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

6. Fictions of Coherence

[199] 6. Fictions of Coherence While Alice Fletcher and Jane Gay expected the Nez Perces to be consistently predictable in their behaviors, Gay’s accounts of the allotment expedition present herself and Fletcher in multiple guises. The Photographer, the Cook, the friend, and “I” keep company with Her Majesty, the Allotting Agent, Miss F., and “you.” To Fletcher ’s personae, Gay might also have added the Scholar and the Reformer .1 As is the case with the groups of Nimiipuu who celebrated the Fourth of July in Lapwai and Kamiah in 1890, these carefully crafted personae produce each other’s meaning: the Photographer and Her Majesty are the agents of abstracted policy, while the Cook and the Allotting Agent are the embodied laborers who perform the quotidian work of realizing those designs. “You” and “I” open, for Gay’s purposes, a conversation about allotment and are the means whereby she invites the readers of her letters to recognize their implicit involvement in the process. “Miss F.” and “the friend” stand for the affiliative relationships upon which Fletcher’s field work depended , and which I analyze in this chapter. These personal ties are barely apparent in the official records of the allotment, but to explore them demonstrates how inseparable were the worlds of public policy and private affiliation. Scholars anxious to include women within the genealogies of nascent professions in the late nineteenth century find a fascinating [200] example in Alice Fletcher. Her allegiances place her at the forefront of the professionalizing human sciences and as a leader in developing and applying federal Indian policy based on Christian-defined notions of domestication and charity. She typifies the unmarried, educated, and well-connected New Woman. She brought to her undertakings —academic, federal, charitable, and personal—a strong sense of duty, an unflinching honesty, and a spotless reputation, sterling qualities of character necessary to allotment’s success. As Loring Benson Priest points out in his history of the policy, Henry Dawes wrote, “[I]f my land-in-severalty bill should become a law, it will depend entirely on the character of the government agents, who execute its provisions whether it is a success or a failure. If it be entrusted to men of unflinching honesty and broad views, the Indian will be secure in the possession of homes on the best lands of the reservations; but if it is entrusted to dishonest men, the Indians will be cheated out of their lands.”2 Although Fletcher exemplified Dawes’s ideal man, she was, nevertheless , enmeshed in a web of personal obligation, affiliation, and patronage. Her devotion to ensuring that the Nez Perces were treated fairly during the allotment was compromised at times by her longerstanding and self-interested devotion to Presbyterian charity and her urgent desire to distinguish herself as an anthropologist. Thus, as I demonstrate, she was at times less than objective. Likewise, her developing career as an academic anthropologist was thoroughly intertwined with a federal policy she had helped to write and with friendships that often resembled family ties. While living on a federal wage she pursued her researches and used the material she gathered to obtain lifelong financial support for her work as a scholar from her close friend Mary Copley Thaw. Fletcher exploited Thaw’s patronage , as well, to ensure that the Presbyterian missionaries on the Nez Perce Reservation would be financially supported so that after she had completed the allotment, they could continue to furnish her with anthropological information. To follow any one of these connections is to touch them all. In making these assertions, I offer an interpretation of Fletcher’s 1890 field season differing significantly from that written by her bicitizens [201] ographer, Joan Mark, who treats Fletcher’s receipt of Mary Thaw’s bequest as a detail largely unrelated to the allotment. Mark does not consider how the news of a lifelong endowment affected her subject ’s attitude toward her work as a federal agent. Nor does she acknowledge the extent to which Fletcher was personally involved in the restoration of the First Presbyterian Church at Kamiah, a project underwritten by Thaw funds and carried forth in large part on government time by government workers. Rather, Mark blames Jane Gay for the resulting tensions among members of the Kamiah Presbyterian congregation and traditional groups of Nez Perces.3 As I demonstrate, such an interpretation...