Alice Cunningham Fletcher

• Alice Fletcher
• Born: March 15, 1838
• Died: April 6, 1923

Anthropologist and reformer of United States Indian policy, was born in Havana, Cuba, where her parents had gone to live in a vain attempt to restore her father’s health. Thomas Gilman Fletcher, who had been a promising lawyer in New York City, died of consumption November 7, 1839. His widow, Lucia Adeline (Jenks) Fletcher, was eventually married again, to Oliver Gardiner. They had no children, so Alice Fletcher’s only sibling was a half-brother from her father’s previous marriage, seven years older than she, and she grew up virtually as an only child.

Fletcher was proud of her ancestry, which on both sides could be traced to English settlers who had come to New England in the 1630s. She was educated in the primary department of the Brooklyn Female Academy (later Packer Collegiate Institute) and in other schools of the “highest standards.” An early photograph taken in Munich while she was on a European tour shows an earnest and soberly dressed young woman with a plain but not unattractive face. Later as she became distinctly plump, her friends often remarked on her resemblance to Queen Victoria.

Fletcher’s first significant reform interest was feminism; later, her concerns also included temperance and antitobacco reform. She was a member of Sorosis, the pioneering New York women’s club, and one of the founders, in 1873, of the Association for the Advancement of Women, a moderate organization interested in getting women to work together “for the benefit of their own sex and society at large.” Fletcher helped to organize the large annual Woman’s Congresses that the association sponsored and there honed her later formidable skills in public speaking and debate, organizing, and fund raising. She was to abandon feminism, however, as soon as she found a cause that more fully engaged her.

Around 1878 financial reversals made it necessary for the first time for Fletcher to earn her living. Inspired by the example of Mary Liver-more, she began a career in public lecturing, speaking on topics in American history. Seeking information for her Lectures on Ancient America, she visited the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There she met the young and energetic director, F. W. Putnam, and became one of his first converts to the new science of anthropology. She spent some months in the museum examining artifacts. Then she met in Boston a party of Omahas on a speaking tour to arouse public sentiment against forced removals of native-American peoples from their lands, and she arranged with them to travel west and camp among the Indians in order to study their life at first hand.

On the Omaha reservation in Nebraska in 1881, Fletcher became caught up in the Omahas’ fears that they might soon be moved to Indian Territory. She helped write a petition to Congress, asking that the Omahas be given individual legal titles to their lands, and then went to Washington to lobby for it. When the act was passed in 1882, Fletcher was hired by the government to make out the land allotments, that is, to assign to each man, woman, and child in the tribe an individual parcel of land.

The allotment work gave Alice Fletcher an unusual opportunity to observe Indian life and the reservation situation, and her concern soon moved beyond land titles to a general conviction that the Indians could survive only by taking on white ways as rapidly as possible. She found support for this view not only in the social evolution theory of Lewis Henry Morgan, but also (for quite different reasons) among some Omahas. She helped Indian children to go away to school at Hampton Institute in Virginia or Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania and arranged for loans to young couples so that they could build frame houses on their lands. In addition to money she raised privately, there was a great increase in federal support for Indian education (from $20,000 in 1877 to almost $3 million in 1900), due in large part to her efforts.

When the Omaha allotments were completed, Fletcher was hired to write a report—Indian Education and Civilization (1888). The report and her own field experience made her one of the nation’s leading experts on Indian affairs, and she became a leader in the campaign to change the nation’s Indian policy. Fletcher and other reformers who met annually at the Lake Mo-honk Conferences of the Friends of the Indians were convinced that the “reservation system” was bad for the Indians because it made them dependent, put them at the mercy of corrupt and inefficient agents, stifled their “development,” and also tied up lands that might be better used. They lobbied successfully for the Dawes Act (1887), the goal of which was to break up reservations as rapidly as possible and merge the Indians into surrounding society as farmers and small tradespeople.

Fletcher was next sent to make land allotments to the Winnebagos and the Nez Percés. Among the latter she encountered intense opposition that served only to stiffen her resolve. When her task was completed, however, she resigned with relief from the Indian Bureau and accepted a lifetime fellowship founded for her at the Peabody Museum in 1890 by Mary C. Thaw.

Fletcher devoted the rest of her life to her anthropological studies, working with Francis La Flesche, an Omaha whom she informally adopted as her son in 1891. Their joint works include “A Study of Omaha Indian Music” (1893) and a classic ethnography, The Omaha Tribe (1911). Fletcher also recorded a long Pawnee ceremony, The Hako (1904).

Fletcher spent her last years in Washington, D.C. She died there, after a stroke, at the age of eighty-five.

Alice Cunningham Fletcher received many professional honors, for she was the first significant woman anthropologist in the United States and one of the leading anthropologists of her generation. Her legacy as a reformer is much more ambiguous, for the Dawes Act is generally regarded as a failure. By 1934, when John Collier reversed the course of federal Indian policy to encourage tribalism, two-thirds of the land that had been given out in allotments was in white hands. Yet she had tried to help a people who in their distress hardly knew where to turn, and within the constraints of her evolutionary views, she had come to have a deep appreciation of Indian life. Above all she tried to help Indians and whites understand one another, for it was a mistrust growing out of ignorance, she believed, that kept them apart.

Fletcher’s papers dating from 1878 are at the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution. Other significant collections are in the Putnam Papers at the Harvard University Archives, the Barrows Papers at Houghton Library, Harvard, the La Flesche Family Papers at the Nebraska State Historical Society, the Dawes Papers at the Library of Congress, and the Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1931). For more recent estimates of her career see the entry in Notable American Women (1971); N. Lurie, “Women in Early American Anthropology,” in J. Helm, ed., Pioneers of American Anthropology (1966); and J. Mark, Four Anthropologists (1980). See also F. E. Hoxie and J. Mark, eds., With the Nez Perces: Alice Fletcher in the Field, 1889-1892 (1980). A partial Fletcher bibliography is included in the obituary by W. Hough in American Anthropologist, April-June 1923. Omitted are many scattered articles in Morning Star and Southern Workman, the publications of the Carlisle Indian School and of the Hampton Institute. Other obituaries are by C. F. Lummis in Art and Archaeology, July 1923, and by F. La Flesche in Science, August 17, 1923.