Osage Nation

The Osage, whose own name means "Middle Waters", are a Dhegihan Siouan-speaking people who became the leading power between the Missouri and Red rivers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Today the federally recognised Osage Nation, based at Pawhuska in Osage County, Oklahoma, has around 25,000 citizens. The English name comes through French, possibly from a phrase meaning "calm water".

Language and tradition tie the Osage to a group of Dhegihan peoples, including the Omaha, Ponca, Kansa and Quapaw, who once lived in the Ohio valley and moved west, according to their own stories because of war with the Haudenosaunee or in search of game. When this happened is debated: some scholars place the move in the seventeenth century, while others think it began as early as 1200 and link the Osage to the Mississippian culture. By the seventeenth century many Osage lived by the Osage River in what is now western Missouri, and they were recorded with horses by 1690.

From woodland villages in Missouri and Arkansas, where women grew maize and squash, the Osage made hunting expeditions onto the plains twice a year. Defeating Caddo groups, they had by about 1750 won control over much of present-day Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas, a dominance that lasted for generations. French explorers Marquette and Jolliet recorded them in 1673, and the Osage became trading partners and allies of the French, sending chiefs to Paris and Versailles in 1725. Under Spanish rule the St Louis fur traders of the Chouteau family built a post among the Great Osage.

Traditional Osage thought sees all things as filled with Wakonda, the life force, and divides the world into sky and earth. Clans, named after animals, plants and weather, belonged to these two halves, which faced each other across the village, with spiritual leaders' lodges between them; people married across the divisions. Children needed a ceremonial name to take part in rituals, and much knowledge was kept in sacred songs.

After the Louisiana Purchase, the Osage ceded most of Missouri in an 1808 treaty, and further treaties in 1818 and 1825 gave up land across Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma for a reservation in southern Kansas. Smallpox, in 1801–02 and again in 1837 and 1855, and wars with incoming peoples such as the Cherokee took a heavy toll; in 1833 an Osage attack on a Kiowa camp became known as the Cutthroat Gap massacre. Under an 1870 agreement the Osage sold their Kansas lands and bought their own reservation of about 1.47 million acres in Indian Territory, coterminous with today's Osage County.

Because they owned their land, the Osage kept communal mineral rights when allotment was forced on them in 1906. Oil made headright holders wealthy, with $30 million in royalties in 1923 alone. Guardianship laws and outright crime followed: in the "Reign of Terror" of the early 1920s many Osage were defrauded, and an estimated 60 were killed between 1921 and 1925, most cases unsolved. The Kyle family murders became the first murder case of the federal Bureau of Investigation.

An act of Congress in 2004 affirmed the Osage right to form their own government, and a constitution ratified in 2006 gave each citizen an equal vote, with citizenship based on descent from the 1906 rolls. In 2011 the United States settled long-running claims over mismanaged trust funds for $380 million. The nation runs a museum founded in 1938, said to be the oldest tribally owned museum in the country, and an Osage-language immersion school.

Our maps draw an approximate Osage territory in 1492, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715, once labelled in the Osage script. Neighbours on these maps include the Pawnee and the Illinois Confederation.