Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-First-Century Osage Nation

1 Reform

Chapter 1 Reform R e f o r m : : : 17 O ne of the first people I met when I began my research in the summer of 2004 was Leonard Maker, the head of the Planning Department at the Osage Nation. A small, middle-aged man with long Osage lineages on both sides of his family, Maker quickly impressed me with his grasp of Osage history , both ancient and recent, as well as his willingness to talk openly about Osage politics. Walking into his office for our first meeting, I was struck by the transient state of the room. There were boxes piled everywhere and books stacked up on each shelf of the bookcase. Watching me as my eyes scanned the room, Maker commented that every couple of months he had been moved to another location, so he had stopped bothering to unpack. As one of the smallest programs, he was repeatedly moved to make room for the expansion of other programs, such as those concerning Osage education and health care. With the opening of casinos, the Osage government began investing more money into its service programs , but it had little space to house all of its new employees. Maker did not have a large staff or even a stable project, so he was moved from one office to another, sometimes in his home town of Hominy, and other times in Pawhuska, the capital of the Osage Nation. Some of the buildings had the quality of the hurriedly erected prefab structures that litter twenty-first-century reservations, with thin walls and hollow floors. Others had ancient shag carpeting and lead in the paint, with the homey feeling that only older buildings can have. In many ways the state of Maker’s office could be read as symbolic of the state of the Osage Nation at the beginning of the twenty-first century —a patchwork of well-worn and temporary structures all exceeding their capacity. Even though it was clearly a moment of great expansion and excitement, there was also a sense of bracing anticipation, as if the floor was about to shift beneath our feet. The reform process promised much-needed change, but also insecurity, as we reimagined what our Nation ought to look like in the twenty-first century. In the chaos of his office, I noticed his dry erase board. Scrawled across its clean white surface was a detailed schematic. Maker was in the midst of planning a process of governmental reform. Public Law 108-431, “To reaffirm the inherent sovereign rights of the Osage Tribe to determine its membership and form of government,” had just passed the U.S. House and was now being debated by the Senate. Attorneys for the Osage Tribal Council had crafted this bill to fulfill a campaign promise the councilors 18 : : : R e f o r m had made to expand membership beyond annuitants in the Osage Mineral Estate. The Osage have a complex colonial history, which has possibly made them unique among the federally recognized American Indian nations in the continental United States. In the 1906 Osage Allotment Act (34 Stat. 539), when the reservation was allotted, the Mineral Estate underneath the reservation was separated from the surface lands. This meant that while the land was allotted to individuals, the subsurface oil and gas remained in national ownership. The proceeds from the sale of oil and gas were to be distributed evenly among all 2,229 people listed on the 1906 Osage allotment roll. Many people today hold only partial shares in the Mineral Estate because their parents’ or grandparents’ shares were divided among multiple siblings. Additionally, one-quarter of all headrights left the Osage Nation before laws were in place forbidding nonOsage from holding more than a lifetime estate, meaning that after the individual’s death, the headright would be returned to a descendant of the 1906 allotment roll. The goal of the 2004 legislation, however, was to allow the Osage Nation to reform not only its citizenship standards but also its government , which was operating under a single council system established by U.S. law. Maker was developing a plan for reform that could be immediately implemented if the bill became law. As I sat down to talk with Maker about his plans for the reform process , he explained how he expected the reform to proceed—and also the histories leading up to this moment and what...