The Allotment Plot reexamines the history of allotment on the Nez Perce Reservation from 1889 to 1892 to account for and emphasize the Nez Perce side of the story. By including Nez Perce responses to allotment, Nicole Tonkovich argues that the assimilationist aims of allotment ultimately failed due in large part to the agency of the Nez Perce people themselves throughout the allotment process. The Nez Perce were actively involved in negotiating the terms under which allotment would proceed and simultaneously engaged in ongoing efforts to protect their stories and other cultural properties from institutional appropriation by the allotment agent, Alice C. Fletcher, who was a respected anthropologist, and her photographer and assistant, E. Jane Gay. The Nez Perce engagement in this process laid a foundation for the long-term survival of the tribe and its culture.
Making use of previously unknown archival sources, Fletcher’s letters, Gay’s photographs and journalistic accounts, oral tribal histories, and analyses of performances such as parades and verbal negotiations, Tonkovich assembles a masterful portrait of Nez Perce efforts to control their own future and provides a vital counternarrative of the allotment period, which is often portrayed as disastrous to Native polities.

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

History

Tonkovich, Nicole

Americas

University Of Nebraska Press

The story of westering Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been told most notably through photographs of American Indians. Unlike this vast archive, produced primarily by male photographers, which depicted American Indians as either vanishing or domesticated, the lesser-known images by the women featured in Trading Gazes provide new ways of seeing the intersecting histories of colonial expansion and indigenous resistance. Four unconventional women-Jane Gay, who documented land allotment to the Nez Perces; Kate Cory, an artist who lived for years in a Hopi community; Grace Nicholson, who purchased cultural items from the Karuk and other northern California tribes; and Mary Schaffer, who traveled among the Stoney and Métis of Alberta, Canada-used cameras to document their cross-cultural encounters.
Trading Gazes reconstructs the rich biographical and historical contexts explaining these women's presence in different Native communities of the North American West. Their photographs not only record the unprecedented opportunities available for Euro-American women eager to shed gender restrictions, but also reveal how women's newfound mobility depended on the increasing restrictions placed on Native Americans in this era. By tracing the complex, often unexpected relationships forged between these women, their cameras, and the Native subjects of their photographs, Trading Gazes offers a new focus for recovering women's histories in the West while bringing attention to the complicated legacies of these images for Native and non-Native viewers.

Trading Gazes: Euro-American Women Photographers and Native North Americans, 1880-1940

Arts & Photography

MacFarlane, Lisa

Bernardin, Susan

Graulich, Melody

Photography & Video

Rutgers University Press

Ethnologist Alice C. Fletcher helped write the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 and became one of the first women to serve as a federal Indian agent. A commanding presence, she spent four summers with the Nez Perce, completing close to 2,000 allotments. Charged with supervising the daunting task of resurveying, verifying, and assigning nearly 757,000 acres, Fletcher also had to preserve land for transportation routes and restrain white settlers claiming prime properties. She sought to "give the best lands to the best Indians," but faced numerous other challenges, including the terrain, complex ancestries, and her own misperceptions about native life. Fletcher wrote daily--letters, reports, petitions, scholarly documents, articles, diaries. The collection reproduced here illuminates her relations with the key players and offers insight into how federal policy was applied, resisted, and amended, as well as her internal conflicts over dividing the reservation.

Dividing the Reservation: Alice C. Fletcher's Nez Perce Allotment Diaries and Letters, 1889-1892

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Washington State University Press

This study of nonfiction written by four of nineteenth-century Ameri-ca's first professional women writers investigates the paradoxes posed by the conflict of their texts with their lives. They were not homemakers, yet in their works they prescribed ideal domesticity for the women of their day. They were not professional educators, yet they wrote authoritatively about educational theory and practice. They were not involved with organized political agitation for women's rights, yet their writings advanced thoughtful, radical revisions to existing social and political structures, particularly the heterosexual family. Comparable home, school, and community backgrounds prepared Catharine Beecher, Sarah Josepha Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller to write for the public. Their nonfiction texts expose the contradictions be-tween what they prescribed for other women and how they themselves chose to live outside the traditional domestic world. Class, race, age, and geography determined the focus of nineteenth-century women's writing, and as Hale, Beecher, Fern, and Fuller promoted and critiqued one another, they profited reciprocally from the others' work, teachings, and examples. As this study shows, by attending to details of womanly behavior such as language, dress, and manners, their writings contributed to altering women's traditional roles in home, school, and community. No previous study has grouped Hale, Beecher, Fern, and Fuller together because each promoted differing political goals. While respecting these differences, this focus on their nonfiction reveals their strong professional links and demonstrates the similar effects of their writings, which prescribed domesticity for the lives of other women while justifying their own professionalism. Nicole Tonkovich is an assistant professor of literature at University of California, San Diego.

Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern and Margaret Fuller

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI

Review\n"The Allotment Plot is a refreshing, nuanced, and insightful reinterpretation of a moment in Nez Perce history that illuminates both the blind nature of federal policy and the tribal resilience reflected in post-reservation Indian resistance and selfdetermination."—David R. M. Beck, American Historical Review\n"An extremely readable and informative book that will benefit scholars from various disciplines."—Jennifer Macias, Pacific Northwest Quarterly\n"A meticulously researched and carefully developed analysis of events before, during, and after allotment on the Nez Perce reservation."—Elizabeth James, Oregon Historical Quarterly\n"The Allotment Plot is a good addition to the field and offers readers much to consider."—C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, H-Net\nNamed the 2013 Caroline Bancroft History Prize Honor Book by the Denver Public Library\nThe Allotment Plot reexamines the history of allotment on the Nez Perce Reservation from 1889 to 1892 to account for and emphasize the Nez Perce side of the story. By including Nez Perce responses to allotment, Nicole Tonkovich argues that the assimilationist aims of allotment ultimately failed due in large part to the agency of the Nez Perce people themselves throughout the allotment process. The Nez Perce were actively involved in negotiating the terms under which allotment would proceed and were simultaneously engaged in ongoing efforts to protect their stories and other cultural properties from institutional appropriation by the allotment agent, Alice C. Fletcher, a respected anthropologist, and her photographer and assistant, E. Jane Gay. The Nez Perce engagement in this process laid a foundation for the long-term survival of the tribe and its culture.\nMaking use of previously unexamined archival sources, Fletcher’s letters, Gay’s photographs and journalistic accounts, oral tribal histories, and analyses of performances such as parades and verbal negotiations, Tonkovich assembles a masterful portrait of Nez Perce efforts to control their own future and provides a vital counternarrative of the allotment period, which is often portrayed as disastrous to Native polities.

This study of nonfiction written by four of nineteenth-century Ameri-ca's first professional women writers investigates the paradoxes posed by the conflict of their texts with their lives. They were not homemakers, yet in their works they prescribed ideal domesticity for the women of their day. They were not professional educators, yet they wrote authoritatively about educational theory and practice. They were not involved with organized political agitation for women's rights, yet their writings advanced thoughtful, radical revisions to existing social and political structures, particularly the heterosexual family.  Comparable home, school, and community backgrounds prepared Catharine Beecher, Sarah Josepha Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller to write for the public. Their nonfiction texts expose the contradictions be-tween what they prescribed for other women and how they themselves chose to live outside the traditional domestic world.  Class, race, age, and geography determined the focus of nineteenth-century women's writing, and as Hale, Beecher, Fern, and Fuller promoted and critiqued one another, they profited reciprocally from the others' work, teachings, and examples. As this study shows, by attending to details of womanly behavior such as language, dress, and manners, their writings contributed to altering women's traditional roles in home, school, and community.  No previous study has grouped Hale, Beecher, Fern, and Fuller together because each promoted differing political goals. While respecting these differences, this focus on their nonfiction reveals their strong professional links and demonstrates the similar effects of their writings, which prescribed domesticity for the lives of other women while justifying their own professionalism. Nicole Tonkovich is an assistant professor of literature at University of California, San Diego.

Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tonkovich, Nicole. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Tonkovich, Nicole

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tonkovich, Nicole. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

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

Trading Gazes: Euro-American Women Photographers and Native North Americans, 1880-1940

Dividing the Reservation: Alice C. Fletcher's Nez Perce Allotment Diaries and Letters, 1889-1892

Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern and Margaret Fuller

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

Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller