House purchased by Picotte Center expands medical history of Omaha Tribe
Cultural preservation group adds home to portfolio that is teaching history of the first Native American medical doctor
Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte served as the country’s first Native American medical doctor, and in 1907 her brand-new home on the Omaha Tribe Reservation doubled as her hospital.
There, she treated Omaha tribal members with modern medical services she learned after graduating as valedictorian in 1889 from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.
Picotte also offered her home for assistance on other tribal matters, such as government regulations and programs thrust into reform by the Dawes Act, a federal program passed in 1887 that broke up Native lands and reallocated them for private ownership. She died in 1915. Her home was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.
Now that home is owned by the Picotte Center, a nonprofit organization that does historic preservation for the doctor’s work.
According to the Nebraska Examiner, the Picotte Center will take community input and work with historic preservation societies to forge the house into part of its larger cultural heritage plans, which also include the first proper hospital she had built shortly before she died.
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