OSAGEOsage

The Wazhazhe

Osage

Peuple des Eaux du Milieu Β· People of the Middle Waters

The international face of the Wah-Zha-Zhe diaspora. Heritage, standing observances, and the global presence of a people in two halves β€” those who remained at Pawhuska under the Sacred Fire, and those who carried the name into the wider world.

Wazhazhe

We call ourselves Wazhazhe. Our language is Dhegihan Siouan; our cousins are the Ponca, the Kaw, the Omaha, and the Quapaw. We came west from the Ohio Valley in the seventeenth century and, by the early nineteenth, held the great prairie between the Missouri and the Red rivers. George Catlin, who painted us, called us the tallest people in North America.

From Treaty to Reservation

Beginning with the Treaty of Fort Clark in 1808, the United States took from us some 52 million acres in Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma. In 1872, in a feat almost unique among Native nations, we purchased our own reservation: 1.47 million acres in north-central Indian Territory, today Osage County, Oklahoma. Pawhuska, Hominy, Fairfax, and Gray Horse rose around the four bands.

Oil, Allotment, and the Mineral Estate

Oil was discovered beneath our land in 1894. In 1907, Principal Chief James Bigheart secured an arrangement no other tribe secured: surface rights were allotted, but the mineral estate stayed communal. Each enrolled Osage received 657 acres and a headright β€” a share of the royalties. By 1923 the people of Pawhuska were, per capita, among the richest on Earth.

The Reign of Terror

The wealth invited horror. Between 1921 and 1925, an estimated sixty Osage were murdered for their headrights β€” by guardians, neighbors, and men who married into the rolls and then began burying their wives. We called in the federal government. The investigation became the first murder case in the history of the Bureau of Investigation, today the FBI.

The Nation Today

The 2006 Constitution restored one-person, one-vote government. The Osage Nation has more than 25,000 enrolled citizens and is headquartered at Pawhuska. It runs a Congress, a Supreme Court, an immersion school (Daposka Ahnkodapi), and the oldest tribally owned museum in the United States. The In-lon-shka dances continue every June. So does the song for our general β€” the only Osage song that requires the entire audience to stand.

Wazhazhe Across the World

Today our citizens live across all fifty states and at least eleven countries. This site is part of that diaspora β€” a private effort, undertaken by descendants of one Osage family, to make the Osage story easy to find. It does not speak for the Osage Nation, which speaks for itself at osagenation-nsn.gov.

Notable Wazhazhe

The diaspora’s working entities

For the corporate seat of the diaspora β€” the holding company that coordinates the working entities β€” see osage.group. For the public-facing landing of Osage Brothers, the family-run holding company, see osagebrothers.com. The on-chain settlement layer is held entirely separately at osage.network with documentation at docs.osage.network.

Sources: Osage Nation; Wikipedia (Osage Nation); David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon (2017); John Joseph Mathews, The Osages (1961).