“The Finest Men We Have Ever Seen”: Reading Jefferson’s Osage Encounters through Orientalism

In 1804, a delegation of Osages traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with President Thomas Jefferson. After their meeting, Jefferson remarked in a letter that the Osages were “the finest men we have ever seen” (“To Robert Smith”). Using Jefferson’s comment as a starting point, this essay considers what contributions Edward Said’s approach to critically engaging colonialism in Orientalism can make to North American contexts. The essay argues that Said’s focus on the exteriority of colonial texts and archives in Orientalism provides an important alternative to most approaches in Native and Indigenous historical studies, which have too often looked for intrinsic meanings behind or beneath textual evidence. Guided by these insights from Orientalism, the essay’s analysis focuses on the tri-racial history of Virginia, the home state of Jefferson as well as Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Far from paying tribute to Osage greatness, Jefferson’s comment set the stage for Osage dispossession and the importation into the Mississippi West of slavery and the racial capitalist system that made it possible. The essay concludes by discussing the relevance of Jefferson’s comment to contemporary manifestations of resistance against this Jeffersonian inheritance, including the Movement for Black Lives, the movement to defend the Missouri River against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and those who organized against the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August, 2017.