Introduction to the Osage

ST. LOUIS -- As the city celebrates 2004 for the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark journey, a display at the St. Louis Art Museum is focusing on the American Indians who played an important role in the region long before the explorers arrived to map the Louisiana Purchase.

"It's the other side of the story," said John Nunley, curator of the Art of the Osage exhibit that appears at the museum through Aug. 8. "This is really a Native American story told through the eyes of the Native Americans."

Art of the Osage features more than 100 objects from 1750 though the present time. It features items related to raising children, hunting, domestic life, warfare, social gatherings and religion.

Many are intricately crafted, and viewers can marvel at ribbon work and hand beading, vibrant colors and feather details. Members of the Osage tribe worked on the show from its beginning, Nunley said.

Learning to adaptThe history of the Osage in many ways parallels that of other American Indian tribes: They were devastated when they came in contact with Europeans and unfamiliar disease, they were removed from lands by the government and encountered periods of poverty and oppression. Still, the tribe managed to keep its traditions remarkably intact.

"The Osage story, if you follow it carefully, is one of adaptation while keeping the culture there," said Principal Chief James Roan Gray, who is the chief for nearly 20,000 Osage and is based in Pawhuska, Okla.

At one point the Osage lived on land in modern-day Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, but over time, they were pushed into smaller and smaller areas. When they moved from Kansas onto a reservation in Oklahoma, the Osage tribe bought the land, and retained the mineral rights. Then, oil was found on the reservation in 1897. The Osage reaped financial rewards.

"Because of the oil found on our land, because we were both cursed and blessed by wealth, we had the temptations of someone who wins the lottery," Gray said. "We used that money to protect our culture."

Garrick Bailey, an anthropology professor from the University of Tulsa, who co-wrote the catalog for the exhibit said, "I think few groups of Native American people have been as successful at maintaining their cultural and social cohesion."

He said the Osage wealth meant they never had to commercialize their art, or change how they made objects because they needed them to appeal to a broad base of people looking to buy Indian pottery or blankets.

The Osage, who integrated art into the objects they made, traditionally didn't sell the objects, he said.

So many of the items in the show have never been displayed before, and there are unifying factors, like recurring tribal motifs, symbols like lightning bolts-- also known as seven-peaked or zigzag design -- that can be interpreted as representative of the power of God and speed of God's actions.

But items usually weren't created just to be beautiful; they were made to be used. A war club isn't just a weapon, though it was used for that purpose. It is shaped to subtly resemble a blue heron, a hunter with great vision. Part of the club is carved to show an alligator snapping turtle, a symbol of strength that can strike quickly. And a string of triangles running along the serrated edge of the club again call the lightning motif to mind.

Nunley, the museum's Morton D. May Curator of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, notes that an audio recording about the Osage and a film help viewers to appreciate the importance of the objects in use. But with so much necessarily behind glass, he acknowledges, "There's a tactile quality to the art that the viewer won't experience."

But Gray said much can be learned from the exhibit, and he commended efforts to make the Osage a part of 2004's look back at 1804.

He said the art exhibit as a whole spoke to how the Osage held to the things that bound them together, even during trying times. "We got through that like everyone else, by holding traditions close to our hearts."

"Born out of those hardships, maybe we could learn how not to repeat them," he said. "It takes a civilized society to catch themselves."