The Hazards of Osage Fortunes: Gender and the Rhetoric of Compensation in Federal Policy and American Indian Fiction

JENNIFER GILLAN The Hazards of Osage Fortunes: Gender and the Rhetoric of Compensation in Federal Policy and American Indian Fiction 'hen william dean HOWELLS chose A Hazard of New Fortunes as the title for his 1890 novel, he probably had the multiple connotations of the term hazard—gamble, risk, or venture as well as danger, menace, or peril—in mind. Certainly, his character Dryfoos experiences these hazards: "he began to honor money, especially money that had been won suddenly and in large sums." Howells describes Dryfoos 's "ambition to go somewhere and be somebody" as a "poison" instilled in him by the local speculators. If he did meet someone "worth" more than him, his "soul bowed itself and crawled . . . with a gambler's admiration of wonderful luck" (226-27). Through his depiction of the moral decline of Dryfoos, Howells cautions that speculation, however alluring and profitable, may not be worth the risk. These hazards are also the subject of John Joseph Matthews' Sundown (1934) and Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit (1990), two novels written about another aspect of this era of intense accumulation, the Allotment period in American Indian history, ushered in by the 1887 Dawes Act and revised with the 1934 Collier Reorganization Act.1 The effects ofthe new wealth generated in the 1920s by an oil boom on the individually-allotted lands of the Osage Indians was a hazard in both senses of Howells' title. On a national level, the Osage were caught up in and Howells was concerned with the hazards of the emerging attitude toward success Arizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 3, Autumn iç Copyright © 1998 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 Jennifer Giüan based on an individual's accumulation ofpossessions and his subsequent increase in social status. What arose in place ofcommunal values was a culture of compensation that promised fulfillment through pursuit of private property, particularly consumer goods. The Dawes Allotment Act was connected to this quest because it made more property available to Euro-Americans by selling off "surplus" land leftover after tribal land was allotted to individual American Indians. The allotment of tribal land can be viewed as a microcosm of the larger transfer of communal power to individuals that occurred in the transition from agrarianism to industrialism. In the case of the EuroAmerican nuclear family, the power once held in common by the family as a unit was transferred to individual family members. For this loss of their place in a single economic unit of production, individuals were promised the consumer power ofpurchasing. The things that the Osage in Matthews' and Hogan's novels turn to for compensation—luxury items such as sportscars, antiques, grand pianos, and exotic pets—are common ones in the typical American fantasy of consumer fulfillment. The difference for Matthews' and Hogan's characters is that they can still remember another way of life in which identity is based not on what one owns, but on what one can contribute to the group. And on some level this tribal culture is still available to them although it is constantly under attack. The most obvious hazard of new fortunes experienced by the Osage was what came to be known as the Reign of Terror, a phrase coined by Oklahoma newspapers to describe the period when many lost their lives in a murderous plot to takeover Osage land and the oil that surged beneath it.2 Even if their individual lives were spared, the tribe as a social unit was drastically altered—its traditions and its survival as a group threatened.3 These hazards were seen as calculated risks by policy reformers who claimed that the tribe and its communal land ownership was an outmoded form ofsocial organization which impeded the assimilation of the Indian into American society. To help ease Indians into a more "civilized" way of life, the allotment policy posited moral, economic , and social arrangements—Christianity, individual property ownership, the nuclear family, and mandatory federal boarding school.4 In rationalizing the policy, Indian Commissioner Thomas J. Morgan used the language of compensation, recommending that American Indian people give up their collective social, economic, and cultural in- Federal Policy and American Indian Fiction stitutions...