John Joseph Mathews, the Osage Tribal Museum, and the emergence of an Indigenous Museum Model

One of the many ongoing exhibits featured in the Osage Tribal Museum is titled "2,229," so named after the number of original Osage allottees recorded onto the membership rolls following the allotment of the reservation in 1906. To date, the exhibit features photographs of approximately 1,500 of the original 2,229 allotted members.¹ Those who visit the Osage Tribal Museum are guided through several exhibits featuring the early history of the Osage people prior to their removal to Indian Territory, along with exhibits on the 1906 Osage Allotment Act and the subsequent allotment roll that was compiled before the rolls closed in 1907. For Osage members, the exhibit offers a people's history of the nation—presented in a visually stunning manner—but also a genealogical history, as present-day tribal members can trace their lineages back to the 2,229 original allottees.² Kathryn Redcorn, director and curator of the Osage Tribal Museum, is responsible for envisioning the exhibit and also for creating an abridged version that traveled in 2006 to St. Louis, Missouri, the traditional homelands of the Osage people.³ This essay thus traces the history of the Osage Tribal Museum, from the time it opened its doors in 1938 to its role in precipitating the emergence of a new tribal museum model.

Born on November 16, 1894, Osage historian, writer, tribal councilman, and author John Joseph Mathews would write late in his life about his personal and professional interest in preserving the cultural knowledge of his Osage community:

When I got back [from military service] I went around to see them [Osage traditional elders] and they all knew my father and my grandfather [had] been with the Osages for a 150 years or so. So I went around to talk with them and I could understand immediately that they were afraid that they were just about to lose it. They were afraid that their moccasin prints would be washed by the sheet waters of oblivion, so you see and then they started talking. I got my first tape recorder and I went around. […] The point was that they might lose their culture, that they might be absorbed by the [here he uses the Osage term for whiteman].⁴

As a result of this personal interest, Mathews would be the primary architect behind the first Indigenous museum in the United States to open its doors to the public.⁵ The Osage Tribal Museum would emerge in the first half of the twentieth century and originate an Indigenous museum model not seen before and thereby altered previously held curatorial and interpretive methods employed in ethnographic and natural history museums.⁶ In addition to providing a historical overview of the first tribally owned and controlled museum open to the public, this essay also seeks to explore the ways in which this tribal museum developed into a uniquely Indigenous museum model. For Indigenous peoples, before 1938 museums were manifestations of Euro-American colonialism, with the power to display, collect, and interpret all things Indigenous.

The Osage world that Mathews was born into reflected centuries of change brought on by European invasion and conquest, culminating in the creation of the United States and subsequent "conquest" of the West through the decades of Manifest Destiny. By the 1890s, Native America was deemed conquered. The Osage people, like all other Native people, found life nearly completely transformed.

It is worth noting and briefly tracing the tumult that came to Osage lands and peoples. It is a familiar story. In 1825, a treaty forced the Osage nation from their ancestral homeland in southwestern Missouri as well as from their traditional hunting grounds covering parts of the present-day states of Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas. They thus "ceded" forty-five million acres of their easternmost lands.⁷ The remaining parcel of land that they reserved for themselves in southern Kansas continued to diminish through a series of unfair treaties in the decades following 1825. In these treaties, the Osages ceded an additional one hundred million acres for which they were compensated...