By: Akanksha
Toy giant Mattel recently announced and released a new Barbie doll in honor of Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte, a member of the Omaha Tribe and the first Native American woman to earn a medical degree in the United States. The doll was unveiled on Monday, November 9, at an event hosted by the Picotte Center at Umonhon Nation Public School in Macy, Nebraska, and was set to be showcased at an event at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha on Wednesday, November 11. Launched as the next addition to the Barbie Inspiring Women series, which pays homage to courageous women who paved the way for generations of girls to dream bigger than ever before, the tribute recognizes her dedication to health care, Native American land rights, public improvements, and the underserved Omaha community. Mattel collaborated with Picotte’s great-granddaughter, Susan Picotte, and the Picotte Center to sculpt the doll in her likeness, with Carlyle Nuera serving as the lead doll designer for Barbie Signature and Sal Velasquez designing the packaging.
The Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte Barbie Inspiring Doll (SKU#: JBJ30) is listed for $38 through Mattel Creations. Built on an original articulated body under the Black Label, the doll is dressed in an outfit inspired by her era and her bronze sculpture in Nebraska. She wears a black-and-white dress reminiscent of 19th-century fashion, paired with a colorful, traditional Omaha Nation (Umonhon Nation) shawl and a medical bag in hand. The package includes the doll, one medical bag, one doll stand, since the Barbie doll cannot stand alone, and a Certificate of Authenticity.
As noted on the Mattel Shop product page, “Girls Need more role models like Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte because imagining they can be anything is just the beginning. Actually seeing that they can makes all the difference.”
The doll joins the Barbie Inspiring Women collection alongside other trailblazers, including Native American ballerina Maria Tallchief. Speaking about the new doll in a statement reported by Native News Online, her great-granddaughter Susan Picotte said, “As a nurse and Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte’s great-granddaughter, I’m so proud to see her story shared with a new generation through Barbie. She was a role model for the women in our family and dedicated her life to improving the health and well-being of her people. I’m honored to carry her name, and I hope this doll shows girls how one person’s commitment to helping others can make a lasting difference.”
Speaking about the launch, Elizabeth Lovejoy Brown, the current Executive Director of the Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte Center, also told KETV that the Center was excited to see her honored by Barbie with this Inspiring Women doll and hoped she would continue to inspire generations of Native children.
Along with unveiling the new doll, Mattel announced that its Barbie Dream Gap Project will make a financial donation to the Advancing Indigenous Science and Engineering Society (AISES) to support its AUNTIE Tech Collective.
The collective equips Native American women and girls with the skills, support, and community needed to thrive in technology fields. To date, the AUNTIE Tech Collective has directly served 180 Native American girls and reached more than 250,000 girls and families through its broader programming and resources.
Born in a tipi in the remote Nebraska territory during the waning weeks of the Civil War on June 17, 1865, Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte was the youngest child of Chief Joseph La Flesche (also known as Pierre La Flesche or Iron Eye), the last formal chief of the Omaha Tribe, and his wife Mary Gale (One Woman, or Hinnaugsnew, meaning Old Woman), both of whom had Native American and European ancestry. As detailed by the Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte Center, Omaha means “to go against the current,” a name given because the tribe had gone upriver when migrating to the Nebraska Territory, a fitting description for Susan, who spent her life going “against the current.”
Growing up on the Omaha reservation, she learned the customs, language, dances, and songs of her people, while also witnessing the poor conditions they lived in and the impact it had on their health.
According to the Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte, a childhood experience shaped her decision to become a physician: she witnessed a sick, elderly Native woman die after a local white doctor refused to visit and provide care because she was Native, saying that, it was only an Indian, it did not matter. This defining moment motivated her to become a doctor for all people, Indian and White.
Susan La Flesche was initially educated and commenced her studies of English at a Christian mission School on her reservation. Her father, Joseph, encouraged his children, including Susan and her sisters Rosalie, Marguerite, to learn English and white social norms at school, hoping their education would enable them to become leaders capable of managing interactions with settlers and defending Omaha land. Following her time at the mission school, she went East to study at the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies in New Jersey, a well-known private boarding school in the late 19th century.
After completing her studies there, she returned to her reservation and began teaching. She soon resumed her education and enrolled at the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, where she graduated in 1886. She then applied to medical school and enrolled at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the first medical college in the U.S. to offer degrees to women.
On March 14, 1889, she graduated at the top of her class as valedictorian.1 While she could suture wounds, deliver babies, and treat diseases, as a woman, she could not vote, nor she called herself a citizen under American law because she was an Indian.
According to an extract from the Southern Workman archived by the National Library of Medicine, Dr. Walker, one of the principal lecturers of the college, spoke of her at commencement: "Thoughtful of a service to her people, child though she was, she permits not the magnitude of her task to stay the inspiration, but bravely, thoughtfully, diligently pursues the course, and to day receives her fitting reward. All this without a precedent. She will stand among her people as the first woman physician. Surely we may record with joy such courage, constancy and ability.”
After completing an internship at the Woman’s Hospital in Philadelphia, she returned to the Omaha reservation to work as a physician at the local government school, the Omaha Agency Indian School working for the government’s Office of Indian Affairs from August 1889 to October 1893. From 1891 to 1893, she also served in a dual workload as a “medical missionary” for her tribe, designated by the Woman’s National Indian Association, before resigning in 1893 for health reasons. She married Henry Picotte in the summer of 1894, added his last name to her own, and the couple welcomed two sons. Despite getting married and having children, she continued to work, which was in stark contrast to the social norms prevalent in the late 19th century.
