In 1891, Fletcher and Gay together bought a house in Washington, DC, where they lived with Fletcher’s research associate Francis La Flesche for the next sixteen years. (La Flesche and Fletcher had been living together since 1884.) La Flesche was restricted to a portion of the house. Fletcher, committed as ever to the idea she was a mother to all Natives, attempted to adopt La Flesche when he was thirty-four years old. The adoption was never legally formalized because it would have meant he would lose his surname, but throughout their long working relationship she saw La Flesche as an assistant rather than as a valuable colleague with cultural and linguistic knowledge she would never attain. He may have had an entirely different relationship to the idea of adoption, for adoption as an adult was an accepted part of Omaha culture.72
La Flesche was also quite possibly a lover, completing the picture of this decidedly queer household. Fletcher destroyed all her personal papers, so few details are known of the relationship between Gay, Fletcher, and La Flesche, except for something of its tumultuous end. In 1906, Francis married Rosa Bourassa, a Chippewa woman who had attended Carlisle, and she moved in. Several weeks later, Jane, Alice, and Francis were all struck with illness. A dramatic confrontation, the content of which we have no records, occurred between Alice and Jane at Alice’s bedside, and Jane moved out two weeks later, never to return. Francis and Rosa were divorced by the end of the year, and he and Fletcher continued to live together until her death in 1923.73 Despite the absence of details, it is clear that Fletcher used her increased social standing to conduct her own domestic relationships however she chose—the very agency she denied to those she deemed less evolved.
Fletcher’s continued anthropological work, much of it done with La Flesche, launched her into new professional heights. She published extensively on Indigenous cultural traditions, especially music and dance. In the fall of 1890, she was awarded a paid research position at Harvard’s Peabody Museum that a wealthy benefactress created specifically for her. The new position was for Fletcher alone—La Flesche continued as her unpaid research assistant. At Harvard, the fellowship had limited reach, for she didn’t have students of her own to train. But she was now a full-time professional scholar and the first woman to have an appointment at Harvard. To the community of middle-class white feminists in DC, her university position was a major victory, and she was now feted by the same kinds of societies she had helped to found twenty years earlier. Eight hundred people attended a lavish reception held by the women’s clubs of DC to celebrate Fletcher; she spent five hours greeting guests in the customary receiving line.74
Alice Fletcher at her writing desk. (Courtesy of National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution)
That winter, Fletcher was an invited speaker at the now annual National Council of Women conference held at Washington, DC’s Albaugh’s Opera House. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who had founded the organization, were also on the agenda. Prominent suffragist and temperance reformer Frances Willard, with whom Fletcher had served as secretary and organizer of the Association for the Advancement of Women, introduced the anthropologist with fanfare. “We are particularly proud of her as a Fellow of the Museum of the Scientific School of Harvard University,” Willard announced. “She is the first bird of a flock.”75
Fletcher’s speech assumed her leadership among feminists, and it assumed all those feminists united behind the civilizing agenda. She began “Our Duty Toward Dependent Races” with a statement of equality: that all the world’s races have a right “to exist,” free of attempted “destruction by war, pestilence, or absorption.” But true to the evolutionary hierarchy to which she was so committed, she argued that races were not equal in development. “It is plainly seen that the white race has led the march of human progress,” she asserted, as evidenced by its monopoly of “the higher arts and sciences” and its superior land holdings. This posed a dilemma. “What shall we from our abundance give to those dependent upon us?” she asked her fellow reformers.76
But Fletcher’s audience at the National Council of Women was not only composed of white feminists eager to bolster their own position through civilizing people of color. Others had distinct ideas of feminism’s meaning, objectives, and vision for change. After all, like all social movements, feminism is less a fixed platform than a rotating scene of ongoing tensions, debates, and outright conflicts.
