The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance

3. “The Square Idea”

[103] 3. “The Square Idea” The presence of Alice Fletcher, a lame, middle-aged white woman in smoked glasses and a flower-trimmed bonnet sitting under an umbrella in her wagon on the southwestern border of the Nez Perce Reservation , signaled that the federal expeditions undertaken to allot lands to Indians were of a quite different order than the great western surveying expeditions now more than twenty years past. Those earlier surveys had enabled territorial conquest by cataloguing resources in land, water, and minerals, foregrounding the unique physical features of specific western places. Allotment, on the other hand, aimed to transform the territories containing those resources into states united within a national grid of political administration and economic production. Thus the allotting enterprise conceptualized land as a space that could be rationalized, made visible upon maps that enabled its division into identically sized and shaped parcels, the boundaries of which could be described mathematically and which could be bought and sold by individual owners. The geographic attributes of the land—its topography, its climate, its amenability to cultivation—were less important than the rationalized description that would enable it to be owned, leased, bought, and sold. To highlight the different ways of understanding a culture’s relation to land, I use the relational distinctions between space and place as they are articulated by Arif Dirlik. For Dirlik, place is “[grounded] [104] land topography,” and place-based thinking recognizes the interrelationship of the land and its inhabitants as they move over it, work within it, and celebrate rituals that connect them to it. “Groundedness,” according to Dirlik, “calls for a definition of what is to be included in the place from within the place —some control over the conduct and organization of everyday life, in other words—rather than from above, from those placeless abstractions such as capital, the nation-state,” or, in this case, in the United States Office of Indian Affairs. Space, by contrast, transforms specificity into abstraction for the purpose of establishing equivalent values.1 A specific location, such as the Nez Perce Reservation, characterized by canyons, mountains , forests, rivers, and mineral deposits, may thus be spatialized— divided into rectilinear plots of equal size by procedures such as surveying and mapping. The resulting boundaries are marked on the land by fences and surveyors’ corners, and the ownership of each segment is documented in a massive bureaucratic written record comprising plats and maps, birth and death records, deeds, and evidence of land transfers. In the resulting archive, maps and deeds substitute for lands and peoples and support the capitalist exploitations of new territory by establishing its ownership, its relative value, and its alienability. The Bureaucratic Imaginary Encounters “the hard facts in the case” Allotment was a policy of spatialization. Its cerebral and disembodied processes were to be carried out in lands already familiar and applied to people now pacified, and its implementation did not expose its agents to extremes of physical danger. Alice Fletcher, for example , traveled to and from Idaho Territory in a Union Pacific palace car and communicated with her employers by letter, telephone, and telegraph. She supervised the survey, documented the assignment of land, kept a written record of her work, and taught those who received allotments the basics of property ownership within a capitalist system. In sum, allotment entailed just the kinds of tasks at which women were thought to excel: establishing interpersonal relationships , benevolently supervising instruction, keeping track of the minutiae of names, dates, and family relationships, and managing a [105] “the square idea” paper archive. These tasks could be done in offices, parlors, churches, and schoolrooms. Most important, because allotment was a means of establishing the dollar value of land, its agents must demonstrate the most unimpeachable honesty and spotless character—again, qualities more likely to be connected with women than with landhungry white men who were settlers, developers, or adventurers. Yet as I demonstrate, Fletcher’s work was necessarily both physical and cerebral, and the degree of her objectivity is a matter of some debate. Near Lapwai lay most of the prime farming land of the reservation . Here Fletcher planned to begin her work, assigning tidy rectilinear plots to individual allottees.2 The raw materials were at hand: a reservation with boundaries stipulated by prior treaty, and whereon allotment had already been partially implemented; a set of prior surveys and maps; a...