Category: Sandra Osawa

Osage–and Lucky to be Here

Where to start?

I just finished reading Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. I thought first about people I know—people of Osage blood—who are indeed “lucky to be here” in light of what happened in Osage County, Oklahoma in the first decades of the twentieth century.

And then “Osage Outrage” came to mind, as what started out as a novel-paced mystery became a litany of lies, deceit, greed, and cold-blooded murder. A novelist would not have left as many dangling unanswered questions, or so many people dead.

Finally, thoughts that could not be as easily captured in a few words came to mind: “It is a question in my mind,” said an Osage Tribal member prior to trial, “whether this jury is considering a murder case or not. The question for them to decide is whether a white man killing an Osage is murder—or merely cruelty to animals.”

“America’s original sin” came to mind. I remembered the first Europeans, Columbus’s crew, having to go to the Pope to decide whether new world people were indeed humans, possessed of souls, or some lower form of life. But three hundred years had passed from the time of the Papal Bull, which said that Indians did indeed have souls (and were thus capable of conversion), and the murders of scores—maybe hundreds—of Osage Indians in the pursuit of wealth. Were the killings mere evil deeds in pursuit of gold—or were they a continuing statement by White America that American Indians are lesser humans, or not humans at all?

I first heard bits of the story from the poet Elise Paschen, the daughter of prima ballerina Maria Tallchief. Tallchief was born in Oklahoma, the daughter of an Osage Indian father, and went from there to the world stage. Elise was at Fishtrap because she is a fine poet, and we were celebrating Indian writers that year. We called the celebration “Circling Back.” Elise read her poems, a couple of which hinted at the dark Osage past, and in conversation said that there was much more to learn and tell.

Sandy Osawa, the fine documentary filmmaker, who is Makah and was raised on that reservation in Washington, was at that Summer Fishtrap. Sandy produced an early morning NBC show on Indians in the mid-70s, and is now a highly regarded documentary filmmaker. Her credits include: In the Heart of Big Mountain, focusing on Navajo matriarch Kathrine Smith; Pepper’s Powwow, the story of Kaw-Muscogee jazz saxophonist Jim Pepper; and Lighting the Seventh Fire, a film about Chippewa spearfishing rights in Wisconsin.

Sandy and Elise became friends, and in 2007 Sandy released Maria Tallchief, which has been shown on PBS stations across the country.

The film mentions, but does not explore in depth, the Osage murders. In Killers of the Flower Moon, author David Grann does. It is a wicked story, beginning with government displacement of Indians, moving to oil discovery on the scrubby lands given the Osage, chronicling the extraordinary wealth of the Osage (the “wealthiest county in America,” for a time); exploring racial attitudes in Oklahoma and the country in the early 20th century, and then following the greed of a few white men—a trickle of evildoers that became a river of corruption and destruction. Reading it was a journey from interest through disbelief to disgust. I set it down sick to my stomach.

But the Osage survive. Maria Tallchief survived to give pleasure to millions as a dancer; her daughter Elise Paschen—we might call her a second generation Osage survivor—survives to give voice to Indian stories; and my friend Nancy Crenshaw, whose father was born on the Osage Reservation in the time of the murders, teaches the children of Wallowa County and, with her teacher son and a growing group of local community members, works with the Nez Perce towards reconciliation of white and Indian in their traditional Wallowa homeland.

Elise and Nancy are really “lucky to be here.” The woman or man murdered could have been grandfather or father rather than aunt, grandmother or mother rather than uncle. And we of course, are lucky too, richer—and not in oil or gold—for their survival.