The next scheduled speaker was none other than Frances E. W. Harper. Willard didn’t introduce Harper, who launched right into pointed critique: “While Miss Fletcher has advocated the cause of the Indian and negro under the caption of Dependent Races,” Harper began, “I deem it a privilege to present the negro, not as a mere dependent asking for Northern sympathy or Southern compassion, but as a member of the body politic who has a claim upon the nation for justice.”77
Justice, Harper emphasized, was a right pertaining equally to all, regardless of whites’ self-serving fantasies that their “rights of property or the claims of superior intelligence” placed other races under their magnanimous care. “While politicians,” she concluded, “ask in strange bewilderment, ‘What shall we do with weaker races?’ I hold that Jesus Christ answered that question nearly two thousand years since. ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do you even so to them.’”78 While white feminists like Stanton, Stowe, and Fletcher consolidated around the civilizing project, despite their competing approaches to the cause, intersectional feminists like Harper, Harriet Jacobs, and Zitkala-Ša threw off white women’s aggressive benevolence and stressed their right to self-determination.
Four years later, Alice Fletcher was named vice president of the anthropology section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the first woman elevated to a leadership position in the nation’s most prestigious scientific organization. Her search for the origins of women’s oppression in Native society had propelled her into the status of the nation’s leading woman scientist. Fletcher’s influence would inspire a new generation of women scientists, physicians, and anthropologists in the decades to come. Her protégés included Susette La Flesche, Francis’s half sister, who went on, under Fletcher’s mentorship, to become the first Native woman to receive a medical degree. Anthropologist Margaret Mead likewise followed in Fletcher’s footsteps, building on her work with the Omaha beginning in the 1930s.79
Meanwhile, land privatization was continuing apace. The Dawes Act included a provision that families could not sell their lands for twenty-five years, in an attempt to ensure the oncoming rush of settlers wouldn’t swindle Natives out of their property. But most Natives ended up leasing their parcels to settlers, opting not to become crop farmers themselves, and this effectively led to losing their lands. By 1934, when allotment policy was radically changed under the Indian Reorganization Act, Native Americans had lost ninety million acres, two-thirds of the lands they had controlled at the act’s passage.80 The Dawes Act is now considered by many to be the most harmful federal Indian policy in US history.
Alice Fletcher’s chosen method for political work, true to her settler feminism, was severance. Zitkala-Ša’s, by contrast, was collectivizing, and her method of collective power turned the tactic of severance into an opening. Boarding schools were designed to eradicate tribal attachments. But paradoxically, as scholar Brenda Child argues, they also brought together children of tribes from across the country, creating the possibility of cross-tribal networks between Natives from disparate regions for the first time.81 Zitkala-Ša was at the forefront of turning these relationships into real political power.
Despite her success in prestigious national venues, Zitkala-Ša walked away from individual literary and artistic pursuits in the early twentieth century, ceasing to publish. The clubwoman approach of professional attainment was not for her. She along with Montezuma was eager to contribute her talents to form a new pan-Indian political organization bringing together tribes across the country. But their visions diverged sharply: he wanted sex-segregated associ
ations, and she was a feminist who wanted to work in coalition. “I feel like putting my hand forward and simply wiping the Indian men’s committee into no where!!!” she wrote him. “Am I not an Indian woman as capable in serious matters and as thoroughly interested in the race—as any one or two of you men put together? Why do you dare leave me out?” Her outrage echoed disagreements between the two of them about a future marriage, in which she balked at his desire for her to play the supporting role of an assimilated doctor’s wife, or what she called “a fine horse to draw your wagon!”82 She soon ended the relationship and married Raymond Bonnin, a childhood friend from Yankton, in the spring of 1902.
