Available Formats
Oo-Ma-Ha-Ta-Wa-Tha and Other Stories
By (Author) Susette La Flesche
By (author) Fannie Reed Griffin
Contributions by Mint Editions
Mint Editions
Mint Editions
3rd August 2021
United States
General
Non Fiction
Hardback
60
Width 127mm, Height 203mm
Oo-Ma-Ha-Ta-Wa-Tah and Other Stories (1898) is a work of history and folklore by Fannie Reed Griffen and Susette La Flesche. Written at the end of a century of devastation, marked by the Western advance of American political, industrial, and military forces, Oo-Ma-Ha-Ta-Wa-Tah and Other Stories preserves as much as it can between the bindings of a book the traditions and stories of the Omaha people. In remembrance of the Omahas, the tribe of Indians after which Omaha city is named, and who, less than fifty years ago, held an uncontested title to the land where Omaha city and the great Trans-Mississippi Exposition is located, this book is dedicated, that the memory of the tribe, its chieftains, its warriors and its maidens might be preserved. Combining biography, historical documents, and folk tales, Oo-Ma-Ha-Ta-Wa-Tah and Other Stories serves as an invaluable record of a proud people. Beginning with the disastrous broken treaty of 1854, Griffen and La Flesche tell the tragic story of the Omahas through the lives of the chiefs who signed it. Concluding with a sampling of entertaining stories inherited from an oral tradition, Oo-Ma-Ha-Ta-Wa-Tah and Other Stories remains a masterpiece of fiction and nonfiction from two groundbreaking and vastly underappreciated figures in American history. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Susette La Flesche and Fannie Reed Griffens Oo-Ma-Ha-Ta-Wa-Tah and Other Stories is a classic work of Native American literature reimagined for modern readers.
Susette La Flesche (1854-1903) was a Native American writer, lecturer, and illustrator. Born to a family of Ponca, Iowa, French, and English ancestry, La Flesche, the daughter of Omaha Chief Joseph La Flesche, was given the name Inshata Theumba, or "Bright Eyes." Raised on the Omaha Reservation, she was sent to a girls' school in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she developed a talent for writing and drawing. She returned to the he home upon graduating to serve as the first American-educated teacher on the Omaha Reservation, where she soon gained a reputation as a political activist and loyal interpreter for Chief Standing Bear. She married abolitionist newspaperman Thomas Tibbles in 1881, and together they toured the country to report on the conditions experienced by Native Americans in a time of genocide and government oppression. She eventually settled on the Omaha Reservation, where she spent the remainder of her life. Fannie Reed Griffen was a biographer and folklorist.