Search

The article focuses on the Osage Nation's treaties and land cessions from 1808 to 1870, detailing how they ceded over one hundred million acres of ancestral lands under unfair negotiations with the U.S. Topics discussed include unfair tactics employed by the US, the impact of treaties on Osage territory, and the consequences of assimilation policies on Osage culture and education.

The article focuses on efforts to allot the Osage Nation's land in 1893, 1894, and 1906, highlighting the challenges and negotiations surrounding the Dawes Act. Topics discussed include the Osages' rejection of allotment, the Dawes Act's implications, and proposals from both full-blood and half-blood Osages.

The article focuses on fraud within the Osage Nation during the late 19th century, detailing how licensed reservation traders exploited the tribe's wealth. Topics discussed include fraudulent schemes to tap into the Osage Trust, conflicts between licensed and border traders, and the exploitation of Osage Indians through inflated prices and predatory lending practices.

The article focuses on the challenges faced by the Osage Nation post-Civil War, including land loss, resource depletion, and conflicts with settlers and other tribes. Topics discussed include Osage livelihood, treaty negotiations, and struggles on their new reservation, highlighting governmental neglect and infringements on Osage rights and lands.

The article focuses on the Legacy of the Osage Allotment Act of 1906, detailing the history of land cessions and treaties impacting the Osage Nation from 1808 to 1906. Topics discussed include treaties and land cessions, the Indian Civilization Act, and the implementation of the Allotment Act of 1906.

The article focuses on an investigation led by Senator William V. Allen into allegations of improprieties and fraud in the Osage Nation in 1896. It covers multiple issues including fraudulent withdrawals from the Osage Trust, questionable oil leases, and the mistreatment of Osage Indians by licensed traders, portraying a history of exploitation and conflicts within the Osage community.

As Native nations reclaim dominion over our histories, stories, and territories, we continue to grapple with how to transform our governance systems to navigate ongoing settler colonialism. Building on existing discussions about the importance of reintroducing Indigenous values into contemporary governance in the face of the politics of recognition, we offer the Osage principle of "moving to a new country." This principle marks the reproduction of Indigenous values through a process of continuous deliberation and adaptation to foster a unified and healthy government system, even in the midst of massive upheaval. Historical vignettes exemplify the process of moving to a new country as Osages sought order and unity amid attempts at assimilation and massive colonial devastation. In the twenty-first century, the Osage Nation Supreme Court's decisions offer a guide for the newly reconstituted government's debates over authority. Citing historical and contemporary characteristics of Osage life, the court is again linking living values of change, order, and unity to the nation's current government structure. Ultimately, the idea of moving offers a model for how Native nations could embrace ongoing change to support living values and meet contemporary needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the U.S. western travels of U.S. author Washington Irving and the concepts of masculinity and race in the U.S. West. According to the article, Irving began his voyage into Native American territory in October 1832. The article discusses Irving's travel guides, Irving's interactions with Osage Indians, and cultural images of Native Americans in the U.S. in the early-to-mid-19th century.

In 1804, a delegation of Osages traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with President Thomas Jefferson. After their meeting, Jefferson remarked in a letter that the Osages were "the finest men we have ever seen" ("To Robert Smith"). Using Jefferson's comment as a starting point, this essay considers what contributions Edward Said's approach to critically engaging colonialism in Orientalism can make to North American contexts. The essay argues that Said's focus on the exteriority of colonial texts and archives in Orientalism provides an important alternative to most approaches in Native and Indigenous historical studies, which have too often looked for intrinsic meanings behind or beneath textual evidence. Guided by these insights from Orientalism, the essay's analysis focuses on the tri-racial history of Virginia, the home state of Jefferson as well as Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Far from paying tribute to Osage greatness, Jefferson's comment set the stage for Osage dispossession and the importation into the Mississippi West of slavery and the racial capitalist system that made it possible. The essay concludes by discussing the relevance of Jefferson's comment to contemporary manifestations of resistance against this Jeffersonian inheritance, including the Movement for Black Lives, the movement to defend the Missouri River against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and those who organized against the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August, 2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1870s both Euro-American Catholics and leaders of the Osage Nation fought against federal restrictions on Catholic schools in Indian Territory. During this fight, Native and non-Native advocates argued that the Osage had a right to Catholic schools. For each group, however, the freedom to establish Catholic education in Indian Territory cohered differently; as a right it derived from different sources of authority. On both sides, these sources existed in complex relation to the sovereignty of the U.S. nation-state. Among the Osage, anger over the absence of Catholic schools, and demands for them as a treaty right, speak to Catholicism's importance to the tribe--not as a belief system, but as a site of political possibility amid the crisis provoked by U.S. colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the migration of rich American Indians from Oklahoma to the West Coast. Jackson Barnett, an Oklahoma Creek Indian who became rich from oil profits, would direct traffic outside his mansion in Los Angeles, California. Members of the Osage tribe received profits from mineral rights, making them the richest U.S. Indian tribe during the 1920s. Many American Indians fled Oklahoma to escape paternalistic property laws and to find better educational opportunities for children.

