Life among the Indians: First Fieldwork among the Sioux and Omahas by Alice C. Fletcher (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Life among the Indians: First Fieldwork among the Sioux and Omahas by Alice C. Fletcher Robin Ridington Life among the Indians: First Fieldwork among the Sioux and Omahas. By Alice C. Fletcher. Edited and with an introduction by Joanna C. Scherer and Raymond J. DeMallie. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. ix + 418 pp. Illustrations, drawings, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $65.00 cloth. Alice Fletcher was a pioneer of what we now call participant observation ethnography as well as applied anthropology. She began her career as a lecturer on subjects having to do with American Indian antiquity and women’s issues. Because of this background she was already proficient in public speaking and writing for an educated audience when she began her first fieldwork at the age of 43. Fletcher undertook her travels to the Rosebud Sioux and Omaha reservations as a freelance writer, intent on being the first to document the lives of Indian women from “the Indian’s point of view” (101). She had previously met Thomas Henry Tibbles, his Omaha wife, Suzette, and her half-brother Francis LaFlesche on their tour of the East with Ponca chief Standing Bear. They agreed to be her guides to Indian country. At the Rosebud Sioux reservation she was witness to abuses by an Indian agent who proudly informed her, “I’ll have you understand that I regulate everything on this reservation but the weather” (121). She was horrified at the chaotic government distribution of cattle at Rosebud and was witness to the Sioux’s poverty and despair, which solidified her negative opinion of the reservation system. Following her time with the Sioux she returned to the Omahas, where she was welcomed into the family of Joseph LaFlesche. As a keen observer and eloquent writer, she recorded important details of Omaha social organization and ceremonial life. Fletcher’s views on assimilation and the transfer of reservation land to the hands of individual tribal members reflected the opinion of her host family. Joseph La-Flesche was a member of the “young men’s party” and [End Page 181] lived in the “village of the make-believe whitemen.” The narrative ends with Fletcher taking a position as land allotment officer for the government. Fletcher completed Life among the Indians in 1886 and hoped to have it published before the end of the decade. For reasons unknown, Charles Scribner, to whom she submitted the manuscript, never brought it into print. Fletcher went on to her pursuits as allotment agent and, in 1890, holder of the Thaw Fellowship, which supported her work without the need to publish commercially. Fletcher, with her collaborator and later coauthor Francis LaFlesche, went on to publish The Omaha Tribe in 1911. It elaborated on much of the ethnographic information in the earlier work, which was intended for a popular audience. The 1911 publication, however, in no way supplants the material finally published here by the University of Nebraska Press and skillfully introduced and annotated by Joanna C. Scherer and Raymond J. DeMallie. Fletcher uses reconstructed dialogue throughout the book and writes in a style that does not sound foreign or dated to the contemporary reader. Her writing reflects an Omaha way of storytelling. Her acceptance into the LaFlesche family gave her access to rich information about Omaha tribal life. She was sometimes told, laughingly, “Don’t you know you are almost as good as an Indian” (274). The book is an important contribution to Plains Indian ethnography and still an engrossing read. The best of premodern ethnographic writing, which this is, continues to have both literary and historical value. Robin Ridington Professor Emeritus of Anthropology University of British Columbia Copyright © 2015 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln