Helen Myers

Aided by Elsie Myers-Stainton

Music enveloped the Indian's individual
and social life like an atmosphere"

Alice Cunningham Fletcher ( 1838-1923) showed a pi-
oneering spirit in both her life and her writing. She went to
live with the Omahas in 1881, just five years after the Battle
of the Little Bighorn, and she returned again and again dur-
ing the following thirty years to photograph and record
their way of life and song. She was the first white person to
witness many Indian ceremonies and to notate or record
them. Her books, the present one from 1900, are valuable to
scholars, first, as a living record of Indian ways and, second,
as insightful comment by an outsider.

Alice Cunningham Fletcher had an abiding desire to
know about Native American life, its traditions, customs,
songs, dance, and ritual. And along with her hankering to
know was a strong impulse to disseminate the knowledge
gained. In Indian Story and Song she says she is now offering
"in a more popular form" material hitherto appearing only
in scientific publications, "that the general public may share
with the student the light shed by these untutored melodies"
(pp. xxix-xxx). But in addition to sharing information,
Fletcher inevitably wanted to draw conclusions from her

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