Focuses on the trading made by Osage Indians with foreign merchants along the Mississippi River in the early 1800s. Geographical advantage of the ethnic group toward western exploration and commerce; Reaction of Spanish officials to the dominance of the Osage in trade; Influence of the group's culture on the people of Louisiana.

The article focuses on Kansas Governor Thomas A. Osborn who promoted white colonization of the state in 1872 through the removal of Native American inhabitants and cites the need to recast the mythology of the Osage Border War of 1874-1875 which had clashing versions of related events. Topics include Osborn's policy and political agenda, the public fear fanned by killings of White settlers and Osages, and the emergence of vigilante groups. Also noted is the grasshopper plague in Kansas in 1875.

Th is article analyzes the EPA’s relationship with Native Americans, which has been neglected by historians. It seems like the EPA, a federal agency born during the self- determination era, would be open to new approaches in federal Native American policy, but this was not the case in 2005. Republican senator James Inhof of Oklahoma added a rider to an otherwise benign transportation bill making it illegal for tribes residing within Oklahoma to operate environmental protection programs without first negotiating with the state government of Oklahoma. Th e rider eroded the federal trust relationship and infringed on Native self-determination. Oklahoma’s tribes and Native American leaders from around the nation worked to get the new law overturned, but the EPA decided to help tribes work within the confines of the new law. Despite the EPA’s stance on the law, the tribes continued to challenge it as they had in the past when hurt by paternalistic federal policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A biography of Osage Band Chief and diplomat We-He-Sa-Ki (Hard Rope) is presented. He was born in 1821 and resided in a village near present-day Vernon County, Missouri. He devoted his life to the survival of the Osage Nation which faced challenges imposed by rapid cultural, economic and technological change making him one of the prominent figures in Osage history. He supported the Union during the U.S. Civil War and left a legacy of sound leadership and diplomacy after his death in 1883.

The article presents a reading of Native American ballerina Maria Tallchief's autobiography "Maria Tallchief: America's Prima Ballerina." It examines how Tallchief ecnountered her publics as a writer, as an Osage woman and as America's first prima ballerina. It looks at her vital role in establishing an American ballet tradition, her connection to her Osage heritage and the establishment of her identity as a postindian princess.

The article focuses on forced removal Quapaw and Osage tribes from their settlement in Mississippi. It discusses history of Quapaw's economic and military alliance with French and Spanish rulers and later with British under Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, claiming the Arkansas post. Topics include Cherokee Treaty of 1817, William Clark's siege of Quapaw lands at the behest of Calhoun, and Osage Treaty of 1818.

