Discovering Alice Cunningham Fletcher

Sitting in a cubicle at the National Museum of Natural History all I can think about is Alice Cunningham Fletcher. On October 1, 1881 she was living in Nebraska with the Omaha Indians. I have been researching and reading the field work of this incredible woman for the past month and it dawned on me. Am I a modern day Alice Fletcher?

She started her journey out west in September 1881, 43 and single with an unquenchable desire to learn. She had no family and was one of the first women to study at Harvard. She was active in womens rights. Throughout her life she was refused jobs becasue she was a woman, this did not stop her efforts to help the Native American's adn practice Ethnology.
I also started my own journey to Washington, DC in September 2009, 20 and single to intern at the Smithsonian for a semester. I have a very different background, born in rural Vermont with a large family that has pushed and helped me to where I am today. Going to a women's college. So what do we have in common?
What we all have incommon, a desire to understand people and how and why we do what we do.

But what has changed? There are of course the obvious that an Excelsior field diary and a fountain pen have morphed over the years into a blog and that we have gone to space, invented the Segway, have microwavable meals and numerous other anomalies.

I want to look however at how people have changed or more importantly if people have changed. By juxtaposing what I experience in my life in DC and Alice Fletcher's life in Nebraska.

On this very day in 1881 Alice Fletcher wrote: "I went down to the river in the moonlight to bathe my face and comb my hair and think. The world seemed small, yet wide and empty and the stars too. Echoless, echoless."

There is nothing more empowering than going off on your own adventure and I feel comforted that Alice Fletcher is in a way guiding me through.