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As physician to the government boarding school, she talked to students about physiology and hygiene and gave lessons in English and math; she also sang hymns, made scrapbooks, told Euro- American folktales, and practiced marching skills with the students. 

Tong shows how she used her connections to raise funds for a reservation hospital—her “life-long aspiration”—which was named for her. 

Tong touches on Omaha history and cultural traditions before giving Picotte’s family history. He recounts interactions that occurred after the arrival of Europeans in Omaha territory, including cross- cultural relations that shaped the lives of her parents and grandparents. In addressing the policy of assimilation and the doctrine of manifest destiny, Tong explains how they helped cause excessive alcohol use, the decreased practicing of traditional culture, and poverty among the Omahas. Photographs depict Susan, her family, and some of her contemporaries. 

What—besides a hospital—did Picotte get for her activism? Surely she experienced frustration, seeing that “much of her work had been in vain.” But society gained a lot from her example, which shows that a life lived between cultures can be difficult and exacting, yet valuable and important. 

Judith Boughter writes in Betraying the Omaha Nation, 1790-1916 about the depletion of Omahas’ lands, injustices committed by whites, and the tensions between traditional and progressive forces. 

Boughter makes it clear who she thinks is to blame for the Omahas’ dispossession. “White settlers and land speculators resented Indian ownership of fertile northeastern Nebraska lands and, beginning in the early 1850s, used every means at their disposal to separate the Indians from their real estate,” she writes, “Unfortunately, Nebraska senators and congressmen worked closely with land speculators to promote special legislation that—little by little, law by unfair law—encouraged Indians to lease, and eventually sell, most of their land.” 

Boughter, who was a graduate history student in Nebraska, calls this book “basically my master’s thesis.” In it she assaults the dominant culture’s shortcomings in dealing with the Omahas. Sadly, she writes, the government’s granting land forever to the Indians meant nothing. 

Boughter addresses politics, trading, treaties, land sales, annuities, and land allotment, followed by the leasing and selling of allotments. According to her accounts, the Omahas received pitifully little in return for lands they considered theirs. Tax breaks were one benefit, but white Nebraskans sometimes objected to Indians being off tax rolls. Such concerns of whites were sometimes placated. 

She writes that the 1825 Fort Atkinson Treaty “marked a surrender of Indian rights and sovereignty and set a precedent by which the U.S. government took from the Indians and gave little in return. The Omahas had already lost so much. The buffalo were disappearing, many lives had been lost to enemy raids and disease, and thanks to the fur trade, Omaha values had changed and their culture was in disarray.” 

In 1854, Omahas agreed to a treaty that ceded much of their ancestral land; they also agreed to move to a reservation. Fears of the Sioux kept them from the reservation: “Once again, they became a wandering nation in search of a safe, permanent home. Their suffering at the hands of the government had only just begun.” 

By about 1880, the Omahas “no longer feared the Sioux, but they did fear the future,” according to Boughter. “For nearly 30 years they had been cheated, lied to, and forced to surrender many of their old ways. Promises had been made and broken, and their tribal government had been dismantled ...they had been asked to farm without money or machinery.”  After allotment in severalty in the 1880s, “The door was open to white greed,” according to Boughter. “The Omahas, who were now citizens without recourse to law and were owners of valuable agricultural lands, would be victimized in the 1890s by unscrupulous whites hovering about the reservation fringes.” Yet the commissioner of Indian Affairs was sure the Omahas’ allotment would be a model for other tribes to emulate. 

The 1854 treaty made with the Omahas was invoked in court through the Indian Claims Commission and an award ensued. The Omahas’ ICC claims were considered over 14 years—a legal process examined by Mark R. Scherer in Imperfect Victories. Sherer also describes the Omahas’ legal battles to recover land now on the east side of the Missouri River and to survive Public Law 280, which temporarily gave the state of Nebraska civil and criminal jurisdiction on the Omaha reservation. 

Scherer accuses the federal government of using the Omahas as guinea pigs for new policies. He gives a great deal of detail in depicting the trials that resulted in some compensation for the ill effects of such policies. Without much focus on personalities, these accounts can be dry reading. But Scherer does give good introductions to them, as well as strategies, arguments, and the outcomes. 

According to Scherer, the government was headed in the right direction early in the 20th century when it issued the Merriam Report, which named allotment and strict acculturation as the major causes of deplorable conditions on reservations. The “Indian New Deal” called for the cessation of the allotment process and implementation of a new system of Indian sovereignty and self-government. That led to the ICC, through which Indians could collect money for lost land. But the ICC was “undermined...by the burgeoning terminationist ideology, as tribal claims became enmeshed with and co-opted by the assimilationist aims of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations,” Sherer writes. 

The ICC became an instrument of termination policy under which Indian nations lost federal support. Through PL 280 the federal government abandoned law enforcement in Thurston County, leading to deteriorating law-and-order conditions on the Omaha reservation. 

Scherer reports that the Omahas gained several million dollars through the ICC and, as one of the first nations to test the ICC, prompted the “Omaha Rule,” used as a guideline for subsequent claims. The Omaha Rule required an open hearing, among other provisions. 

Money from ICC claims was distributed to individual Omahas and for various projects. The Omahas also won land on the Iowa side of the Missouri River, on which they operate a casino. 

Scherer, who calls the Omahas “legal warriors,” writes in the introduction that they have achieved “a prominence in the annals of federal Indian relations.”  “...it was the Omahas’ perceived success on the reservation during the 1860s and 1870s that would lead to further government attempts to undermine their tribal identity through assimilationist ‘reforms’. 

“Beginning in the 1870s, and continuing virtually to this day, the Omahas have borne more than their fair share of the burden of shifting government policies. Indeed, since the establishment of the reservation in northeast Nebraska in 1854, the Omahas have served involuntarily as sociological guinea pigs in the laboratory of federal Indian policy, with each new program contributing, until recently, to a cumulatively disastrous effect on the tribe’s culture and economy...government bureaucrats and assimilationist advocates touted the Omaha experiment as a success, paving the way for the landmark 1887 Dawes Sever- alty Act, which extended the allotment program nationwide.” 

Scherer includes an account of the Omahas’ history as background for their 20th century legal struggles. He also gives helpful historical context when discussing the origins and widespread effects of federal policies.                 Z 

Kirk Zeblosky has a bachelor of journalism degree and a master of arts in English.