Osage Women and Empire

In Osage Women and Empire Tai S. Edwards offers a powerful contribution to the story of the Osage empire through an examination of gender roles and their persistence throughout a critical period of U.S. removal and settler expansion. The book is not a comprehensive study of Osage cultural practices or history; instead, the author is interested in centering gender construction in the context of Osage history and providing new insight into Osage resistance and survival. Based on research in federal archives, missionary records, ethnographies, and traveler narratives, the book reveals how gender complementarity organized Osage lives and maintained a space for women as respected and essential actors. The first chapter focuses on the ways Osage cosmology contributed to a system of gender complementarity that permeated Osage lives. Through rituals that persisted over time and endured throughout colonization, the interdependent roles of women and men were reaffirmed and designed to seek aid from Wa-kon'-da (the great spirit) in their nation's continued existence. The next chapter looks at the rise of an Osage empire during the eighteenth century and pushes against previous narratives of women's diminished status during this period. Arguing that women were central to Osage dominance because of a continued reliance on their physical and spiritual roles, Edwards demonstrates that many aspects of cosmology and gender roles remained intact despite changes in Osage social organization during European colonization. Chapter 3 examines the diminished power of Osage people in the nineteenth century as U.S. settler colonialism made inroads into their territory and forced social structure change. Despite the “civilizing” efforts of Protestant missionaries and land dispossession brought about by federal Indian policy, Edwards argues, Osage cosmology and gender construction were not altered. Chapter 4 focuses on the dire conditions and increasing difficulties the Osage people endured under confinement to a Kansas reservation from the 1830s to the 1870s. As they faced the full force of U.S. settler colonialism, the Osage struggled to maintain ritual practices that reinforced gender complementarity. The concluding chapter briefly turns to Osage history after the nineteenth century and argues that gender complementarity remains prominent today, crediting “I'n-Lon-Schka [a ceremonial dance], ribbon work, and women with maintaining and strengthening Osage identity and nationhood in the face of ongoing U.S. imperialism” (p. 132

Ancient history · Art · Colonialism · Complementarity (molecular biology · Context (archaeology · Dominance (genetics · Empire · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Power (physics · Sociology · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law

• Vital Relations

  Jean Dennison, Weomepe Designs•Vital Relations•2024

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