ABSTRACT Even as Indigenous authority over land remains under attack through ongoing settler-colonial processes, Native nations continue to pursue their own agendas. Like the negotiations around sovereignty across the globe, the result is a web of interconnected authorities. Native nations, US counties and states, the federal government, and various corporations constantly deploy creative tactics, calculated disruptions, and negotiated compromises in an effort to gain and maintain authority over a territory. As demonstrated by Osage political history, tobacco sales tax negotiations, and battles over industrial wind parks, acting as a sovereign creates interconnection with other governments. Considered in light of these ongoing negotiations, sovereignty is not freedom from external control but is, rather, an inescapable web of negotiation, contention, and concession that leads to further entanglement. [ settler colonialism, sovereignty, corporations, compacting, energy production, Native nations, Oklahoma] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a critical analysis of the practices and discourses of white settler 'men' in Southeast Kansas (Ancestral Osage Territories) by examining the inextricable links rural masculinity has with settler colonialism. I begin by underscoring how efforts in erasing Indigenous histories have been sanctioned through processes of dispossession, bordering, and nation-state building. I then explore how hetero-patriarchal rural hierarchies are assembled via capitalistic desires for private property; conservative Christianity's rhetoric of altruism and good intentions; white supremacist conceptions of race; and masculinist perspectives regarding work and gender. Next, I highlight how the spatial assertion of white settler masculinity reproduces colonial oppressions based upon interlocking subject positions and notions of difference. I continue by suggesting denial and disaffiliation are banal exercises of disavowal employed by white settler societies as attempts to forget colonial violence. I then finish by illustrating how a masculinist status quo might be disrupted, resisted, and transformed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Sundown" by John Joseph Mathews is presented in relation to the sociospatiality and temporal dynamics altered by the Osage Allotment Act. It takes note of colonial attempts to steer Indians from savagery toward civilization giving way to recognition of the conflict between tradition and assimilation while still dispossessing the Indigenous of their perception of spacetime. The use of modernist style in presenting the Osage Nation's plight is also discussed.

The article presents a case study of debates surrounding citizenship reform in the Osage Nation during the early 21st century. Particular focus is given to the roles of recognition, tribal sovereignty, territory and the Osage Nation's constitution in these debates. The author discusses the factors leading to Osage voters' choice of lineal descent as a determinant of citizenship, rather than blood quantum and culture. Settler colonialism is also discussed.

The article presents a study which chronicled the Osage Indian population in Kansas state based on historical records on French colonization, trade with other Native American tribes and health status. Topics discussed include the impact of American expansion on the Osage economy, subsistence and health, an overview of the Osage contact with French colonists in and the impact of the Louisiana Purchase on the Osages. The factors that affected the fertility of the Osages are also discussed.

The article discusses an ancient city known as Cahokia, located in the areas that would become St. Louis, Missouri, and East St. Louis, Illinois. According to the article, Cahokia was built around 1050 and contained a gigantic pyramid known as Monks Mound. The article describes the area known as the "American Bottom," early human settlements in the area, and the construction of a wooden palisade near the core of Monks Mound. The article discusses the possibility that ancestors of the Osage Indians built and ruled Cahokia.

The article discusses governance and politics among the Osage Indians. It comments on the governance of the Osage Tribal Council (OTC), created in the early twentieth century, which became the Osage Nation in 2006. The author examines relations with the U.S. government and the fear of the U.S. government denying recognition of Osage nationhood. Other topics include the Osage Mineral Estate, the allotment of Osage reservation land, and the question of the separation of powers within Osage government.

