The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance by Nicole Tonkovich (review)

In presenting a multi-vocal collection of counter-narratives to the official version of the allotment of Nez Perce lands during the period 1889-1892, Nicole Tonkovich usefully recovers both the gendered nature of that story and the long-ignored archive of Nez Perce recollections of their experiences to provide a unique inside perspective on the process. In so doing, The Allotment Plot makes several significant contributions to the history of women's growing participation in the professions of nineteenth-century America, documenting not only Alice Fletcher's emergence as one of the era's most influential ethnographers but also the fascinating women's communication network that tied Fletcher's western fieldwork to a circulating counter-archive of photographs and letters exchanged between Fletcher's assistant E. Jane Gay and women's reform organizations like the Washington Indian Association in the East. The Allotment Plot also illuminates late-nineteenth-century Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) life in new ways; its final chapter richly details the tribe's own archives of the allotment period, exploring personal and family collections of printed memorials, beadwork, newspaper clippings, and photographs in order to put faces and voices to an assimilationist policy that resulted in what the author aptly characterizes as "[t]he tenderly violent pedagogies" of federal Indian policy (193).

The book's title employs the word "plot" in two significant ways. For Tonkovich, plot refers both to the scientific and rationalizing practice of breaking up the land into rectilinear allotments and to the narrativizing practice of the ideology behind this land tenure scheme, one in which "the imperatives of allotment" were portrayed as "feminized and domestic" (119). The Allotment Plot makes a persuasive case that teasing out these seemingly conflicting approaches to implementing the Dawes Act of 1887 (the federal law that required reservation lands be divided up into individual and family tracts) demands that historians explore several different kinds of records and place them in conversation with each other. Tonkovich calls one set of archives "memory palaces," official histories found in state-sponsored libraries and government records that employ "strategic forgetting" in their representation of allotment as a seamless process of assimilation (7, 99). The other group of archives, consisting of what Tonkovich describes as "an unruly assemblage of oral, performative, and documentary sources" (5), opens to view the complex and sometimes contradictory experiences of women like Fletcher and Gay, who were sent out west to administer allotment, and the resistance activities of Nez Perce tribal members, who also collected archives of their own in scrapbooks. Alongside the story of two cutting-edge Euro-American women professionals, The Allotment Plot recounts the activities of literate tribe members like James Rubens and James Stuart, men who attempted to manipulate the narrative of allotment on the Nez Perce reservation toward an affirmation of their tribal sovereignty.

In order to shape this intricately multifaceted thesis about competing narratives and conflicting archives, Tonkovich bookends her study with absorbing interpretations of Fourth of July celebrations on the Nez Perce reservation in 1885, before allotment began, and in 1903, long after Alice Fletcher had supposedly completed her assignment. What is striking about these ceremonies (held on July 4 but coinciding with traditional Nez Perce solstice rituals) is not so much how they mingled Euro-American patriotic activities with traditional Native practices but rather how little they changed over the four years of intense "civilizing" efforts Fletcher lent to her allotment project.

Connecting these framing snapshots of the public performance of Nez Perce community self-understanding are seven chapters in which Tonkovich moves chronologically through the allotment period. The chapters expose at every turn how Fletcher painted a much rosier picture of the project in her official government letters and reports than is found in her private correspondence with her coterie of female philanthropists, as well as in Gay's personal photographic record of how Fletcher's activities on the...