Omaha ethnologist Francis La Flesche (FLF) has been remembered either as an unsuccessful supporter of the settler project or a misunderstood subversive social scientist. Before his appointment with the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology in 1910, FLF worked for three decades with ethnologist and allotment agent Alice Fletcher as a native informant, an epistemic tool whose gender, age, and subjectivity were rendered mutable. As the first Indigenous professional ethnologist, FLF studied the Osage nation extensively, but his scholarship and artifact collections were deemed “incomprehensible” and pedantic. His published works relied on Osage categories, lacked legible theoretical contributions, and his collections were undisplayable. Even FLF’s professional presence was evidence of the failure of the inner logics of his field, which presupposed his destined vanishing. In this paper, I challenge this historical narrative in which one can only resist or collude with cis-heteronormative colonial sciences. I read FLF’s failure, the fact that he was never quite the
proper subject of settler scientific knowledge production, as part of the making of Indigenous ethnology. Using J. Halberstam’s construction of queer failure, in which failure “exploits the unpredictability of ideology” and “recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant,” I argue that this never-quite-ness was not just an absence of authority, but a Native scientific position. Using a queer interpretive lens, I explore FLF’s published works and personal correspondence relating to salvage, and question settler-normativity in the study of Native science— the epistemic production of the objects and tools of settler science.
