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

4. Ethnographic Knowledge and Native Cartography

[135] 4. Ethnographic Knowledge and Native Cartography As she prepared to return to Idaho for her second summer’s work in 1890, Fletcher was intent upon giving more attention to her ethnological investigations. Such work was, to her way of thinking, entirely congruent with her allotting duties. However, as I demonstrate , the two foci of her work—one cultural and historical, and the other political and progressive—were often at odds. At worst, Fletcher used her scientific work to escape the considerable annoyances of her bureaucratic responsibilities; at best, her scholarly investigations fed her growing realization that Nimiipuu culture and history were intimately tied to the land she had initially seen as a two-dimensional abstraction. Ultimately, local knowledge forced her to seek several important modifications to allotment policy. F. W. Putnam, whose institution and work had benefited from Fletcher’s earlier field work among the Omahas, encouraged her to gather information and artifacts from Nez Perce informants, as well. She assured him she had “already planned” to do so, “and as a beginning Miss Gay photographed the sunken places, the sites of the Ancient winter dwellings and also the old graveyard. Of these I will write you when I send you the photos. I have beside the articles I mentioned a memorial staff I took from a mound of stones—the only one I saw on the reservation—and I will send that to you with an account of the religious ceremony of which it is the memorial. I [136] will do all I can to preserve materials for you.”1 Letters such as this make clear that as she went into the field with those who were to receive title to their lands, travel Gay praised as evidence of Fletcher’s disinterested concern to ensure that each allottee received the maximum measure of land under the law, the allotting agent had other agendas in mind as well. Fletcher the anthropologist saw — and sometimes looted—ceremonial sites, encouraged her informants to furnish her with details about their uses, and purchased from them artifacts she could ship east to be stored in Putnam’s memory palace until her future ministrations could transmute them from objects connected to a place and its culture into evidence in support of a narrative of evolutionary anthropology. The tension between Fletcher’s anthropological avocation and her professional duties as an allotting agent intensified in March 1890. En route to Idaho to begin her work she visited her friend the philanthropist Mary Thaw, who proposed, “that [Fletcher] resign from Ind[ian] work she to pay me an annuity of $1200 . . . to begin July 1st.” Fletcher considered this offer to pose a “serious question for me to meet & answer.”2 Thaw’s gift ultimately took the form of an endowment to Harvard, where the money funded a chair for Fletcher, the first to be held by a woman in that institution.3 Even before these arrangements were finalized, the prospect of the award allowed Fletcher to begin to think of herself as a professional scholar. The promise of a permanent annuity meant she could resign immediately from government employment and devote all her attention to her anthropological investigations. Even as she pondered the decision she intensified her efforts to gather ethnographic resources. Arriving in Idaho in late April 1890 with her mind full of new possibilities and half-formed plans, Fletcher consulted with her friend Susan McBeth, who had pursued amateur ethnological investigations among her congregants and who had collaborated with several of her theological students to compile a Nez Perce–English lexicon that would further her missionary work. Aging and ill, McBeth agreed to share her work with Fletcher, who wrote to Putnam with great excitement: land [137] I’ve struck a mine of great ethnological wealth here. Miss S. L. McBeth who has been nearly 20 yrs among this tribe as a missionary is . . . quite a scholar. . . . She is the lady who has prepared all the native preachers educating them entirely herself. She has made a very careful study of this people, their myths etc. & their language. She has a dictionary & grammar besides all this other material nearly ready to print. She offers to work with me & let me use any thing she has out of regard for what I have done, she of course to have the credit of her own work. She is now an invalid—partly paralized...