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

10. After-Images

[299] 10. After-Images Although federal officials made little or no response to the Memorial of the Nez Perce Indians . . . to the Congress of the United States, it has since become a cornerstone of Nimiipuu cultural history. Copies of the document were printed under Borah’s sponsorship and sold for ten cents each. Many of the original deponents and other interested tribal members owned personal copies, for the document served as a kind of local archive that contained both the words of treaty agreements between the Nez Perces and the federal government and the words of those who had been affected by those agreements .1 Within the homes of these local owners, print copies of the Memorial may have joined other records—physical, textual, and photographic—in private collections. Wary of appropriation and misuse of these items, many Nimiipuu historians, collectors, archivists , and elders have assembled such private collections—of baskets , weavings, bags, and beadwork made by themselves or by family members—and of paper records—newspaper clippings, letters, photographs, scrapbooks, and other memorabilia—that function as counter-archives to those held in official, state- and universitysponsored memory palaces. Those who have constructed these archives might well be described using the words of cultural historian Michel de Certeau as “unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts.” In his book The Prac- [300] tice of Everyday Life, this scholar considers the “dispersed, tactical , and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals . . . caught in the nets of ‘discipline.’” For de Certeau, capitalism is one such “discipline ,” and he posits that consumers might in fact also be cultural producers who demonstrate their agency by the uses they make of the goods they purchase. Such repurposing, he asserts, comprises “an antidiscipline.”2 My focus here is not on capitalist consumption but on other forms of discipline—the technologies of allotment—that can also be resisted through antidisciplinary tactics of mirroring and repurposing. As I have demonstrated, the academic discipline of anthropology , supported by archives of illicitly appropriated cultural items, posited a theory of progressive development used in the 1870s and 1880s to justify a federal policy of Native assimilation and extinction . In this concluding chapter I show that collecting and archiving can be mimicked, that the archival impulse might be turned upon itself—in this case by Native cultural producers who have reclaimed , re-collected, curated, and preserved materials that support stories told from within, place-based narratives of survivance. Starr Maxwell’s Memorial might be seen as an antidisciplinary act wherein the oral testimony of “poets of their own acts,” transcribed by Maxwell and Whitman, spoke back to the written words of the treaty agreements introducing the document and to the federal officials who refused to grant them a hearing. The juxtaposition of the two kinds of evidence corrects the incapacity of official archives to account for oral and experiential memory. A number of those who gave oral testimony to Maxwell were also, in fact, private archivists. They pointedly referred to documentary evidence in their possession, asserting that they could support their claims by producing the written public forms recognized by state courts and tribunals. For example, the several deponents who testified about fractionated heirships supplemented their testimony with copies of letters they had received from distinctly unhelpful federal officials, as did He-yume-toke-te-nikt, who had applied to sell her allotment. In the preceding chapter I quote from the dismissive response she received. Harrison Red Wolf asserted that he “h[e]ld copies of letters to my father . . . which show the trust imposed in my father” afterward [301] (M, 57). James Grant, the tribal record keeper since 1892, based his testimony on written records of births and deaths in his possession —an internal census demonstrating that hundreds of children born since Fletcher’s departure had not yet received lands (M, 40). The collection of voices of more than a hundred Nimiipuu and, by implicit reference, the evidence of their own privately held archives, thus were joined in the Memorial, which stood as a summative reference point for how matters stood between the Nez Perces and the federal government in 1911. By the late twentieth century, many of these issues were still unresolved , but few copies of the Memorial remained, yellowed, torn, and “battered” but held as “priceless heirlooms,” according to Dennis Baird.3 Thus in 2000 the Northwest Historical Manuscripts Series republished the...