Those who, especially women, seek to implement cures
for social problems arising from patriarchy's wealth
inequality and unregulated capitalism can only do so
much. Institutional opposition and one's cultural shaping
obstruct however much good luck and passion one
employs. The mistakes a reformer deeply regrets, her
failure to achieve only partial success of what she
envisions are nonetheless valuable; those lessons augment,
however unintentionally, what the reformer does manage
to achieve.
Miss Alice C. Fletcher's writings and recordings from her
three decades of living with Native Americans, in
particular the Omaha Nation, made her internationally
admired and influential. But more importantly, her works
preserve a pre-industrial, nature-based perspective and
ethos. We who are technology-saturated and floundering
under apocalyptic environmental damage can, and to my
mind, must, adopt those ways of valuing nature that Miss
Fletcher documents and admires of the Omaha and other
indigenous nations.
Raised in privilege, well-educated, a public lecturer on
American history, teacher, former temperance and
antitobacco reformer, one of the founding members of the
Association for the Advancement of Women, among other
93achievements, Fletcher was inspired by the then new
science of anthropology when her research led her to the
Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and
Ethnology at Cambridge, Massachusetts. In
approximately 1878, after months of studying the
museum's artifacts under the charismatic influence of
museum director Frederick Ward Putman, she discovered
her life's passion when representatives of the Omaha came
to Boston on a speaking tour to arouse public support for
their right to keep their lands.
In 1881, Fletcher lived with and studied the Sioux on their
reservation, her companion Susette "Bright Eyes" La
Flesche, an Omaha spokeswoman and translator who
aided in the 1879 landmark civil rights trial in which
Mantcunanjin, "Standing Bear, established that Native
Americans are persons within the meaning of the law with
habeas corpus rights.
Fletcher's cultural shaping by the mores of her time may
have caused her regret, and it makes her legacy
problematic however understandably. In 1881, her
involvement with the Carlisle Indian School in
Pennsylvania, where native children were taught "the
accoutrements of civilization," is an example of one of the
now discredited colonialist enterprises of gilding child
theft and native exploitation.
Fletcher's introduction of a system of small loans to
Indians to help them buy land and build houses and her
successful passage of the Dawes Act in Congress
accounted for not only the breakup of Indigenous
reservations but also, by 1887, the theft of forty-six
million acres of Native American's land. By advocating
replacement of communal land ownership (what we call
the commons) with private land ownership Fletcher
intended, with various unintended disastrousconsequences, that American Indians assimilate to the
colonists as their best means of survival.
But Fletcher's writings preserve Indigenous cultural
beliefs and these have universal and timely relevance.
Jane E. Harrison, the British classics scholar who
revolutionized anthropology with her insights into Greek
mythology, respectfully draws on Fletcher's notes. In her
magisterial Themis, in which Harrison traces the
development of religion from primitive beliefs and
practices, Harrison draws on Fletcher's "The Significance
of the Scalp-Lock," to explain the concept of orenda, or
continuum, or mana, which I summarize as follows:
The Omaha believed, that all animate and inanimate forms
and phenomena possess a common and continuous life
similar to human will-power and which they named Wa-
kon-da. Through this force all things are related to
humans and to each other; a relationship maintains
between the seen and the unseen, the dead and the living,
and between the fragment of anything and its entirety.
We experience this in the quotidian. To hold an autumn
leaf in one's hand is to feel and, I assert, to be, connected
to its tree, to the revolution of the sun through the seasons,
to the earth that grew the tree, and to the otherwise
incomprehensible vastness and meaning of the universe,
i.e., "to find the world in a grain of sand."
Miss Alice Fletcher's heart was certainly in the right place,
her intentions and commitment unassailably admirable,
and her writings, musical documentation and recordings
are invaluable. As well, what we know of her life (she
burned her private papers) helps us understand the nature
of the world she had to adapt to.
In her preface to her last writings, "Indian Games and
Dances," she wrote, "Living with my Indian friends I
95found I was a stranger in my native land. As time went on
the outward aspect of nature remained the same but a
change was wrought in me. I learned to hear the echoes of
a time when every living thing, even the sky had a voice.
That voice devoutly heard by the ancient people of
America I desired to make audible to others." One can
gauge the health and sustainability of a society by the
nature of that society's games (which include war) and
dances. A fletcher is a maker of arrows, and Alice
Fletcher hits the existential target of our times.