A Warrior of the People: How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America’s First Indian Doctor
About this audiobook
On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche received her medical degree―becoming the first Native American doctor in US history. She earned her degree thirty-one years before women could vote and thirty-five years before Indians could become citizens in their own country.
By age twenty-six, this fragile but indomitable Indian woman became the doctor to her tribe. Overnight, she acquired 1,244 patients scattered across 1,350 square miles of rolling countryside with few roads. Her patients often were desperately poor and desperately sick with tuberculosis, small pox, measles, and influenza, with their families scattered miles apart, and whose last hope was a young woman who spoke their language and knew their customs.
This is the story of an Indian woman who effectively became the chief of an entrenched patriarchal tribe, the story of a woman who crashed through thick walls of ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice and then spent the rest of her life using a unique bicultural identity to improve the lot of her people―physically, emotionally, politically, and spiritually.
A Warrior of the People is the moving biography of Susan La Flesche’s inspirational life, the subject of the PBS documentary Medicine Woman, and it will finally shine a light on her numerous accomplishments.
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About the author
Joe Starita is the author of several books, including I Am a Man: Chief Standing Bear’s Journey for Justice and The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge, which was nominated for the Pultizer Prize and won the MPIBA Award. He was the New York bureau chief for Knight-Ridder newspapers and a veteran investigative reporter for the Miami Herald. His stories won more than two dozen awards, one of which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for local reporting. He has held an endowed chair at the University of Nebraska’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications.
Carrington MacDuffie is a singer and recording artist, who first began reading audiobooks featuring poetry. The recipient of multiple Earphones Awards and six Audi nominations, she has read novels by Jackie Collins, Sun Tzu's The Art of War, Anna Quindlen’s Still Life with Bread Crumbs, and Christopher Buckley’s Florence of Arabia. She also co-narrated Transgressions: Death's Betrayal by Macmillan Audio. MacDuffe has published her own audiobook, Many Things Invisible, featuring poetry integrated with music and sound.
