The Osage Indian Tribe: Defying the Odds on America’s Barren Plateau

You have to imagine a sort of American Larzac. A vast plateau of rocks and dry grass where no one, ever, would have thought of settling with family and herd. Specialists in American geography have long bickered over the best way to classify this sad no-man’s land, a land that is scorching in summer and freezing in winter: was northern Oklahoma part of the Midwest, in the same way as the otherwise fertile plains of Kansas and Iowa? Or was it already the South, with its sorrows and its perils, the oppressive heat from April, the nasty climate from July, and, on the heights of the rocky plateaus, the impossibility of raising livestock? One thing seems certain: the members of the Osage Indian tribe never had the leisure to ask themselves all these questions, and when, around 1870, white men decided that this territory of stones and brush was theirs. would be devolved, they hardly had time to argue.

Already forcibly displaced between 1818 and 1825 (like hundreds of other tribes a few years later), and therefore driven from their ancestral lands in Missouri and Arkansas, the Osages had seen their population halve over the course of the first long stage of their exodus to Kansas. An almost “ordinary” tragedy, in this century without pity for the losers of the conquest of the West: epidemics, malnutrition, sometimes even famines. So when, in yet another twist in history, the Washington administration asked them to go into exile again, this time to settle on the plains located north of the small town of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Osages , of whom there were only 3,000, accepted on one condition: to become the inalienable owners by paying a sum certainly significant for the time – 300,000 dollars, the equivalent of 7 million dollars in 2023 – , but which would guarantee them never to be displaced again. The agreement was signed in 1872 (then completed in 1906) and the Osages became owners of 6,000 km2 of land. Life on this inhospitable plateau would not be easy, but here, at least, no one would come to dislodge them again.

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