husband's death, especially as she began to hear from people that pianism had helped them to give up alcohol and to reconnect with their traditional beliefs and practices. She ultimately advocated against laws outlawing peyote use, especially in the context of Native American religion.

In 1989, the Department of the Interior made a number of new policies that related to the Omaha without actually consulting the Omaha on any of them. One was that they consolidated the Omaha and Winnebago agencies, and that gave agency doctors and other officials a lot more territory and people to try to cover. The court wrote a number of. Letters explaining the strain that this merger would put on the people who were working in these agencies, they also revisited the trust period that had been outlined in the Omaha Allotment Act of 1882.

That 25 year trust period was expiring, which meant that people who had been on their land for 25 years were supposed to be evaluated for their competence. And if they were competent, the land was supposed to be theirs. Competence under this definition included things like self-sufficiency and the ability to speak English. But instead of starting the evaluation process, the government added 10 more years to the timeline across the board. Dr. Picot was selected to lead the Omaha tribal delegation to Washington, D.C., to try to address all of these policies and issues.

Her mother had died that year. She was also very ill. And so she had started off not by planning to go in person, but by writing a lot of letters to government officials. But when people told her they were going to carry her bodily to the train if she didn't go herself, she went to Washington in person with the delegation. She and three other members of the delegation spent about three weeks there, including appearing before the secretary of the interior and the United States attorney general.

A big focus of the meeting was the land allotment. In one meeting, Picart said, quote, We have suffered enough from your experiments. We are weary of hardships needlessly endured. We have been practically robbed of our rights by the government, therefore, in the name of justice and humanity. And because we want to become a self-reliant, independent, self-sustaining people, we ask for a more liberal interpretation of the law.

So in one way, this delegation was successful. The competency commission did reverse that decision to just add a blanket 10 years to the test period across the board. But in another way, it wasn't. The government was once again under huge pressure from people who wanted to be able to buy the land in question. And local governments were really eager for the land to be released because that would make it part of the local tax base. So instead of actually examining the competence of all the people who had been allotted land, the competency commission just approved the release of hundreds of allotments, including ones that belonged to people who had specifically said they were not ready.

This was once again disastrous. And over the next five years, the vast majority of people who had received land allotments lost their land.

In 1913, Picot completed a project that had been a lifelong dream. She opened a hospital in Salt Hill, Nebraska. This was the first hospital on a reservation that wasn't funded by government money. Picart used her own money and raised the money she didn't have herself. In addition to general patient wards, the hospital also had a maternity ward and an operating room.

But sadly, Susan left because it didn't live. Very long after her hospital was opened, she had been having trouble with pain in her head, neck and ears for years. We talked about it earlier on the show, and this pain got cyclically worse. She also progressively lost her hearing, and in 1914, she had a series of operations which did alleviate some of the pain, but also revealed that she probably had bone cancer. Doctors tried every treatment they could think of, including using a radium pellet that was sent by Marie Curie on request from Susan's brother in law.

Susan Le Picot died on September 18th, 1915. Her funeral was conducted by three Presbyterian ministers with an Omaha elder giving the final prayer. She was buried next to her late husband. She was only 50 when she died. So this is an incredible amount that she was able to accomplish in our relatively short life. The hospital she established continued to operate until the 1940s, and the building still exists today. It's on the National Register of Historic Places. A large scale fundraising effort started in early twenty eighteen to try to restore and preserve the building.

And the Omaha tribe are included in the preservation efforts. In late June of twenty eighteen, it was named one of the United States 11 most endangered historic places by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Picot Elementary School in Omaha is also named for her. There's also a really lovely documentary called Medicine Woman, which weaves Susan Fleshpots Story with the stories of a group of Omaha, Lakota and Navajo women who have become doctors and surgeons and healers. And one of the things that they talk about is how Susan Flesh Barcott has become a role model and an inspiration for young native women, both for people who want to go into health care and wellness.

And then also just in terms of self-determination and perseverance. According to the PBS website, this documentary is going to be really airing on PBS and November of twenty eighteen. I don't know the specific date or where. It will have passed by the time this episode is out. You can also find it online, but I really I'm very fascinated by Susan Barcott because it's she occupied the whole, like one foot in each world. Description that a lot of people have used of her applies not just to the fact of of the fact that she went to medical school and she had like a formal education and was also the daughter of a chief, but also the fact that, like, the way she approached the world was sort of about trying to carve out a place for herself and for the Greater Omaha tribe while still trying to survive in a world that was not really conducive to a lot of more traditional tribal beliefs and practices and observances.

So she's kind of a complicated and fascinating figure that way. Well, and I wonder what it must have been like for her to have for quite some time put her trust in what she believed to be the good intentions of people. Yeah. In the government and that she was working with. And then to realize that that trust was not necessarily given always to the correct people. Yeah.

And you can tell in some of her writing that the older she got and the more experience that she had dealing directly with like government agents and policy in that kind of stuff, she you can tell that she was sort of like she had been so patient and she she was reaching the end of her patients for some of those elements of what was going on in the world that she was living in. But seriously, still, what an accomplishment to start your own hospital at the age of, I think, forty eight when she finished the hospital.

So I got to get right to work on that if I'm going to do anything close to it.

I would never achieve anything close to it, so. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook URL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now, our current email address is History podcast at I Heart radio dot com. Our old HowStuffWorks email address no longer works and you can find us all over social media at MTT in history.

And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast, Google podcast, the I Heart Radio app.

And wherever else you listen to podcasts, stuff you missed in history class as a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts from my heart radio music by her radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Beyond the Beauty, a podcast from My Heart Radio, I'm your host, Bobby Brown. I've been in the beauty industry for a long time and I've learned a lot. I have watched makeup, skincare and beauty change more than I ever could have imagined. This season on Beyond the Beauty, I'm exploring the beauty industry past and present. I'm reflecting on my own experiences and I'm talking to some of the biggest and brightest names in beauty today. Listen to the brand new season of Beyond the Beauty on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Nearly 600 years after the invention of the printing press, the most important book in the history of the world has arrived, there might be overstating things, stuff you should know, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things.

It will change your life forever.

Well, that's not necessarily true.

Most scientists agree that stuff you should know an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things is proof that time travel is possible because that is the only way to explain how a book this impressive was possibly made and why stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things will regrow hair quite in your teeth and improve your love life.

That's just not at all. Right.

Well, the love life part, maybe if you find someone who thinks smart is sexy stuff, you should know an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things available for preorder. Now at stuff you should know Dotcom.

Now, that is true.