Francis La Flesche
Personal Information
Description
Francis La Flesche was born and raised on the Omaha Reservation, the son of Omaha chief Iron Eye. He met the anthropologist Alice Fletcher, one of the major influences in his life, in Washington, DC while he was accompanying the Ponca chief Standing Bear on a political tour in 1879-1880 following Standing Bear's trial in which it was determined that an Indian is a person. In 1882, when Fletcher visited the Omaha Reservation, she used La Flesche as her interpreter and informant. He went on to become her field assistant and, finally, collaborator. In 1910, he joined the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology, and retired in 1929. His major area of interest was recording Omaha and Osage cultures, languages, and music through both written documentation and cylinder recordings.
Books
Ke-ma-ha
La Flesche's stories tell us a great deal about Omaha culture in ways that anthropological treatises cannot. Many are full of humor and deal with everyday situations. La Flesche shows us what it was like to grow up in Omaha traditional culture before the influence of white Americans changed that culture forever.
The Osage and the invisible world
Francis La Flesche (1857-1932), Omaha Indian and anthropologist with the Bureau of American Ethnology, published an enormous body of work on the religion of the Osage Indians. His informants were among the most knowledgeable Osage religious leaders of their day, and La Flesche could speak fluently with them in their own language. His goal in writing was remarkably different from that of most of his Anglo-American colleagues: rather than simply describe Osage religion, he wanted to explain it in order to demonstrate to the academic world the true intellectual achievements of the American Indian. Consequently he left a unique record of the once-secret initiation rituals of the last functioning Mississippian priesthood. . In this book, Garrick Bailey brings together in a clear, understandable way La Flesche's data for two important Osage religious ceremonies - the "Songs of Wa-xo'-be," an initiation into a clan priesthood, and the Rite of the Chiefs, an initiation into a tribal priesthood. To put La Flesche's work into perspective, Bailey offers a short biography of this prolific Native American scholar and an overview of traditional Osage religious beliefs and practices - in effect, a synthesis of La Flesche's work.
The Omaha tribe
This classic treatise on the Omahas is based on twenty-nine years of study and observation in the field. "Nothing has been borrowed from other observers,'" Alice C. Fletcher writes in the Foreword. Volume II considers social life and societies, music, warfare, treatment of disease, death and burial customs, religion, and language. The first chapter on Social life includes information on kinship, courtship, marriage, child raising, etiquette, avocations of men, of women, clothing, adornment, property, and amusement. An Appendix traces the history of the tribe since the coming of the white man and describes the effects of that contact.
The Middle Five
The Middle Five, written by the Omaha ethnologist Francis La Flesche, is a series of vignettes portraying La Flesche’s childhood growing up on the Omaha Reservation and attending a Presbyterian mission school. Published in 1909, the book portrays both the cultural conflicts arising from the assimilatory nature of the mission school and the youthful escapades of Frank (La Flesche’s younger self), Brush, Edwin, Warren, and Lester, who together make up the titular gang of schoolboys called the “Middle Five.” Like Zitkála-Šá’s short story “The School Days of an Indian Girl” from American Indian Stories, The Middle Five depicts life in an American Indian residential school, but takes place much closer to the reservation and thus portrays the interactions between the mission school and reservation life. It is regarded as a classic work of Native American literature and is often assigned in classrooms as a vivid firsthand account of 19th-century indigenous life.