Background
Francis La Flesche was born on December 25, 1857, on the Omaha Reservation, the son of Joseph La Flesche and Elizabeth Erasmus.
( Originally published in 1911 by the Bureau of American ...)
Originally published in 1911 by the Bureau of American Ethnology, The Omaha Tribe is an irreplaceable classic, the collaboration of a pioneering anthropologist and a prominent Omaha ethnologist. Volume II takes up the language, social life, music, religion, warfare, healing practices, and death and burial customs of the Omahas. The first volume covered tribal origins and early history, organization and government, various beliefs and rites, and food gathering.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0803268777/?tag=2022091-20
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1163139297/?tag=2022091-20
( The Omaha Tribe is considered by some anthropologists t...)
The Omaha Tribe is considered by some anthropologists to be the most important and comprehensive study ever written about a Native American tribe. First published in 1911 as a report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, this classic treatise is based on twenty-nine years of study and observation in the field. "Nothing has been borrowed from other observers," Alice C. Fletcher asserts. "Only original material gathered directly from the native people has been used, and the writer has striven to make so far as possible the Omaha his own interpreter." Volume I is devoted to tribal origins and early history, beliefs about the environment, rites pertaining to the individual, tribal organization and government, the sacred pole, and the quest for food. Volume II, also available as a Bison Book, considers language, social life, music, religion, warfare, treatment of disease, and death and burial customs.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0803268769/?tag=2022091-20
( Francis La Flesche (1857-1932), Omaha Indian and anthro...)
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, all gathered from the most knowledgeable Osage religious leaders of their day. Yet his writings have been largely overlooked because they were published piecemeal over the course of twenty-five years and never adequately collected or analyzed. In this book, Garrick A. 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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0806131322/?tag=2022091-20
( Born on the Omaha Reservation in 1857, Francis La Flesc...)
Born on the Omaha Reservation in 1857, Francis La Flesche was raised in the years when federal policy encouraged Indians to assimilate. He learned English at a mission school, acquiring a fluency that prepared him for a career that moved between tribal and national concerns. Most of the stories in Ke-ma-ha have never before been published. Written to bring public attention to the Omahas, they tell us about that culture in ways that anthropological treatises cannot. Francis La Flesche collaborated with anthropologist Alice C. Fletcher on The Omaha Tribe and A Study of Omaha Indian Music. These titles, as well as La Flesches autobiographical The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe, are available as Bison Books.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0803279779/?tag=2022091-20
( The Middle Five, first published in 1900, is an account...)
The Middle Five, first published in 1900, is an account of Francis La Flesche's life as a student in a Presbyterian mission school in northeastern Nebraska about the time of the Civil War. It is a simple, affecting tale of young Indian boys midway between two cultures, reluctant to abandon the ways of their fathers, and puzzled and uncomfortable in their new roles of "make-believe white men." The ambition of the Indian parents for their children, the struggle of the teachers to acquaint their charges with a new world of learning, and especially the problems met by both parents and teachers in controlling and directing schoolboy exuberance contribute to the authen-ticity of this portrait of the "Universal Boy," to whom La Flesche dedicated his book. Regarded by anthropologists as a classic of Native American literature, it is one of those rare books that are valued by the specialist as authentic sources of information about Indian culture and yet can be recommended wholeheartedly to the general reader, especially to young people in high school and the upper grades, as a useful corrective to the often distorted picture of Indian life seen in movies, comics, and television.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0803279019/?tag=2022091-20
Francis La Flesche was born on December 25, 1857, on the Omaha Reservation, the son of Joseph La Flesche and Elizabeth Erasmus.
La Flesche attended the Presbyterian mission school on the reservation, where he began the study of English, a language of which he was in time to have an impressive command.
La Flesche got his first major exposure to white civilization in 1879, when he and his half-sister Susette served as interpreters for the Ponca Chief Standing Bear on his famous lecture tour to Chicago, Boston, New York, Washington, and other cities. He also came to the attention of Samuel Jordan Kirkwood, a United States Senator from Iowa who, when he became Secretary of the Interior in 1881, appointed La Flesche as a clerk in the Office of Indian Affairs. For the rest of his life, Washington, D. C. , was his place of residence, though he often spent time working on various Indian reservations and always returned to the Omaha reservation for vacations.
La Flesche collaborated with Alice Cunningham Fletcher and he did much of the research over a period of some 20 years that ultimately resulted in the monumental study The Omaha Tribe, published in 1911 with himself and Fletcher as coauthors. He was particularly skilled at persuading elderly tribal leaders of the Omaha to reveal the words and ceremonies of the ancient tribal rituals, which were rapidly dying out. Alice Fletcher ultimately proposed to legally adopt La Flesche as her son, a plan which fell through only because he did not want to change his surname, as the law required. La Flesche also studied at the law school of the National University in Washington and was granted a bachelor's degree in law in 1892 and a master's degree in 1893.
In 1900, La Flesche published his first book as sole author: The Middle Five, a charming autobiographical sketch of his school days at the Omaha Indian mission school. It did not sell well at the time but was reprinted in 1963. Following the publication of The Omaha Tribe in 1911, he turned his scholarly research to the Osage tribe, a group closely related to the Omahas. In 1910 he transferred from the Office of Indian Affairs to the Bureau of American Ethnology in the Smithsonian Institution. There he could devote his full time to exhaustive research on the Osage tribe, the first results of which appeared in 1921 in The Osage Tribe: Rite of the Chiefs; Sayings of the Ancient Men. Later products of his studies included a monumental Dictionary of the Osage Language, published in 1932, and War Ceremony and Peace Ceremony of the Osage Indians, published posthumously in 1939.
La Flesche's friend and mentor Alice Fletcher died in 1923. Thus she did not live to see the numerous honors which came to him for his work on the Osages, including membership in the Washington Academy of Sciences and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Nebraska in 1926. His own health began to fail in 1927 and he ultimately suffered several paralytic strokes. Francis La Flesche died on September 5, 1932, at his younger brother's home on the Omaha Indian reservation near Macy, Nebraska. He was buried on the reservation.
( Francis La Flesche (1857-1932), Omaha Indian and anthro...)
( Originally published in 1911 by the Bureau of American ...)
( The Middle Five, first published in 1900, is an account...)
( The Omaha Tribe is considered by some anthropologists t...)
( Born on the Omaha Reservation in 1857, Francis La Flesc...)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
In 1922, Francis La Flesche was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
In June 1877, Francis La Flesche married Alice Mitchell , but she died the next year. In 1879, he married a young Omaha woman, Rosa Bourassa. They divorced in 1884.