Traditions of the Osage: Stories Collected and Translated by Francis La Flesche, and: The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing after Removal (review)

Washington Irving is mentioned briefly in the introduction to The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing after Removal, when the editors cite his A Tour on the Prairies (1835) as an example of a work in which “an accomplished craftsman took pains to create Indians as people instead of types” (10). While some might take issue with the accuracy of this statement, it is nonetheless fitting that Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies is alluded to here, since that work actually serves as an interesting bridge between The People Who Stayed and the second text in question in this review, Traditions of the Osage: Stories Collected and Translated by Francis La Flesche. A Tour on the Prairies was written after Irving’s brief excursion to the mixed- and shortgrass prairies of Kansas and Oklahoma—the heart of what was then Osage territory—in the fall of 1832. Indeed, the Osage are the primary Native culture with which Irving interacts while on his “tour.” Irving’s work is intimately tied to the post-Removal literature accumulated in the pages of The People Who Stayed as well, as the person leading Irving’s expedition was none other than Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, Commissioner on Indian Affairs and point man for Andrew Jackson’s early efforts to relocate the Native communities of the Southeast to “Indian Territory” in present-day Oklahoma. More than just a bit of trivia from nineteenth-century American literature, the link that Irving allows between these two recent collections of traditional and contemporary Native literature speaks to the interconnectedness of their concerns, in spite of the geographical and cultural gaps separating them: namely, the desire to overturn dominant narratives of western settlement and progress, of which Irving can be seen as a standard-bearer, by giving a voice to those formerly silenced by the presumption that Native cultures throughout North America willingly succumbed to the pressures of Euro-American civilization.

Compared to the indigenous cultures with which they cohabited the prairies and plains of the North American midcontinent—such as the Sioux, Cheyenne, Pawnee, and even Kiowa—the Osage are not as prominently discussed in the history and literature of the region. Traditions of the Osage thus serves as a correction to the absence of Osage life and culture in contemporary analyses of the region and its people, in particular critiques of Euro-American settlement and removal. In the first two chapters, Garrick Bailey offers the reader a concise history of the Osage following contact with the French in the mid-eighteenth century. Unsurprisingly, most of this narrative involves the Osage losing traditional home grounds through a series of treaties with and incursions by the French, the Spanish, and eventually the Americans, perhaps most prominently in the era of Jacksonian Removal that serves as the backdrop for The People Who Stayed. However, Bailey gives ample space to other components of Osage culture and society, contextualizing the traditional stories included by elaborating upon religious beliefs, tribal organization, and the day-to-day life of Osage men, women, and children.

Bailey organizes the stories themselves into three different categories: sacred teachings, folk stories, and animal stories. Most of these are what one would expect in such a collection; the sacred teachings, for example, include numerous stories describing Osage cosmogony, the implementation of religious customs and practices, and moral prescriptions by which to live. Likewise, the folk stories recount legends of prominent Osage events and people, while the few animal stories included tend toward the allegorical. The standout of the collection is a folk story titled “The Woman War Leader,” which tells of a widow who mourns the loss of her husband before organizing a war party of...