Osage Women and Empire: Gender and Power

by Tai Edwards

The Osage empire, as most histories claim, was built by Osage men’s prowess at hunting and war. But, as Tai S. Edwards observes in Osage Women and Empire , Osage cosmology defined men and women as necessary pairs; in their society, hunting and war, like everything else, involved both men and women. Only by studying the gender roles of both can we hope to understand the rise and fall of the Osage empire. In Osage Women and Empire , Edwards brings gender construction to the fore in the context of Osage history through the nineteenth century.

Edwards’s examination of the Osage gender construction reveals that the rise of their empire did not result in an elevation of men’s status and a corresponding reduction in women’s. Consulting a wealth of sources, both Osage and otherwise—ethnographies, government documents, missionary records, traveler narratives—Edwards considers how the first century and a half of colonization affected Osage gender construction. She shows how women and men built the Osage empire together. Once confronted with US settler colonialism, Osage men and women increasingly focused on hunting and trade to protect their culture, and their traditional social structures—including their system of gender complementarity—endured. Gender in fact functioned to maintain societal order and served as a central site for experiencing, adapting to, and resisting the monumental change brought on by colonization.

Through the lens of gender, and by drawing on the insights of archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, and oral history, Osage Women and Empire presents a new, more nuanced picture of the critical role of men and women in the period when the Osage rose to power in the western Mississippi Valley and when that power later declined on their Kansas reservation.

Genres: History, Native American

232 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2018

Reviews

[Kathy KS · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although I did learn some interesting things about early America, the Osage Indians, and the mission system in the Central U.S., reading this started to feel like slogging after awhile. I really felt that the same things were being said, over and over, with slightly different twists. (Reminds me of answering essay test questions in my youthful days). Since I was listening to Alan Taylor's American Colonies at the same time, there was some overlap in some of the subject matter. This was interesting in many ways, but might have also led to my feeling I was reading the same things...

My favorite part was the bibliography. Anyone interested in the various topics the author touched on might enjoy following up on others in the specific vein.

[Grace Carlson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is fantastic for understanding the Osage Empire. The title implies that it is mainly about women and gender, but I found it all-inclusive. Edwards is a great scholar who does not hold judgment and leaves her mind open to possibilities. While reading a scholarly book like this it's important to be able to flip back to stand out details. Edwards writing style and flow throughout the book allows this ability to look back as she connects her topics to one another in each chapter. The chapters don't necessarily separate the book into sections but give the reader different context for different stages of the Empire (all while connecting them to previous chapters.)

[David Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ethnohistorians have persuaded us that the Plains Indians enjoyed considerable power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They have defined that power in predominantly male terms: Native power came from horsemanship, from bison hunting, from men’s skill with the lance and the gun. In her study of the Osages, Tai Edwards identifies a fundamental flaw in this gendering of power: at least one prominent Plains nation (and probably others) defined the male and female genders as complements, rather than oppositional poles. In their worldview, men were powerless without women’s labor and women’s spiritual work, men were powerless.

In the material realm Osage women birthed and reared growing numbers of children, raising the national population to 18,000 by the second half of the eighteenth century. They raised corn and other crops, which not only fed their own kinfolk but also supplied a regional provisions trade. They cleaned and shaved and processed the 10,000 packs of animal hides that Osage men sold between 1764 and 1804. Some married French traders and became inter-ethnic diplomats; easy divorce preserved their individual autonomy. In matters spiritual, women again played a central role. They sang in ceremonies planned to ensure the success of hunters, carried scalp poles before and after young men went into battle, and made, kept, and carried waxobe bird wing tokens that would give warriors courage.

When in the 1820s Protestant missionaries came to the Osage homeland, telling Native listeners that they needed to give up their old lifeways and gender roles, Osage women kept them at a respectful distance. A few worked as field hands on the mission, for wages; a few sent their daughters to learn to sew and read; most valued them only as mediators with the United States government, with whom the Osages wanted to remain on amiable terms. It was just as well that Osage men and women retained their skills in hunting and gathering, and the religious rituals that (they believed) helped them succeed in both, because a decidedly unfriendly U.S. government drove them from Missouri in the 1830s, and then into Oklahoma thirty years later. Their survival in a new and drought-ridden homeland now depended on those traditional skills, and on the gender complementarity that had previously allowed the Osages to build a territorial empire of their own.