By David L. Bristow
This is a preview of an article that will appear in the Spring 2026 issue of Nebraska History magazine. “Household Plus” NSHS members receive four magazine issues per year.
A reporter for the Chicago Inter Ocean apparently got more than he bargained for when he approached the shy young woman known as Bright Eyes.
Inshtatheamba (“Bright Eyes”), also known as Susette La Flesche Tibbles, is remembered as the interpreter for Standing Bear, the Ponca chief who successfully challenged the government’s attempt to force him back to Indian Territory.[1] The case was the first in which a federal court ruled that an Indian was a person under the meaning of the law.
Bright Eyes is significant in her own right. Her talents and formal education allowed her to communicate with non-Native audiences in ways that Standing Bear and other traditional leaders could not. While observing the proprieties expected of educated white women, she used her understanding of US law and culture to challenge American audiences on the basis of their own stated values and political ideals.
Inshtatheamba (“Bright Eyes”), also known as Susette La Flesche Tibbles. NSHS RG2737-PH0-9
Born in Bellevue in 1854—the year Nebraska Territory was opened to white settlement—Bright Eyes was one of seven children of Joseph “Iron Eye” La Flesche, the last traditional chief of the Omahas. She learned English at the Presbyterian Mission school on the Omaha reservation, and later graduated from the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies in Elizabeth, New Jersey. While in New Jersey she wrote several (non-extant) essays on Native rights for the New York Herald before returning home to teach on the reservation. Her association with Standing Bear made her known as a lecturer, and also introduced her to Omaha Herald editor and Ponca ally Thomas Tibbles, who she married in 1881. She later wrote for the Omaha World-Herald and other papers about the Ghost Dance movement, the Wounded Knee Massacre, and other topics. She and Tibbles were living in Bancroft, Nebraska, when she died in 1903.[2]
Following Standing Bear’s famous 1879 trial, Bright Eyes and Tibbles accompanied the Ponca chief on a national speaking tour. There the shy twenty-five-year-old served as interpreter and reluctantly learned to become a compelling speaker. Unfortunately, newspaper reports usually focused on Standing Bear while giving only vague summaries of Bright Eyes’ speeches.
Standing Bear, his wife, and one of his sons, 1870s. NSHS RG2066-PH5-2
In Chicago, a reporter for the Inter-Ocean newspaper visited Standing Bear’s group. With chairs arranged in the circle, the reporter listened as Standing Bear politely explained how the court had set him free but had not restored the Poncas’ wrongfully taken land. The Ponca chief asked “all Christian people to help me get it back.”[3]
Unusually, the article then devotes most of its space to a follow-up interview with Bright Eyes, revealing the young woman’s forthright and passionate side, and demonstrating why audiences quickly came to regard her as such a compelling advocate for her people. Here is the complete interview, reprinted for the first time (as far as we know) since November 1879:
The Western Progress (Spring Hill, KS), Nov. 13, 1879.
The Interview
Bright Eyes did not let the reporter off so easily, and proposed to show up the wrongs done the Indians without mincing matters. The Omahas, of which tribe she is a member, speak the same language as the Poncas, many of whom are now in their vicinity, having escaped from the Indian Territory.
“What specific wrongs do you complain of,” asked the reporter, after a few preliminaries.
“We, that is, the Omahas,” she replied, and she shut a small volume of poems she was reading, and folded her hands in her lap with a single forefinger inserted between the leaves to keep the place, “we complain that we have not anything to say about the way in which our money should be expended. We have an annuity of about $8 or $9 apiece a year, and the agents invest it for us in what the Government thinks we need. It is our money. It was the price of our land.”
“Do you want each person to draw his share and spend it as he pleases?”
“Oh no. It is better invested as a whole, for the good of the tribe, but we want some attention paid to our wishes in the matter. Now, for example, some years ago, when Mr. T. T. Gillingham was our agent, he went and had an infirmary built. It cost $6,000, and was paid for out of our money. We did not need it. We did not want it. It was never occupied until at last some white people who had no homes went into it. The Indians, when they are sick, are taken care of by their friends. They would not go into an infirmary.[4] This is only one case of the utter disregard that has always been shown the wishes of the Indians by men who handle their money. Now, I wanted some object books and other things for the school I was teaching in, so that young Indians could be taught English more readily. The agent applied to the department, and now, after six months, nothing has been heard of it. That is simply a specimen.”
