Sloan, Thomas Louis (14 May 1863–10 September 1940), Omaha tribal member, attorney, and Indian activist, was born to a mixed-race father, William E. Sloan, and a non-Indian mother, name unknown, in St. Louis, Missouri. At a young age he was orphaned and went to live with his paternal grandmother, Margaret Sloan, on the Omaha Indian Reservation in Nebraska. Margaret was the daughter of Michael Barada, a non-Indian man, and Taeglaha Haciendo, a woman of the Omaha tribe, making Thomas one-eighth Omaha. Reservation officials considered him a troublemaker and jailed him after he accused agents of cheating the tribe financially. He was later sent to the Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1886, where Captain Richard Henry Pratt had started the Indian boarding school system in 1878. Sloan excelled at Hampton and graduated as valedictorian in 1889. He decided not to attend Yale law school after graduation and returned to the Omaha Reservation....
