The Omaha Tribe is considered by some anthropologists to be the most important and comprehensive study ever written about a Native American tribe. First published in 1911 as a report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, this classic treatise is based on twenty-nine years of study and observation in the field. "Nothing has been borrowed from other observers," Alice C. Fletcher asserts. "Only original material gathered directly from the native people has been used, and the writer has striven to make so far as possible the Omaha his own interpreter." Volume I is devoted to tribal origins and...

Originally published in 1911 by the Bureau of American Ethnology, The Omaha Tribe is an irreplaceable classic, the collaboration of a pioneering anthropologist and a prominent Omaha ethnologist. Volume II takes up the language, social life, music, religion, warfare, healing practices, and death and burial customs of the Omahas. The first volume covered tribal origins and early history, organization and government, various beliefs and rites, and food gathering. Alice C. Fletcher was the foremost woman anthropologist in the United Stares in the nineteenth century. Francis La Flesche, a member...

One day Alice C. Fletcher realized that "unlike my Indian friends, I was an alien, a stranger in my native land." But while living with the Indians and pursuing her ethnological studies she felt that "the plants, the trees, the clouds and all things had become vocal with human hopes, fears, and supplications." This famous statement comes directly from the preface of this book and was later etched on her tombstone. "I have arranged these dances and games with native songs in order that our young people may recognize, enjoy and share in the spirit of the olden life upon this continent," she...

"Among the Indians, music envelopes like an atmosphere every religious, tribal, and social ceremony as well as every personal experience. There is not a phase of life that does not find expression in song," wrote Alice C. Fletcher. The famous anthropologist published A Study of Omaha Indian Music in 1893. With the single exception of an 1882 dissertation, it was the first serious study ever made of American Indian music. And it was the largest collection of non-Occidental music published to date, ninety-two songs, all from a single tribe.

Fletcher and Francis La Flesche, her Omaha...

One of the more complex and widespread rituals practiced by Native American groups focused on the calumet, a sacred pipe with a feathered shaft. The Calumet Ceremony was a powerful ritual through which members of another tribe were adopted. It also promoted social unity within tribes and facilitated contact and trade between them. Perhaps the most detailed description of a Calumet Ceremony was recorded near the turn of the century by ethnographer Alice C. Fletcher. Fletcher witnessed the Hako, a version of the Calumet Ceremony practiced by the Chaui clan of the Pawnee. With the invaluable...

Alice C. Fletcher (1838 1923), one of the few women who became anthropologists in the United States during the nineteenth century, was a pioneer in the practice of participant-observation ethnography. She focused her studies over many years among the Native tribes in Nebraska and South Dakota.
Life among the Indians, Fletcher s popularized autobiographical memoir written in 1886 87 about her first fieldwork among the Sioux and the Omahas during 1881 82, remained unpublished in Fletcher s archives at the Smithsonian Institution for more than one hundred years. In it Fletcher...