[3] Fletcher taught school and later became a public lecturer to support herself, arguing that anthropologists and archaeologists were best at uncovering ancient history of humans.

"[4] Fletcher credited Frederic Ward Putnam for stimulating her interest in American Indian culture and began working with him at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

[6] From 1881, Fletcher was involved with the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where native children learned English, arithmetic, and skills designed to allow them to be integrated American citizens.

[8] She was accompanied by Susette "Bright Eyes" La Flesche, an Omaha spokeswoman who had served as interpreter for Standing Bear in 1879 in his landmark civil rights trial.

[8] Also with them was Thomas Tibbles, a journalist who had helped publicize Standing Bear's cause and arranged a several-month lecture tour in the United States.

In 1883 she was appointed special agent by the US to allot lands to the Miwok tribes, in 1884 she prepared and sent to the World Cotton Centennial an exhibit showing the progress of civilization among the Indians of North America in the quarter-century previous,[10] and in 1886 visited the natives of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands on a mission from the commissioner of education.

[10] In 1887 she was appointed United States special agent in the allotment of lands among the Winnebago and the Nez Perce under the Dawes Act.

She was a pioneer in the study of American Indian music, a field of research inaugurated by a paper she gave in 1893 before the Chicago Anthropological Conference.

[5] In 1898 at the Congress of Musicians held in Omaha during the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, she read several essays upon the songs of the North American Indians.

Out of this grew her Indian Story and Song from North America (1900), exploring a stage of development antecedent to that in which culture music appeared.

[6] Fletcher worked with Frederic Ward Putnam in his research on Serpents Mound in Ohio and assisted in the efforts to raise funds to purchase the site in 1886.

[2] Over her lifetime Alice Fletcher worked with and for the Omaha, Pawnee, Sioux, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Chippewa, Oto, Nez Percé, Ponca and Winnebago tribes.

In 1890 she was awarded the Margaret Copley Thaw Fellowship at Harvard, which granted her funding for ethnographic and reform work.