The Omaha People and Their Homeland

The people who gave the city to the east its name were here first. And unlike most Native nations in the region, they never entirely left. The Omaha Tribe, who call themselves Umonhon, meaning upstream people, have lived in northeastern Nebraska and along the Missouri River for centuries. They are still here today, on a reservation centered around the town of Macy.

The Omaha occupied a particular position in the contact era between Native and settler worlds. They were sophisticated traders who had long-standing relationships with other plains nations. They negotiated a series of treaties with the United States beginning in the eighteen hundreds, treaties that, unlike the experience of many neighbors, left them on at least a portion of their ancestral land, though reduced significantly from earlier territory. The Omaha Reservation was established by treaty in eighteen fifty-four.

What makes the Omaha story distinctive in the wider history of Nebraska is the family that emerged from it in the late nineteenth century. Joseph La Flesche, also known as Iron Eye, was the last recognized chief of the Omaha, and he deliberately positioned his children at the intersection of two worlds. His daughter Susette La Flesche, known as Bright Eyes, became a nationally recognized speaker and journalist who traveled the country in eighteen seventy-nine and eighteen eighty alongside Standing Bear, translating his story for white audiences and arguing before audiences in Boston and New York that Native Americans had legal rights. Her sister Susan La Flesche Picotte became the first Native American woman to earn a medical degree, in eighteen eighty-nine, and spent her career treating patients on the Omaha Reservation from a practice that stretched across a wide reservation.

The reservation at Macy is about thirty miles north and east of here. The Umonhon are still there. Their language, Omaha-Ponca, is undergoing active revitalization efforts, with tribal members working to pass it to younger generations.