Alice Cunningham Fletcher

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Alice Cunningham Fletcher

American anthropologist

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Last Updated: Apr 2, 2025 • Article History

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Born:: March 15, 1838, Havana, Cuba

Died:: April 6, 1923, Washington, D.C., U.S. (aged 85)

Subjects Of Study:: Omaha; culture

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Alice Cunningham Fletcher (born March 15, 1838, Havana, Cuba—died April 6, 1923, Washington, D.C., U.S.) was an American anthropologist whose stature as a social scientist, notably for her pioneer studies of Native American music, has overshadowed her influence on federal government Indian policies that later were considered to be unfortunate.

Fletcher taught school for a number of years, lectured occasionally on various topics, and was an early member and secretary of Sorosis and in 1873 a founder and secretary of the Association for the Advancement of Women. A growing interest in archaeology and ethnology led to extensive reading in those fields, guided by Frederic Ward Putnam, director of Harvard’s Peabody Museum, and by 1878 to fieldwork with American Indian remains in Florida and Massachusetts. In 1881 she went to Nebraska and began living among the Omaha. Her subsequent efforts to improve the lot of Native Americans reflected a missionary zeal and a paternalism toward Indians that was characteristic of the 19th century.

Concerned that the Omaha were about to be dispossessed, Fletcher went to Washington in 1882, drafted a bill to apportion Omaha tribal lands into individual Indian holdings, or allotments, and successfully lobbied for its passage in Congress. Appointed by President Chester A. Arthur to supervise the apportioning, she completed granting the land parcels in 1884 with the assistance of a young clerk in the Indian Bureau, Francis La Flesche, brother of writer-activist Susette La Flesche. The son of the principal Omaha chief, La Flesche lived with her as her adoptive son (unlegalized) and collaborated with her in her studies of native peoples and cultures.

Fletcher went to Alaska and the Aleutian Islands to study indigenous educational needs in 1886. Her tireless championing of Native American welfare—together with that of Mary Bonney and others—was instrumental in the passage of the Dawes General Allotment Act (1887), which further apportioned remaining tribal lands and provided for eventual citizenship for Native Americans. Though viewed as humanitarian at the time of its enactment, the Dawes Act came to be regarded as a public policy failure.

In the years following, Fletcher conducted land apportionment among the Winnebago and Nez Percé Indians and wrote Indian Story and Song from North America (1900) and The Hako: A Pawnee Ceremony (1904; reissued 1996). Her major work is thought to be The Omaha Tribe (1911), an exhaustive study written with Francis La Flesche. From 1899 to 1916 she was on the editorial board of the American Anthropologist, to which she was also a frequent contributor, and in 1908 she led in founding the School of American Archaeology (later the School of American Research) in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Native American

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A dancer in a bright pink shawl with fringe, wearing traditional regalia adorned with blue and black accents, performs at an outdoor cultural event.

Culture areas of the Indigenous peoples of North America

A bronze bust of an Indigenous American figure sits in a kitchen, overlaid with sacks of rice marked with a green check and milk with sugar cubes crossed out.

Distribution of American Subarctic cultures

Distribution of Northeast American peoples

Distribution of Indigenous peoples of the American Southeast

Distribution of Indigenous peoples of the North American Plains

Distribution of the Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest

Native American

Indigenous peoples of Canada and United States

Also known as: First Nations, Northern American Indian

Written by Elizabeth Prine Pauls

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: May 7, 2025 • Article History

Also called:: American Indian, Amerindian, Amerind, Indian, aboriginal American, or First Nation person

Key People:: Hermon A. MacNeil; Layli Long Soldier; Walter Ufer

Related Topics:: Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains; Indigenous peoples of the American Southeast; Northwest Coast Indian; Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest; Northeast Indian

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Native American, member of any of the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere, although the term often connotes only those groups whose original territories were in present-day Canada and the United States.

Pre-Columbian Americans used technology and material culture that included fire and the fire drill; the domesticated dog; stone implements of many kinds; the spear-thrower (atlatl), harpoon, and bow and arrow; and cordage, netting, basketry, and, in some places, pottery. Many Indigenous American groups were hunting and gathering cultures, while others were agricultural peoples. Indigenous American domesticated a variety of plants and animals, including corn (maize), beans, squash, potatoes and other tubers, turkeys, llamas, and alpacas, as well as a variety of semidomesticated species of nut- and seed-bearing plants. These and other resources were used to support communities ranging from small hamlets to cities such as Cahokia, with an estimated population of 10,000 to 20,000 individuals, and Teotihuacán, with some 125,000 to 200,000 residents.

At the dawn of the 16th century ce, as the European conquest of the Americas began, Indigenous peoples resided throughout the Western Hemisphere. They were soon decimated by the effects of epidemic disease, military conquest, and enslavement, and, as with other colonized peoples, they were subject to discriminatory political and legal policies well into the 20th, and even the 21st, century. Nonetheless, they have been among the most active and successful Native peoples in effecting political change and regaining their autonomy in areas such as education, land ownership, religious freedom, the law, and the revitalization of traditional culture.

Historically, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas have been usually recognized as constituting two broad cultural groupings, American Indians (a term now considered outdated) and Arctic peoples. American Indians are often further grouped by area of residence: Northern America (present-day United States and Canada), Middle America (present-day Mexico and Central America; sometimes called Mesoamerica), and South America. This article is a survey of the culture areas, prehistories, histories, and recent developments of the Indigenous peoples and cultures of the United States and Canada. Some of the terminology used in reference to Indigenous Americans is explained in Sidebar: Tribal Nomenclature: American Indian, Native American, and First Nation; Sidebar: The Difference Between a Tribe and a Band; and Sidebar: Native American Self-Names. An overview of all the Indigenous peoples of the Americas is presented in American Indian; discussions of various aspects of Indigenous American cultures may also be found in the articles pre-Columbian civilizations; Middle American Indian; South American Indian; Arctic: The people; American Indian languages; Native American religions; and Native American arts.

Native American culture areas

Comparative studies are an essential component of all scholarly analyses, whether the topic under study is human society, fine art, paleontology, or chemistry; the similarities and differences found in the entities under consideration help to organize and direct research programs and exegeses. The comparative study of cultures falls largely in the domain of anthropology, which often uses a typology known as the culture area approach to organize comparisons across cultures.

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Which English Words Have Native American Origins?

The culture area approach was delineated at the turn of the 20th century and continued to frame discussions of peoples and cultures into the 21st century. A culture area is a geographic region where certain cultural traits have generally co-occurred; for instance, in North America between the 16th and 19th centuries, the Northwest Coast culture area was characterized by traits such as salmon fishing, woodworking, large villages or towns, and hierarchical social organization.

The specific number of culture areas delineated for Native America has been somewhat variable because regions are sometimes subdivided or conjoined. The 10 culture areas discussed below are among the most commonly used—the Arctic, the Subarctic, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Plains, the Southwest, the Great Basin, California, the Northwest Coast, and the Plateau. Notably, some scholars prefer to combine the Northeast and Southeast into one Eastern Woodlands culture area or the Plateau and Great Basin into a single Intermontane culture area. Each section below considers the location, climate, environment, languages, peoples, and common cultural characteristics of the area before it was heavily colonized. Prehistoric and post-Columbian Native American cultures are discussed in subsequent sections of this article. A discussion of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas as a whole is found in Indigenous American.