While living in Utah with Bonnin on the Ute Reservation a decade later, Zitkala-Ša collaborated with Mormon composer William Hanson on an opera bringing aspects of the Sun Dance ceremony to the stage, the ritual Alice Fletcher had watched in fascination at Pine Ridge in the 1880s. After two years of joint work on the libretto and score, The Sun Dance Opera was first staged in Vernal, Utah, in 1913, featuring Ute singers and dancers. It is one of the very first Native-led performances in US theater history, and it brought to life a story of heroic resistance rather than the tragic pageants or sensationalized Wild West shows that formed the bulk of Native-themed entertainment. Zitkala-Ša’s efforts to bring Dakota and Sioux legends and spirituality to broad audiences are acts of both translation and community preservation, though it was far from an “authentic” rendering of the dance. Yet perhaps this, too, was part of Zitkala-Ša’s vision for her people: continued evolution, rather than a fossilized past. As Laguna Pueblo feminist Paula Gunn Allen underscores, eradicating culture and imagination is a central part of settler colonialism. “The wars of imperial conquest,” she writes, “have been fought within the bodies, minds, and hearts of the people of the earth for dominion over them. I think this is the reason traditionals say we must remember our origins, our cultures, our histories, our mothers and grandmothers, for without that memory, which implies continuance rather than nostalgia, we are doomed to engulfment.”83 Zitkala-Ša used her education not to assimilate but to resist engulfment.
After nearly fifteen years in Utah supporting the Ute tribe, Zitkala-Ša began to realize her dream of national organizing on behalf of collective Native rights. She and her husband moved to Washington, DC, where she was active in Native American politics from the mid-1910s until her death in 1938. She took leadership in a variety of causes, some now sharply criticized as assimilation campaigns and others upheld as progressive models: advocating for access to US citizenship; combatting peyote use—a largely conservative movement that saw her working with Pratt as an ally; fighting to end Bureau of Indian Affairs control over Native tribes; and especially, fighting land theft and gross abuses of power enabled by the Dawes Act. She wrote extensively, yet no longer for the pleasure reading of a literary audience: she edited the Society of American Indians (SAI) Quarterly Journal, conducted long negotiations by letter with federal agents, and researched and reported land abuses from California to Oklahoma. In one six-year period, she gave four hundred public lectures, mostly to women’s clubs to recruit allies for Indian citizenship. World War I particularly incensed her: a full 25 percent of Native men enlisted to fight for the United States, yet all were still barred from suffrage and access to courts. But “if he is good enough to fight for American ideals,” she countered, “he is good enough for American citizenship now.”84 Natives in most states were granted US citizenship in 1924, though their reservations were still under the oily thumb of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The work was far from done.
When SAI collapsed, Zitkala-Ša and her husband founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926, based in Washington, DC. Zitkala-Ša, now fifty years old, served as president. Under the motto “Help Indians Help Themselves in Protecting Their Rights and Properties,” they represented forty-nine tribes, often via lobbying and testifying in congressional hearings, while also traveling up to eleven thousand miles per year across the Midwest and West to investigate tribal conditions and editing and distributing the Indian Newsletter among reservations. Through this leadership, Zitkala-Ša became the most prominent Native woman activist in the United States.85
One of Zitkala-Ša’s most significant political achievements was her coauthored pamphlet, Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians (1924), which earned a congressional hearing into the exploitation of Natives’ oil-rich lands, such as settler men’s kidnapping and raping Indian children to weasel control of their allotted forty acres. While the hearing had little immediate result, it is credited with inspiring Congress to authorize an investigation of abuses on reservations that, a decade later, led to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (IRA). Also known as the Indian New Deal, the IRA was as large a shift in federal Indian policy as the Dawes Act had been fifty years earlier. But while the Dawes Act adopted the policy of conquest via assimilation rather than military defeat, the IRA moved toward Native sovereignty. The act terminated the still ongoing process of allotting land; restored unallotted lands to tribes, now recognized as semi-sovereign nations; and legalized Native religious practices, including the Sun Dance. Fifty years after Fletcher began allotting land in Nebraska and Zitkala-Ša first stepped foot onto the property of White’s Manual, Zitkala-Ša helped end assimilation policy, restoring some measure of tribal self-determination. Back in South Dakota, she organized her tribe to resist the new IRA-imposed constitution, composing one of their own that prohibited federal control of tribal affairs.86
Yet when Zitkala-Ša died in impoverishment at sixty-two in 1938, what little remained of her legacy was largely obscured by the settler norms she so fiercely resisted. While the New York Times published a brief obituary mentioning “Mrs. R.T. Bonnin’s” work in Indian rights, her own death certificate merely read “Gertrude Bonnin from South Dakota—Housewife.”87
PART II
CLEANSING
CHAPTER FOUR
BIRTHING A BETTER NATION
Margaret Sanger and Dr. Dorothy Ferebee
When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history, and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.
