From the desk of Nicole Tonkovich
Nicole Tonkovich is the author of newly released, The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance. Tonkovich recently began a blog where she will transcribe field diaries kept by Alice Fletcher during
her allotment work. Click here for the first entry. Below she discusses how she discovered her book's topic.
I became aware of E. Jane Gay and Alice C. Fletcher while
watching Ken Burns’s PBS series The West.
I was immediately intrigued–both by the clarity and beauty of Gay’s
photographs and by the fact that these two women were well into their middle
age when they went West, where Fletcher supervised the allotment of lands to
the Nez Perce Indians from 1889 to 1892.
As I delved into the story I was initially attracted to Gay’s
work. In addition to her photographs, she documented the pair’s adventures in a
series of witty and sometimes-acerbic columns published in reform periodicals
of the era. What she was telling the readers of these newspapers differed in
detail and in intent from the reports her friend Fletcher was sending to the
Indian Bureau. Somewhat reluctantly, I began to read Fletcher’s records, as
well. She was in many ways Gay’s opposite: where Gay was acerbic and witty,
Fletcher was earnest and hectoring. Gay had a lively sense of irony; Fletcher
lacked that sense entirely. Yet together they were part of the conception and
administration of a major federal program that impacted not only the Nez Perces
but nearly every Indian tribe in the nation, decimating their lands and
endeavoring to erase tribal identities altogether.
UNP blog 