The early twentieth-century oil boom radically transformed the Osage reservation in Oklahoma, and in the early 1920s the Osages became the world's richest community because of their collective sharing of profits from mineral resources. In 1934, John Joseph Mathews, an Osage American tribal historian, published Sundown, his only work of fiction, a peculiar Bildungsroman about the life of Chal Windzer in the aftermath of oil discovery on the Osage reservation. I argue that Mathews's use of the novel of formation is a particularly important literary and intellectual intervention. First, at a time when the significance of material resources to the American economy and American national imaginary was growing, Mathews uses the generic convention of progress to narrate oil's social “formation,” alongside the tale of Chal's dissolution, his failure, that is, of the very development which the novel's genre implies. Second, Mathews's literary representation of the oil boom as the Great Frenzy – a period of widespread violence and cultural chaos – complicates traditional accounts of capitalist economic development, which define late-stage capitalism and its financial deregulation and IT boom as an era of radical cultural “fluidity” (Bauman, Sennett). By drawing attention to the material and social fluidity of oil culture and the force with which it affected the Osages, Sundown points to a specific Osage American colonial, and thus always already transnational, history of (petro)modernity. The character of modernity, Mathews shows us, is inextricably tied to the conditions under which human and natural resources are extracted and allowed to become “social.” The destabilization of reservation culture derives equally from oil discovery itself, and the technological transformations within the energy industry, from the colonialist conditions that impose capitalism upon the Osages, and from the very collectivist modes of wealth distribution that the Osages adopted in order to resist colonial exploitation. Thus Mathews's novel reveals an alternative genealogy of the destabilization of cultural forms to the one that begins with post-Bretton Woods global financial deregulation, the collapse of state institutions in the global North, and the late twentieth-century emergence of new communication technologies. For the Osages in the 1920s and for the characters in Sundown, crude oil and colonial exploitation, as well as, paradoxically, anticapitalist legal provisions of the Allotment Act's collectivizing of it, make reservation culture “liquid” and “uncertain” precisely at the time of America's entering into the presumably “solid” econo-political phase of development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses author John Joseph Mathews of the Osage Nation tribe, and how his life and work can be interpreted through Native American studies. Tribal and gender identity, internationalism, and U.S. expatriates are discussed, as well as modernist travel narratives, Mathews' travels in North Africa, and scholarship on Mathews. His novel "Sundown," his memoir "Talking to the Moon," and his similarities to writer Earnest Hemingway are discussed.

In 1820, Osage chiefs traveled from southeast Kansas to St. Louis to ask Bishop Louis DuBourg to visit their villages, promising that "he could pour waters on many heads." Through their experience with French traders, the Osage had come to trust Catholic priests; thus, as Protestant clergy began to petition the government for the right to establish missions on Osage lands, the chiefs turned to the "Chief of the Black Robes." By negotiating a relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, the Osage hoped to preserve their identity as "Children of the Middle Waters." The author examines the ensuing relationship between the Osage and the Jesuit priests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the alliance forged by Native American groups Quapaws and Chickasaws during the American Revolutionary War in the 1700s. Aside from the goal of preserving their population, the Chickasaw-Quapaw diplomacy was created to establish mutually beneficial military trade networks. Details of violence between the two groups which included village raids and warfare prior to their peace agreement are presented. In spite of continuous pressure, threats, and bribes from other groups like Spaniards and the British, their alliance remained intact.

This article explores ideas of justice and punishment held by various Indians and Europeans, ending with the trial of several Osage men accused by the United States of the kind of killing that the Osage had done for a century in protection of their trade and land rights. It argues that Indian ways of cross-cultural interaction shaped interactions with Europeans and also changed in order to deal with the new hazards and opportunities that newcomers presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of the Osage Indian tribe up to the Osage Allotment Act of 1906 in an attempt to understand why the Osage Nation was treated differently than other tribes. The Osage Allotment Act created a tribal government for only the Osage Indians and no other tribe. The Osage Nation was unique in that it had control over lands with valuable mineral resources. The passage of a bill in 2004 granted the Osage Nation sovereignty to determine its own government.

The article examines the beliefs and principles of four groups of people who lived in the Arkansas Valley in the early 19th century,namely the Osages, the Quapaws, the immigrant Cherokees and the British Americans. The groups have differences in their views on diplomatic relations, land rights, sovereignty and colonialism. In the West in the 19th century, Indian groups did not surrender silently to the British settlers.

Among 19[sup th] century Osage full-bloods, a modified cranium, specifically a flattened occiput, was an integral part of ethnic expression. An early archival source documenting this practice is a sculpted bust of Black Spirit, who, along with five other members of the Osage tribe, toured Paris in 1827, where a local artisan skillfully crafted this marble likeness of an exotic visitor from America's frontier When viewed in profile this bust clearly depicts a tabular occiput. Comparative study of 124 Osages measured by Franz Boas and colleagues at the close of the 19[sup th] century reveals that the majority of mixed-bloods did not possess altered crania, while full-bloods did. It will be demonstrated that Indian-white marriages created a domestic environment where parents chose not to utilize a cradleboard as part of infant care. Their probable motives for this decision will also be explored. The craniometric data analyzed in this report document an important form of culture change among admixed Osage Indians at the close of the 19[sup th] century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]