Alice Cunningham Fletcher was an American ethnologist, anthropologist and scientist. She also studied and documented American Indian culture.
Background
Alice Cunningham Fletcher was born in Havana, Cuba March 15, 1838 after her family traveled there in an effort to improve her father’s health. Both of her parents were from wealthy New England families – her father was a New York lawyer and her mother came from a prominent Boston business family. Little documentation of her early life remains. After her father died in 1839, the family moved to Brooklyn Heights.
Education
Fletcher was enrolled in the Brooklyn Female Academy, that was considered as an exclusive school for the elite.
Career
In early adulthood, Fletcher taught school for several years and lectured occasionally. By the 1870s she had become very active in upper class feminist and suffrage groups in New York City. She was a member of the women’s club Sorosis, and a founder and secretary of the Association for the Advancement of Women in 1873. Fletcher read extensively in archaeology and ethnology. She began working with anthropologist Frederic Ward Putnam, Director of the Peabody Museum of Archaelogy and Ethnology at Harvard University, where she became interested in American Indian culture. By 1878 she was working in the field with Indian remains in the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys. She became a member of the Archaeological Institute of America in 1879 and by 1882 she became assistant in ethnology at the Peabody Museum. In 1881 Fletcher traveled to Nebraska to live among the Omaha, investigating their customs and traditions under the auspices of the Peabody Museum. Accompanying Fletcher on this trip were Omaha writer-activist Susette La Flesche and her half brother Francis La Flesche, with whom Fletcher began a 40-year mother-son relationship. Fletcher and Francis La Flesche began working together in Washington DC in 1881. Fletcher collaborated with the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution on her research, and La Flesche also worked there for a time. In 1882, the Bureau of Indian Affairs hired Alice Fletcher to survey all Omaha lands and assess their suitability for allotment. At one point, she feared that the Omaha were about to lose their lands. She traveled to Washington, where she helped draft a bill to apportion Omaha tribal lands into smaller plots, or allotments, and lobbied in Congress until the law was passed. In 1883 she was appointed by President Chester A. Arthur to supervise the apportioning of Omaha lands.
Working through the Women’s National Indian Association, Fletcher introduced a system by which small sums of money were loaned to Indians who wanted to buy tracts of land and build houses. She also helped secure a loan for Susan La Flesche, Susette’s sister, to finance her studies at medical school. Graduating at the top of her class, Susan La Flesche became the first Native American woman doctor in the United States. Alice Cunningham Fletcher helped write and pass the Dawes Act of 1887, which imposed a system of private land ownership on Indian tribes for whom communal land ownership had always been their way of life. Individual Indians became eligible to receive land allotments of up to 160 acres. At the time, Fletcher thought this would allow American Indians to assimilate to European-American ways, which she believed was their best means of survival. From 1899 to 1916, Fletcher was on the editorial board of the American Anthropologist, to which she was also a frequent contributor, and in 1908 she led in founding the School of American Archaeology in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Fletcher achieved enormous professional prominence. She was also active in professional organizations, serving as president of the Anthropological Society of Washington and in 1905 as first woman president of American Folklore Society. She was vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a longtime member of the Literary Society of Washington. She died on April 6, 1923 in Washington.
Views
Fletcher and other champions of allotment believed that as long as the tribe owned the land, individuals had no incentive to work and make economic advances. They feared that as long as Indians held their lands collectively, neighboring whites would not respect their ownership of the land.
Quotations:
"Now, how can Indians do better, hemmed in as they are at the agency, deprived of their native life, poor enough but having its compensation and not fully introduced to our ways, they are stranded between two modes of life. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
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".
"From an anthropological perspective, the chief importance of Fletcher’s work lies in her application of the scientific rigor of archaeology to the field work of ethnology. She attempted in her observations of living Indians to move beyond the purely descriptive and impressionistic toward categorizing specific aspects of Indian culture and economic practices. Like almost all anthropologists of her day, she assumed that cultures could be placed on a continuum of savagery and civilization, and that the more closely Indians mimicked white culture the more civilized they had become. "
Connections
Francis La Flesche and Fletcher collaborated professionally and also had an informal mother-son relationship. La Flesche lived with her as her adopted son, although legally he wasn't her son.