ALICE CUNNINGHAM FLETCHER, ANTHROPOLOGIST AND INDIAN RIGHTS REFORMER

Alice Fletcher was born in 1838 of a middle-class family from New York. She became interested in ethnology and at the age of forty-three went west to make a scientific study of the plains tribes. Her experiences among the reservation Indians confirmed her desire to contribute as an anthropologist and convinced her of the need to change the conditions in which the Indians lived.;After a decade living among these tribes, Fletcher retired from active government service to devote herself to ethnology. She was supported by a lifetime fellowship through Harvard University and by the pay which came for her publications and projects for various government agencies. For the next thirty years, until her death in 1923, Fletcher wrote for the popular press on Indian Affairs, and produced a substantial number of scholarly monographs on Indian mythology, ritual and tribal structure. She was a well-known authority on Indian music. Her books The Hako and The Omaha Tribe are classic studies of their kind.;Fletcher was an active participant in the professionalization of anthropology. She was a member and President of the Washington anthropological societies; she contributed to the organization of the national society and its journal; she held the prestigious Vice-Presidential Chair of Section H of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She helped advance academic anthropology by aiding in the establishment of the anthropology department at the University of California at Berkeley, and the School of American Research at Santa Fe.;Fletcher was counted among the most outstanding ethnologists of her day. She was unique among them for her melding of scientific expertise and humanistic reform. She participated in the Indian reform movement as a scientist and government representative when no one combined these roles. Concern for the Indians affected her ethnographic work just as scientific objectivity brought her credibility in the Indian movement. Fletcher's empathy and her emphasis on the native view were among her greatest strengths.;As a result, Fletcher joined with reformers committed to a program of individual land ownership to replace the reservation system. She was well suited to the task, since she brought field experienced backed by scientific purpose to the cause of reform. Fletcher lobbied in Washington for enactment of severalty legislation, and was successful in seeing an allotment bill for the Omaha passed on August 7, 1882. The Bureau of Indian Affairs appointed her Allotting Agent to the Omaha. As a result of her success in this work and the passage of the Dawes Act of 1887 which enacted a general severalty policy, Fletcher was also appointed to allot the Winnebago and Nez Perce.