Alice Cunningham Fletcher

Career

Alice Cunningham Fletcher was born in Havana, Cuba, on March 15, 1838, and died on April 6, 1923. She became an American ethnologist, anthropologist, and social scientist who focused on Native American cultures. However, she also strongly supported policies that pushed for Native American assimilation, including the Indian boarding school system and the shift to private land ownership for Indigenous peoples.

Early life and education

Her father was a New York lawyer, and her mother came from a prominent Boston family. They moved to Cuba hoping the climate would help her father’s illness, but he died in 1839. After that, the family settled in Brooklyn Heights, New York City, where Fletcher attended the Brooklyn Female Academy, an exclusive school for the elite.

To support herself, Fletcher taught school and later became a public lecturer. She argued that anthropologists and archaeologists were the best people to uncover ancient human history.

She also pushed for educating Native Americans so they could gain what she called the “accoutrements of civilization.” Frederic Ward Putnam sparked her interest in American Indian culture, and she began working with him at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. She studied remnants of Indian civilizations in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and joined the Archaeological Institute of America in 1879. Starting in 1881, she was involved with the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where Native children learned English, arithmetic, and skills meant to turn them into integrated American citizens.

That same year, Fletcher made an unprecedented trip to live with and study the Sioux on their reservation, representing the Peabody Museum. She was accompanied by Susette “Bright Eyes” La Flesche, an Omaha spokeswoman who had interpreted for Standing Bear during his landmark 1879 civil rights trial, and journalist Thomas Tibbles, who had helped publicize Standing Bear’s cause. This trip also marked the start of Fletcher’s 40-year professional and personal relationship with Francis La Flesche, Susette’s half brother. They collaborated on work and shared an informal mother-son bond, living together in a Washington, D.C., house from 1890 onward.

Fletcher took on several special appointed positions. In 1883, she was a special agent allotting lands to the Miwok tribes. In 1884, she prepared an exhibit for the World Cotton Centennial showing the progress of civilization among North American Indians over the previous 25 years. In 1886, she visited Alaska and the Aleutian Islands for the commissioner of education.

In 1887, she was appointed a U.S. special agent to allot lands among the Winnebago and Nez Perce under the Dawes Act. She became an assistant in ethnology at the Peabody Museum in 1882, and in 1891 she received the Thaw fellowship, which was created specifically for her. She was active in professional societies, serving as president of the Anthropological Society of Washington and, in 1905, as the first woman president of the American Folklore Society.

She was also vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a longtime member of the Literary Society of Washington.

Through the Women’s National Indian Association, Fletcher set up a system of small loans so Native Americans could buy land and houses. She also helped secure a loan for Susan LaFlesche, an Omaha woman, to attend medical school. LaFlesche graduated at the top of her class and became the first Native American woman doctor in the United States. Fletcher later helped write, lobby for, and administer the Dawes Act of 1887, which broke up reservations and distributed communal land into individual household parcels.

Author

In 1888, she published “Indian Education and Civilization,” a special report for the Bureau of Education. She was a pioneer in studying American Indian music, starting with a paper she gave in 1893 at the Chicago Anthropological Conference. In 1898, at the Congress of Musicians in Omaha during the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, she read several essays on North American Indian songs, and a number of Omaha Indians sang their native melodies. This work led to her book “Indian Story and Song from North America” (1900), which explored a stage of development before culture music appeared.

Fletcher also assisted Frederic Ward Putnam in researching Serpents Mound in Ohio and helped raise funds to purchase the site in 1886. The site was donated to the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society in 1900 and is now a National Historic Landmark. In 1930, Margaret Mead began working with the Omaha tribe but focused on modern aspects because of the extensive work Fletcher had already done. Over her lifetime, Fletcher worked with and for the Omaha, Pawnee, Sioux, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Chippewa, Oto, Nez Percé, Ponca, and Winnebago tribes.

Death and legacy

Fletcher became president of the Anthropological Society of Washington in 1903 and the first woman president of the American Folklore Society in 1905. One of her colleagues, Walter Hough, remembered Fletcher as one who, 'Mildly, peaceably, yet with great fortitude...did what she could to advance the cause of science.' Her ashes are interred in the patio wall of the New Mexico Museum of Art behind a bronze plaque with a quote from her. Some of her recordings can be found in the Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology.

Arthur Farwell's String Quartet in A major, Op. 65 The Hako, composed in 1923, was inspired by Fletcher's work. Joan Mark's book about Fletcher, A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fletcher and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988) received the 1989 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize. Fletcher Nunatak in Antarctica is named after her.