Alice C. Fletcher was the foremost woman anthropologist in the United Stares in the nineteenth century. Francis La Flesche, a member of the Omaha tribe, worked closely with Alice Fletcher for many years and in addition produced ethnological studies of his own. His autobiographical account The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe is also available as a Bison Book.
In his introduction to this Bison Book edition, Robin Ridington focuses on the place of Fletcher and La Flesche's work in the history of anthropology and the history of anthropologists' relationships with the Omahas. Ridington is a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia and the author of Little Bit Know Something: Stories in a Language of Anthropology (1990).