“You do not claim that there is any personal violation of properties by the agents?”
“Yes, I do,” and now there was blood in her eye. “I would like to know what right an Indian agent had to open a letter I may write to a friend or receive. Not done? Yes, indeed, it is done every day. They don’t care for postal laws. If we have no rights, what does the fourteenth amendment mean? Are Indians all the people in this country who have no rights? Now, have the United States authorities the legal privilege to come right into this room, arrest me, put me under guard of a soldier, and send me back to my reservation?”
The supposition was so ridiculous that the interviewer laughed, but the young lady insisted that she did more than half expect to be turned over to a soldier, to be taken back before the day was over.[5]
“Your soldiers,” she continued, “are just kept to fight the Indians and quell disturbances that the interior department has caused. Then, if an Indian kills a white man, you go and kill all the tribe you can find.”
“Our soldiers only kill Indians in open battle,” mildly interrupted the reporter.
“They kill men, women, and children,” affirmed the eloquent young lady, “and you cannot deny it, for it is true.”
“But the Indian women fight like tigers, it is reported.” “So do white women when their homes are attacked, their husbands being killed and their children being murdered. All history of the world from the beginning applauds the courage of women who, when necessity demanded it, were ready to fight to the end for their homes or their country.”
“But you are more barbarous in war than we, and you shock the public by the atrocity upon captives and the bodies of the dead.”
“You never hear but one side. We have no newspapers to tell our story. I tell you the soldiers do things with the prisoners or dead as horrible as any Indian could think of. Then your people are almost always the aggressor. I’ll tell you a case I know of. Two young white men met an Indian with a basket of potatoes. One of them said he would like to have it to say when he went home at the East that he had shot an Indian. The other dared him to shoot this one. He drew a revolver and shot him. The Indian was an Omaha. Oh, I tell you if he had been a Sioux or a Cheyenne you would have heard from it. But we knew we would gain nothing, and nothing was done.”
“Well, what do you propose to do?”
“I propose that you white people treat us on a platform of plain honesty, and let us be citizens. We now are farmers, and are doing well. We want to stay there, and want assurance that we can live like other farmers. We have deposed the chiefs, and want to be just like any other citizens of the State.”
Concluding Thoughts: “Law is Liberty”
In her introduction to The Ponca Chiefs, Thomas Tibbles’ 1880 book about the Standing Bear case, Bright Eyes wrote that she wanted the American people to hear the Poncas’ story because, “The people are the power which move the magistrates who administer the laws,” which is about as succinct a definition of democracy as one could ask for.
“It is a little thing,” she continued, “a simple thing, which my people ask of the nation whose watchword is liberty; but it is endless in its consequences. They ask for liberty, and law is liberty.”
Thus, in a few sentences she distilled the essence of America’s founding documents. In their speeches Standing Bear and Bright Eyes described multiple instances in which power was used against them without justification and without recourse. Bright Eyes saw clearly that the central purpose of constitutional government is its protection from arbitrary power. This is why Standing Bear went to court to establish his personhood under the law—because, as Bright Eyes so succinctly phrased it, “law is liberty.”
See also: “Chief Standing Bear and the Declaration of Independence“
Notes:
[1] It is not certain that Bright Eyes was Standing Bear’s interpreter during the trial itself. See Ed Zimmer, “Listening to Standing Bear, Or, Quibbles with Tibbles,” Nebraska History 103, no. 3 (Fall 2022): 123.
[2] Erin E. Pedigo, “‘The Gifted Pen’: The Journalism Career of Susette La Flesche Tibbles (1854-1903),” (2011). Theses from the College of Journalism and Mass Communications, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/journalismdiss/13; “LaFlesche Family [RG2026.AM],” Manuscript Finding Aid, Nebraska State Historical Society.
[3] This and the Bright Eyes interview are from a Chicago Inter Ocean report reprinted as “The Indian’s Story,” The Western Progress (Spring Hill, KS), Nov. 13, 1879: 3.
[4] In 1889, Susette’s younger sister, Susan La Flesche, became the first Native American woman to become a medical doctor; she was class valedictorian at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. As Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte, she established a hospital on the Omaha Reservation in Walthill, Nebraska. See Joe Starita, A Warrior of the People: How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America’s First Indian Doctor (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2016).
[5] The reporter is apparently being ironic or playing devil’s advocate; the first part of the article describes the similar circumstances of Standing Bear’s arrest earlier that year.
