When junior Angelica Solomon arrived to listen to speaker Joe Starita at the Native American Symposium, she thought she’d be getting lunch and maybe listen to something interesting—she had no idea that she’d hear about her great-grandmother’s plight in becoming the first female Native American doctor.

“Before this I didn’t really know a lot of details,” said Solomon. “They just said that she was the first woman who was a nurse or doctor. He gave me details! It was just kinda cool going back into time and just thinking that this was my grandmother.”

On Nov. 30, Starita visited the OASIS Student Lounge to share insights from his new book, “A Warrior of the People,” the biography of Susan La Flesche Picotte. Starita tells the story of La Flesche’s resiliency as a pioneering Native American woman who left her reservation to move across the country and pursue her passion for medicine at a time when top-minds suggested that being a doctor was bad for women’s health.

Rather than avoid pain and suffering, La Flesche sought “to find the purpose and the courage to live out that purpose,” said Starita. After obtaining her medical degree, La Flesche returned to the reservation to care for the Omaha tribe.

“I kinda want to fulfill like what she did, her dream,” said Solomon who is pursuing civil engineering. “I want to go back to my reservation, the Winnebago reservation, and give back as much as I can just like she did. It really hit home to me.”

At the conclusion of the hour, Starita encouraged students to follow La Flesche’s example and take chances. He noted that most of the major advancements for the past two centuries, from vaccines to the light bulb and locomotive, have been the results of American perseverance. His last motivational thought was that you cannot succeed without knowing how to fail—or you need to think bigger.