Web: Osage

Earlier I posted a review of a true crime book about the murders of Osage during their decades of intense wealth.  Here are some links for those interested in learning more, although I will warn that some give away the story in the book, so you may wish to read the book before clicking some of these links.

The Osage Nation Museum is a great place to start and to visit if you are ever in the area.  It’s part of the larger Osage Nation website which has a wealth of information and where you can also sign up for free Osage language lessons.

This photoessay contains many (but not all) of the photographs found in the book.  This NPR interview with the author also tells quite a bit of the story, or you can read the first chapter on the New York Times website.

“It’s the story of an incredibly sinister crime — a true racial injustice. I did not want this to be simply a cataloging of the dead. And I didn’t want it to be cursory. For the most part, when these murders had been written about — if they were mentioned at all — there was no sense of who these people were, or what their lives were like. You never got close to their consciousness or their souls. That’s what I set out to do.”

^ In this interview, Grann talks about how difficult it was for him to write a purely historical book (his others seem to have been straight true crime or adventure books), as well as the challenge of confronting the evil of widespread racism and systematic murder.

He also did an interview with Indian Country Today.

In an unrelated but interesting Osage story, a family oral history was used to rediscover and eventually recover ten busts from 100 years ago that were lost at the Smithsonian, which can now be see at the museum linked above.