In her lifetime, Dr. Picotte cared for more than 1,200 (over 1,240) patients and travelled across 1,350 square miles of open prairie, traveling across the length and breadth of the reservation to make house calls on her favorite horse, Pie, or by horse-drawn buggy, in addition to receiving patients in her office. Throughout the fall of 1905, a lantern illuminated the front window of her house in Bancroft, Nebraska; its warm glow signaled to fellow tribal members that she was at home to treat illnesses ranging from the flu to tuberculosis. For poor families, her responsibilities extended beyond medical treatment: she prescribed nourishing meals, brought food to families, cooked meals, and stayed overnight at the homes of critically ill patients.
She also worked to prevent illness through public health education and social reform. She was involved in the temperance movement, encouraging people to stop consuming alcohol.
To combat diseases like tuberculosis, which disproportionately affected Native Americans,1 she promoted good hygiene and food sanitation, banned the sharing of communal drinking cups, and insisted on window screens for good ventilation and to keep disease-carrying flies out of homes. These simple changes made a significant difference in the mortality rates of her people.
A central goal for Dr. Picotte was establishing a hospital on the reservation so patients needing surgery would not have to travel to Omaha or Sioux City. According to the Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte Center, “She envisioned wide-open spaces with lots of windows and sunlight. And there would be lilacs. That she was sure of.”
After the Commissioner of Indian Affairs refused to provide monetary assistance for the construction of a hospital for Indigenous people on the Omaha reservation, she built the facility using private funding. The hospital in Walthill, Nebraska, known as Walthill Hospital or Memorial Hospital, opened in 1913. It was the first hospital on the Omaha reservation and served both Native and white patients without question. The facility included two general wards, five private rooms, a maternity ward, and an operating room.
She died at her home in Walthill on September 18, 1915, at age 49, from complications after surgery. As recorded in her obituary on the National Library of Medicine website, she “had devoted her life to the interests of her tribe, by whom she was regarded as the leader” and was a member of the Nebraska State Medical Society.
Walthill Hospital was declared a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1993, and following a multi-year restoration project, the historic facility reopened as the Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte Center in June 2025, operating as a community health and mental health clinic, memorial museum, and cultural center.
Beyond medical care, Dr. Picotte helped tribal members navigate politics, business, and the fallout of federal allotment policies that made it difficult for them to retain claims to their land or access profits from lands they leased as settlers pushed into territories surrounding the reservation. As quoted by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Susan once reflected of her people, “They need help of all kinds from anyone who can give it.”
Records at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives (NAA) also reveal an underrepresented dimension of the work done by Susan and her sister Rosalie, a manager of the tribe’s business affairs: their contributions to anthropology.1 Their mother, Mary Gale, had lived through the 1854 treaty when the tribe ceded its homelands east of the Missouri River and trekked northward to a reservation near Decatur, Nebraska, without receiving the promised payment and protection the U.S. government promised. Because Mary Gale preferred to speak Omaha, she passed on her knowledge of Omaha traditions by telling stories to her daughters.
In October 1905, Susan recorded her mother’s account of an artistic tradition and translated it from Omaha to English, describing the detailed process of quillwork from the moment a woman plucked the quill off a porcupine to its embroidery in a moccasin. Susan sent her translation to her half-brother, Francis La Flesche, an employee of the Smithsonian Institution who spent decades collaborating with anthropologist Alice Fletcher, who wrote the 1911 book ‘The Omaha Tribe.’1
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During a period of “intense ethnographic examination” in the 1800s and 1900s, most white researchers believed Native Americans rested on the brink of extinction and portrayed Indigenous people as relics of the past. Critical of these studies, Alice Fletcher and Francis La Flesche relied exclusively on stories from Omaha people, aiming, as noted by the Smithsonian, “to make so far as possible the Omaha his interpreter.”1 Even so, their peers initially dismissed the approach, with one critic scoffing, “The Indian as his own interpreter is not an unbiased witness,”.
Throughout the drafting of The Omaha Tribe, Fletcher and Francis relied on Susan and Rosalie to ask their mother questions and translate her community-based expertise. While some passages in The Omaha Tribe are nearly identical to Susan’s translation, scholarship of the era often displaced Indigenous women into footnotes or off pages entirely, and Mary Gale’s name does not appear in the text.1 By deciding which details to offer or withhold, sometimes giving brief answers, and other times recounting rituals step by step, Mary Gale protected the Omaha tribe’s private rituals and controlled the knowledge anthropologists could access.
By translating and writing down their mother’s stories alongside her own publications addressing reformers and policymakers, including Alice Fletcher, who swayed Washington legislators' policies on Omaha land distribution, Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte helped shape the historical record and protect the future of the Omaha tribe.
Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte, who spent most of her 49 years going against the tide to help the Omaha people, left a lasting legacy. Her legacy is being passed on to a new generation, as the historic Walthill Hospital has now reopened as the Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte Center. Mattel has also honored her by including her in its Barbie Inspiring Women series.
Review of Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1905–1906: The Omaha Tribe, by Alice C. Fletcher and Francis La Flesche. The American Historical Review 17, no. 3 (April 1912): 634–36.
https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/17/3/634/15239?redirectedFrom=fulltext.
Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte Center. "Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte | Her Life, Legacy & Impact." Accessed November 13, 2026. https://picottecenter.org/dr-susan.
National Library of Medicine. "Susan La Flesche Picotte (1865-1915)." "If You Knew the Conditions...": Health Care to Native Americans. Accessed November 13, 2026. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/if_you_knew/ifyouknew_12.html.
Smithsonian American Women's History Museum. "How Susan and Rosalie La Flesche Made Omaha History." January 9, 2025. https://womenshistory.si.edu/blog/how-susan-and-rosalie-la-flesche-made-omaha-history.
(OG/APC/MSM)