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David R. M. Beck, Nicole Tonkovich. The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 866–867, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.866a
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Nicole Tonkovich has written a complex narrative that details the conflicting goals of federal policymakers and Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) tribal members during the late nineteenth-century allotment process at the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho. Allotment was essentially a policy under which the federal government removed lands from communal-based tribal control and turned a portion of them over to fee patent ownership status for individual tribal members. As a result, for the Nez Perce—as well as for other tribes to whom the policy was applied—“surplus” reservation land was opened for non-Indian ownership.
Tonkovich's “multivocal counter-narrative” (p. 6) provides new insights into the goals, actions, and results of a one-size-fits-all federal policy as it was resisted and reshaped by local conditions and perspectives that stood in opposition to the “bureaucratic imaginary” that conceived the policy (p. 10). The Allotment Plot focuses on the work of Alice Fletcher, who worked with Congress to develop the 1887 Dawes (General Allotment) Act, and who was appointed as Special Indian Agent to oversee the process among the Nez Perce. The use of the word plot in the book's title refers to its meaning both as a basis for storyline and as a piece of land. Fletcher was accompanied by E. Jane Gay, who in addition to photographically documenting the events also produced written records of her experience that made their way into archival collections.