# # #

Happy Thanksgiving

I watched a film on PBS last night, “The Thick Dark Fog.” It is the story of a Lakota man named Walter Littlemoon and his struggle to reclaim his humanity, stolen from him at a boarding school as a five year old on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The man’s a poet—a simple and eloquent speaker, and I will now order his book, They Called Me Uncivilized. 
And while I wait for the book, I will puzzle over two things. First, as we recovered from the horror of the Holocaust in Europe and watched another again with a sideways glance at Cambodia, cultural genocide was going on under our noses in our own country. Oh, by the mid-sixties, as I came of age, we were probably no longer kidnapping Indian children, cutting their hair, and beating the Indian out of them so that we could make them men and women, but the products of our years of doing so were serving in Vietnam and stumbling around Los Angeles and Portland and other American cities after Eisenhower era “termination” policy do-gooders had put them on Greyhound buses and dropped them off with a few bucks and a charge to join the mainstream. 
Why didn’t we—good white college students at state universities and the best private colleges, Civil Rights workers risking harm registering black voters, Peace Corps Volunteers standing up for and with poor people in over 100 other countries—know what was really going on in our own? Some few of us did, I guess, but mostly we were only half-educated, knew that Indians were mistreated but wanted them to get what black people were getting, their civil rights. Not many of us were talking about getting Indians the rights to lands and resources stolen from them and the rights treaties had supposedly granted them as Indians, as pre-white inhabitants of the country.
Now I live next to a couple of reservations in the traditional homeland of Nez Perce people, and I am learning—slowly—their stories and the stories of Indian peoples across the continents, the New World. “Thick Dark Fog” is not the first documentary on Indians I have watched. I’ve seen “Smokin’ Fish,” a Tlingit story, and know Sandra Osawa and her films, “Pepper’s Powwow,” about the great Indian jazz musician, Jim Pepper, and “Maria Tallchief,” the story of the Osage prima ballerina that Sandy did with help from Maria’s daughter, the poet Elise Paschen. And of course I have seen “Smoke Signals” more than once.
After watching the film tonight, I went to nativetelecom.org and found logs of radio and TV broadcasts, notice of Native radio stations, filmmakers, producers, etc. And it occurred to me that we still live in two parallel worlds. That yes, Indian stories creep across the lines, and some of us go to powwows and tribal and national museums and read books by Sherman Alexie and James Welch, Scott Momaday and Debra Earling, but that for the most part our schools still omit Indians and their 500 year history of dealing with the “nation of immigrants” that have and continue to descend on the Americas.
That’s the other puzzle. Custer and the Big Horn are, as the late novelist James Welch claimed, subjects of more books and movies than just about anything in American history. There are statues of the “Red Napoleon,” Chief Young Joseph, across the land. But the real stories of Crazy Horse and Joseph are still locked away from the mainstream of American history and affairs. And the Sierra Club doesn’t much ask Indians how they were able to live in this land for 20,000 or 30,000 or more years before Europeans arrived.
There are breeches, tears in the wall and points of connection between the Nation of Immigrants story and the Indian story, and I guess it is our job at the Josephy Library to keep finding them.
Which gets me back to Thanksgiving. How many of us were taught how or even puzzled over how the Indians got the corn and squash and beans that they supposedly fed the Pilgrims in the cold northeast all the way from their origins in warm  Mesoamerica? One world to another?
# # #

“Noble Savage”

After the last blog on Mildred Bailey and “passing as white,” a friend suggested that it sounded accurate on the one hand, but on the other, why is it that so many Americans claim Indian roots? There are jokes about the number of people with Cherokee great-grandmothers, but when, he asked, have you heard someone obviously “white” claim a slave ancestor from Sierra Leone.

What’s with this contradiction of widespread pride in Indian ancestry—and white America’s disregard for and continuing practice of forgetting Indian history and consciously eradicating Indian culture?

I can’t site a page in a Josephy book or remember a specific conversation, but I know that he believed that, from the earliest days of white settlement, relations with Indians were dominated by a triad of white attitudes toward them: romanticize, kill, or assimilate.

We now know that diseases often preceded actual contact and that millions of indigenous Americans died before they saw a white face. We also know, though it is less frequently mentioned, that Europe, and especially northern Europe, was in the final throes of the little ice age when those first ships sailed to the North America. Famine was fact, and the people who traveled were a scrawny lot (I read somewhere that Napoleon’s army was made up of men who barely topped five foot, unlike Charlemagne‘s much earlier army of six footers.) And their first sightings of Indians must have been awe-inspiring. Think of the early paintings of the “red men,” and of the Indians who were brought to Europe to parade in front of kings, queens, and philosophers.

These able-bodied Indians appeared to be living well without the trappings of European civilization, without large houses, police forces, and only the barest of manufactured goods. “Noble savages,” Rousseau called them. At least some of the early colonists, Benjamin Franklin among them, read and were influenced by the Europeans and found confirmation of their views in personal experience.

I don’t remember which general declared that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, and there is not time or space to chronicle the attempts by do-good white Americans to assimilate Indians. The Dawes Act, Indian Reorganization Act, and Eisenhower’s termination policy can serve as brief reminders

But is it too much to say that Josephy’s original triad is with us still? That White America is still conflicted about Indians, and that we carry with us these old attitudes—all of them. At Fishtrap, we hosted the Makah filmmaker Sandy Osawa, and watched her documentaries on musician Jim Pepper and prima ballerina Maria Tallchief. We listened to Horace Axtell describe a language and sounds related directly the world around us.

And now that powwow’s are mainstream, we are stirred by jingle dancers and Indian elders with eagle feathers. I remember selling a book of Indian sayings in my bookstore days: To Touch the Earth.

Maybe that is what the Cherokee great grandmother is all about….

check out Sandy Osawa and Maria Tallchief here: http://indiancountrynews.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2006&Itemid=80