Material Entanglements: Anthropological Collections & Indigenous Women's Histories at the Smithsonian Institution

This paper interrogates Smithsonian Institution collections assembled by anthropologist Alice C. Fletcher of Indigenous material culture to uncover Native women’s histories, focusing specifically on the Umoⁿhoⁿ (Omaha) tribe. Fletcher served as an early field anthropologist beginning in the 1880s, when the burgeoning discipline was dominated by men. Working for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian, her fieldwork and collecting practices were instrumental in the passing of assimilation legislation and the classification/institutionalization of Native American objects. In 1883 she arrived at the Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation to undertake allotment—the parceling and forced sale of 50,000 acres—of land and brought groups of students to the Hampton Institute and Carlisle Industrial School. She also began collaborating with tribal member Francis La Flesche in the creation of an ethnography, amassing Umoⁿhoⁿ objects and representations over two decades—much of it still in Smithsonian collections.

My analysis explores Umoⁿhoⁿ women’s experiences in the 1880s through this material culture, tracing their entanglements with Fletcher’s endeavors and arguing that one cannot be read without the other. Focusing on regalia and photographs, along with archival letters and oral histories, I demonstrate how assimilation efforts undertaken by Fletcher reconfigured the material intimacies of Umoⁿhoⁿ women and girl’s lives. In the disciplinary spaces of the reservation home and national boarding school, gender expression through objects, clothing, and self-representation became regulated in profoundly new ways. Examining these holdings not only as critique of colonial collecting practices, but also to make visible Umoⁿhoⁿ experience, models museum-based intersectional women’s history.