Osage Indian Bands And Clans

The grandson of an Osage Indian, author Louis Burns wrote this primer to help persons of Osage descent trace their paternal lineage and to introduce researchers to Osage culture and the nuances of its language. The book opens with a discussion of the Osage dispersion from Missouri to Oklahoma and Kansas from about 1800 to 1870. Mr. Burns provides very helpful maps showing the concentration of the various tribal bands in each state. Next comes a summary of the richest sources of 19th-century Osage heritage, namely, Jesuit records, a great source of information concerning baptisms, marriages and interments; U.S. Government Annuity Rolls; and Osage Mission records, the best source of Osage family data. The aforementioned is followed by a list of tribal towns, as extracted from Jesuit records, and a list of Osage bands as found in the Annuity Rolls of 1878. When these sources are used in conjunction with the author's detailed listing of clans and their members, which furnishes names in both phonetic Osage and English, researchers stand a good chance of tracing their Native American heritage from about 1800 to the present. The balance of this carefully crafted volume focuses on aspects of the language, some knowledge of which is indispensable for successful research. Featured are an index to Osage names in Osage and in English, a listing of and indexes to kinship terms, a critical pronunciation key to Osage, and a conversion table for Osage Indian syllables. Mr. Burns' seminal work concludes with a bibliography of tribal literature.

Siouan peoples who migrated from the Atlantic coastal region and settled in the central portion of the North American continent long before the arrival of Europeans are now known as Osage. Because the Osage did not possess a written language, their myths and cultural traditions were handed down orally through many generations. With time, only those elements deemed vital were preserved in the stories, and many of these became highly stylized. The resulting verbal recitations of the proper life of an Osage—from genesis myths to body decoration, from star songs to child-naming rituals, from war party strategies to medicinal herbs—constitute this comprehensive volume. Osage myths differ greatly from the myths of Western Civilization, most obviously in the absence of individual names. Instead, “younger brother,” “the messenger,” “Little Old Men,” or a clan name may serve as the allegorical embodiment of the central player. Individual heroic feats are also missing because group life took precedence over individual experience in Osage culture. Supplementing the work of noted ethnographer Francis La Flesche who devoted most of his professional life to recording detailed descriptions of Osage rituals, Louis Burns’s unique position as a modern Osage—aware of the white culture’s expectations but steeped in the traditions himself is able to write from an insider’s perspective.

Louis Burns draws on ancestral oral traditions and research in a broad body of literature to tell the story of the Osage people. He writes clearly and concisely, from the Osage perspective. First published in 1989 and for many years out of print, this revised edition is augmented by a new preface and maps. Because of its masterful compilation and synthesis of the known data, A History of the Osage People continues to be the best reference for information on an important American Indian people.

Traditions of the Osage is a collection of sacred teachings, folk stories, and animal stories in their original language, Osage, between 1910 and 1923.

Osage, a language of the Dhegiha branch of the Siouan family, was spoken until recently by tribal members in northeastern Oklahoma. No longer in daily use, it was in danger of extinction. Carolyn Quintero, a linguist raised in Osage County, worked with the last few fluent speakers of the language to preserve the sounds and textures of their complex speech. Compiled after painstaking work with these tribal elders, her Osage Dictionary is the definitive lexicon for that tongue, enhanced with thousands of phrases and sentences that illustrate fine points of usage. Drawing on a collaboration with the late Robert Bristow, an amateur linguist who had compiled copious notes toward an Osage dictionary, Quintero interviewed more than a dozen Osage speakers to explore crucial aspects of their language. She has also integrated into the dictionary explications of relevant material from Francis La Flesche’s 1932 dictionary of Osage and from James Owen Dorsey’s nineteenth-century research. The dictionary includes over three thousand main entries, each of which gives full grammatical information and notes variant pronunciations. The entries also provide English translations of copious examples of usage. The book’s introductory sections provide a description of syntax, morphology, and phonology. Employing a simple Siouan adaptation of the International Phonetic Alphabet, Quintero’s transcription of Osage sounds is more precise and accurate than that in any previous work on the language. An index provides Osage equivalents for more than five thousand English words and expressions, facilitating quick reference. As the most comprehensive lexical record of the Osage language—the only one that will ever be possible, given the loss of fluent speakers—Quintero’s dictionary is indispensable not only for linguists but also for Osage students seeking to relearn their language. It is a living monument to the elegance and complexity of a language nearly lost to time and stands as a major contribution to the study of North American Indians.

The Osage Indians were a powerful group of Native Americans who lived along the prairies and plains of present-day Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains, now available in paper, shows how the Osage formed and maintained political, economic, and social control over a large portion of the central United States for more than 150 years.

DICTIONARY OF INDIAN TRIBES OF THE AMERICAS - Second Edition contains information on over 1,150 tribal nations of the entire western hemisphere, from the Aleuts of the Arctic region to Onas in southern Argentina and Chile. This is a contemporary work and its intention is to bring modern day insights to the consideration of the native peoples who populate the western hemisphere. Every effort has been made to include tribes that have not been extensively covered in other publications. Modern anthropologists and historians tend to agree that there is a basic homogeneity (cultural, social, biological, or other similarities within a group) among the native peoples of the Americas that need to be considered when any of the tribes are studied. The tribal entries were written by noted local, national and international historians and anthropologists.

John Joseph Mathews (1894–1979) is one of Oklahoma’s most revered twentieth-century authors. An Osage Indian, he was also one of the first Indigenous authors to gain national renown. Yet fame did not come easily to Mathews, and his personality was full of contradictions. In this captivating biography, Michael Snyder provides the first book-length account of this fascinating figure. Known as “Jo” to all his friends, Mathews had a multifaceted identity. A novelist, naturalist, biographer, historian, and tribal preservationist, he was a true “man of letters.” Snyder draws on a wealth of sources, many of them previously untapped, to narrate Mathews’s story. Much of the writer’s family life—especially his two marriages and his relationships with his two children and two stepchildren—is explored here for the first time. Born in the town of Pawhuska in Indian Territory, Mathews attended the University of Oklahoma before venturing abroad and earning a second degree from Oxford. He served as a flight instructor during World War I, traveled across Europe and northern Africa, and bought and sold land in California. A proud Osage who devoted himself to preserving Osage culture, Mathews also served as tribal councilman and cultural historian for the Osage Nation. Like many gifted artists, Mathews was not without flaws. And perhaps in the eyes of some critics, he occupies a nebulous space in literary history. Through insightful analysis of his major works, especially his semiautobiographical novel Sundown and his meditative Talking to the Moon, Snyder revises this impression. The story he tells, of one remarkable individual, is also the story of the Osage Nation, the state of Oklahoma, and Native America in the twentieth century.