—H. G. Wells
ON A STEAMY MID-JULY DAY IN 1912, JEWISH RUSSIAN IMMIGRANT JAKE SACHS FINISHED his shift driving trucks, returned home, and climbed up the dark stairwell to his third-floor apartment. The three rooms Jake shared with his wife Sadie and their young children in New York’s notorious tenement district were much like their neighbors’: lacking direct sunlight and running water. Windows opened only onto narrow, garbage-filled airshafts. On the Lower East Side, over five hundred thousand people made their homes in buildings initially designed for one-fifth that number.1 But poverty left the Sachs family and those like them with few options. That day, a tragic scene befell Jake when he opened the door. Their three children howled with anger and fear as twenty-eight-year-old Sadie’s slight frame lay prone on the bare floor. Pregnant once more, Sadie had sought the advice of neighbors. She couldn’t imagine another mouth to feed, another body to clothe, on Jake’s paltry earnings. She had tried drugs and purgatives, but they failed to relieve her of the pregnancy. Finally, she borrowed a sharp instrument from a friend, and inserted it into her uterus. The result was a raging case of sepsis, an often-fatal infection of the blood. By the time Jake arrived home, Sadie was unconscious.
Disinclined to go to a hospital, Jake called a doctor known to the neighborhood. The doctor brought along a nurse to help him save Sadie’s life. It would be no easy task. All the water, food, medicine, and ice to keep Sadie’s dangerous infection at bay had to be hauled up three flights of stairs in stifling heat. All the waste was carried downstairs to the toilet shared by the hundreds of people in the building. The nurse stayed three weeks, stealing only little snacks of sleep as “days and nights were melted into a torpid inferno.”2 Yet the neighbors were kind, coming every day to care for Sadie, bringing soups, entrees, custards, and drinks as she improved.
At the end of the three
weeks, as the nurse prepared to depart, Sadie summoned the courage to ask, “Another baby will finish me, I suppose?”
Her nurse hedged, replying only, “It’s too early to talk about that.”
The doctor arrived to make his last call, and the nurse relayed Sadie’s fear about becoming pregnant again. He minced no words.
“Any more such capers, young woman,” he scolded, “and there will be no need to call me.”
“But,” she trembled, “what can I do to prevent getting that way again?”
“Oh ho.” The doctor laughed. “You want your cake while you eat it, too, do you? Well, it can’t be done.” He picked up his coat and bag, and with a friendly pat on her back dispensed his official advice as he left the room: “Tell Jake to sleep on the roof!”3
Sadie and her nurse locked eyes. The nurse fought back tears as Sadie, in despair, pleaded for information—information Sadie knew was readily available to middle-class women, for they had many fewer children than she and her neighbors did.
“He can’t understand, can he?” she implored. “But you do, don’t you? You’re a woman and you’ll tell me the secret and I’ll never tell it to a soul.”4
The nurse, too, was now distraught. Despite her medical training, she knew of only two techniques, and she felt neither condoms nor the withdrawal method was likely to be of any interest to Sadie. The nurse had previously concluded that tenement husbands were quite disinclined to use contraceptive methods. She had nothing to tell Sadie, promising only to return in a few days. But days turned into months. The nurse couldn’t contend with the woman and her circumstances, though Sadie’s face haunted her dreams.
The Trouble with White Women Page 14