Career Biography on Anthropologist Alice Fletcher

Alice Fletcher was a pioneer ethnologist and leader of the movement for inclusion of American Indians into white society. She was one of the first women whose work in anthropology has received professional recognition. She was a defender of indigenous rights and women's rights.

Fletcher was born in Cuba, where his family settled in the U.S. there in vain for his father to recover from tuberculosis. Of wealthy New England family, his father was a lawyer and his mother came from a family of prominent Boston businessmen. His father died in Cuba when she was just a year and a half. Once in Brooklyn, she studied at private schools, but we do not have much information about his early years and the Fletcher was always very short on the first 40 years of his life. It was known that she was a teacher in schools for a while. Further, it seems that she had serious problems in the family.

In the 1870s, she had become an active member of various feminist groups and upper-class suffragettes in New York. Fletcher was interested in anthropology and indigenous issues in the 1870s. In 1880 he began studying archeology with Frederick Putnam, director of the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, as a mentor. His interest in archeology came to the indigenous communities. In 1881 he moved to the Omaha Indians of Nebraska to study.

The time spent with the Omaha gave birth to her commitment to anthropology and the creation of an indigenous policy. He was fascinated by its culture, especially music and dance, and had a close friendship with several members of the tribe, until he finally took his son Francis the Flesch.

She also became an influential advocate with the growing pressure for the division of tribal ...